PHD thesis by Dr Helen Smith
Senior Research Fellow and Project Manager
Globalism Institute RMIT
GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001
phone: 03 9925 2496
email: helen.smith@rmit.edu.au
fax: 03 9925 3049
mobile: 0411 737 632
Dr Helen Smith has kindly provided a copy of her 2006 PHD for the purposes of AFISC reference and research, and AFISC would need to approach Dr Smith if any elements of her work are to be cited or published to obtain her permission.
All chapters are available on this page.
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Vocational Education and Training is characterised by an enduring relationship between the logic of the labour market and the logic of education, a relationship that makes VET unique.
Introduction
A campaign to shift the locus of control of vocational knowledge, and of training policy and practice, has been underway in Australia since the mid-1980s. This shift in the way the power relations of training are materialised is twofold. In one aspect it is being taken from the hands of the seven Australian states and territories and vested in the Commonwealth Government. |
Abstract and contents |
The goal of this campaign is a national training system aligned to the skill requirements of a globalising economy – an economy in which trans-national and national companies and economic arrangements exert considerable influence over the fortunes and form of local labour markets.
In this power-laced scenario a new entity has been born: the Training Package – modest and flexible; robust and powerful.
The national training system envisaged in this campaign is unconstitutional in a peculiarly Australian way.1 When the Australian Constitution was framed between 1895 and 1900, just a century after Anglo-European settlement, the states did not cede to the Federation their constitutional powers to establish schools, colleges and universities and accredit their education and training programs.
Constitutionally, the Federal Government can intervene in education by using its financial powers, but can only implement its interventions with the agreement of the states and territories.
The campaign has been of many parts, woven into the everyday working lives of policy-makers, managers, administrators, teachers, trainers and training designers in all Australian states and territories. It has deployed novel technological objects and practices in pursuit of its goals.
It has involved the political relations of Commonwealth and State governments and their respective agencies of public administration; employer associations and peak industrial bodies; unions and union peak bodies; publicly funded TAFE colleges and private training providers; major public and private sector enterprises; TAFE teachers and private training provider trainers; and a number of technologies that manage and regulate training – curriculum, units of competency, standards, assessment and recognition tools, and qualifications.
These human, institutional, management and regulatory agents have been held together as networks of practice by a series of Commonwealth/state and employer/union agreements about the division of power, and by reciprocal exchanges: money has flowed from government into training providers for teaching and assessment; in return, data about the quantity and quality of these funded activities has flowed to government (ANTA 2004).
Since 1997 the consolidation of a Commonwealth/industry training power base has been played out through a radical departure from the way training programs had long been authorised – in the form of accredited courses.
The new direction was pursued through an innovative technology called the Training Package, and a new authorisation process, called endorsement, that set out to replace state and territory government accreditation, in addition bringing industry into a prominent role in training as the designers of Training Packages.
This meant that training programs financed by government, or otherwise seeking national recognition, whether conducted in colleges or workplaces, would, if covered by an endorsed Training Package, operate under the auspice of national industry competency standards.
The move to reorient training to the needs of a globalising economy of questionable legitimacy, and the introduction of the unambiguously industry-oriented Training Package, has brought into focus some ‘big questions’ that are the subject of only oblique attention in strategy papers and ameliorative initiatives.
This move has laid bare tensions between transnational company demands for ‘fast to market’ training products and market-oriented quality assurance mechanisms; and the measured pace at which the eight state and territory training authorities designed and accredited their different training qualifications, carefully formulated to meet the needs of individuals and industries already represented in well-established ways.
It has also raised questions about how training institutions are to balance the growing demand for training oriented to corporate needs, with their responsibilities associated with civic governance.
A pivotal point for these big questions is the curriculum – for it is through curriculum that a modernist settlement about schooling and citizenship has been negotiated. The modern curriculum – whether it is materialised in a ‘cognitive-psycho-social developmental’ mode in primary and secondary schooling, or a ‘culture-cognitive-application extensional’ mode in universities and training institutions, is deeply implicated in the form of representation peculiar to modernity: a dichotomy between ‘nature/non-humans’ and ‘culture/humans’ (Latour 1993).
Schooling plays an important role in the formation of the modern citizen as the knowing actor; and the formation of modern knowledge about ‘nature’ as the object of knowing. The curriculum has come to occupy a curious and powerful place in the nature/culture dichotomy as a social laboratory in which the citizen and school knowledge are fabricated.
The curriculum represents (forms and demonstrates) the nature of humanity – what the citizen is as a social fact, by processing humans to citizenship in general, and by awarding the badges of identity and recognition that are so powerful in placing individuals in ‘society’.