Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemLooking into "A BLACK BOX" - vocational education and training for international students in private registered training organisations in Melbourne, Australia( 2014)This study investigated and analysed situated realities influencing international students’ outcomes in seven commercial for profit private Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers in Melbourne, Australia. It draws from the notions of social structure – a system of human relations – as its theoretical and analytical lens to explore how the restructuring of the VET system using the competitive training market model in Australia reorganised the way it is understood and practised. The study shows that commercial for profit private VET providers operating in a competitive VET market mostly emphasise profit imperatives and education-migration policy frameworks to conceptualise and define international students’ characteristics, expectations, learning and educational outcomes. The study used a mixed methodology consisting of both quantitative and qualitative techniques to gather data in seven research sites in Melbourne. It used a longitudinal survey of international students; in-depth interviews of training managers and quality assurance auditors; and a survey of vocational teachers to gather the research data. General systems theory and interpretive approaches were used to analyse these data. The findings were triangulated to form core themes and sub themes comprising the contexts of delivery and assessments, international students’ characteristics and outcomes, and teacher pedagogic practices and perceptions. The study offers a basis for understanding how the intertwined, complex and situated mechanisms in a market model for VET combine to influence international students’ outcomes and skills training in general. It shows that when international VET students’ purposes for undertaking VET in Australia are divergent and shifting, the competitive training market model policy dimensions, which frame their participation, are mostly neither aligned nor congruent with the students’ expectations and aspirations for participating. Most international students’ educational and employment aspirations were not met; their prior employment and educational experiences were not emphasised; they were narrowly represented, conceptualised and defined in migration terms; and most of them were working in jobs unrelated to their training. It further shows that the situated factors influencing international students’ outcomes in commercial for profit private VET RTOs in the study are interconnected with the market model for VET, policy imperatives, international students’ characteristics and aspirations and the market-based environmental demands. Hence these factors, particularly the way international students and their providers are represented in the education-migration discourses and the way courses are delivered, cannot be understood in isolation. By implication, the construction of educational policy frameworks, which enable the naming of values inherent in the training packages model, must include international students’ learning contexts, expectations and purposes for studying in commercial for profit private VET providers. But, this cannot be achieved in a training environment where perceptions about the skills, knowledge and work-readiness of the graduates from this sector are viewed to be inconsistent with what their qualifications claim they have. Hence, policy makers and educators must reconstruct the purposes of VET outside the education-migration framework to include the internationalised VET cohorts’ educational and employment expectations and aspirations. Overall, the study shows that policy imperatives (interpretation and reinterpretation of policy), training packages implementation, teacher pedagogic choices and teaching and learning resources in a business environment influenced commercial for profit private VET provider contexts in the study, particularly international students’ aspirations, experiences and outcomes. Whilst some international students used VET as a pathway into higher education, to get a job in their field of training, to build and broaden their knowledge and skills and to improve their credentials with the hope to gain a better future, most of them made these choices at a severe cost to their aspirations and goals. By implication, the competitive VET market system elements may not be congruent with the other components of the education system and that the other components of the system do not support each other. Hence the study argues that international students and commercial for profit private VET providers’ contribution can only be more clearly understood and more substantially recognised if their characteristics, relationships in the delivery contexts and the discourses informing their participation are comprehensively mapped and analysed.
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ItemCultural perspectives, thinking, educators and globalisation: a critical analysis of the Future Problem Solving Program( 2012)Globalisation in its modern phase has inevitably included a strong educational element, in which learning programs that originate in one part of the world have been transported to another. In concordance with economic trends in the contemporary era, this export trade has been primarily one-way. Curricula that have been devised in the industrialised societies of more ‘developed’ States - the so-called ‘West’ – have been introduced into regions that have very different cultural, socio-economic and educational characteristics and traditions. Contemporary models of teaching higher order thinking as a discrete curriculum focus have been part of this movement, particularly since the notion of thinking skills came to be perceived as central to an advanced school education since at least the 1970s. As a result, while a number of thinking skills programs have been developed in educational systems within economically advanced countries, Future Problem Solving (FPS) Program International remains one of the few that has adopted a deliberate line of internationalism, moving into regions beyond its initial base of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, such as Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, with varying degrees of success. However, as with similar learning programs, the Future Problem Solving Program has been introduced into new territories on the premise that the notion of thinking does not vary across cultures, and that, regardless of the socio-economic and cultural background of the new FPS region, this form of educational transference is both possible and inevitably successful. This research project investigated the validity of transplanting thinking skills programs from one system to another on an international scale by focusing on a trinity of concepts that delineates the centre of this conundrum: culture, thinking and international education. The Future Problem Solving Program, along with the specific thinking skills on which it is instituted, provided the context of the investigation, which employed a comparative analysis of educators in the multicultural societies of Malaysia and South Africa, with a view to establishing the degree to which cultural background determined how thinking skills are conceived and enacted by educators. Using a grounded theory perspective, the findings of the project were threefold: first, that, different cultures do tend to conceptualise elements of thinking in different ways; that a converging spectrum of cultural dispositions towards thinking can be identified; and that those whose cultural dispositions of thinking are more towards the middle of the convergence, where a balance across cultural dispositions is more in evidence, tend to be those who are either more exposed to cultures outside their country of origin, or who are more inclined to support the cultural transformation of a society in the name of social, or national, stability. The implications of these findings for globalisation of thinking skills initiatives such as the Future Problem Solving Program are significant, for they suggest that such thinking skills programs need to be reworked to meet the pattern of cultural dispositions of thinking that exist within a particular region if they are to be successfully instituted in different places as part of a conscious program of international growth.