Re-envisioning VET practice: practitioners and the experience and implementation of change

Abstract

There has always been change and vocational education and training (VET) practitioners have always had to respond to it. Being situated as they are at the interface of industry and the academy, and being required as they are by those who fund them to be responsive to shifts in those industries, many have, of necessity, re-envisioned their own practices and re-invented their own identities several times in their working lives. They have done so as comprehensively as the most adaptive of their industry colleagues. What's more, it has been their educational practice that has facilitated the adaptiveness to technological and managerial change of a huge proportion of the Australian workforce. In debates about 'the VET professional' this leading role in the change process is too often overlooked. In fact, VET practitioners are adept at managing vocational identity shifts. Those who began their working lives as industrial practitioners fashioned new identities for themselves when they moved into the field of education. In addition, the technologically driven changes of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution required them to make fundamental modifications to both their industrial and pedagogical practices. At the same time, they have been continuously incorporating the altered professional practices that have evolved in their industries-of-origin into their own repertoires in order to continue to base their teaching practice on current industry practices. Thus VET professionals accommodate and envision dual professional identities for themselves, which richly and uniquely equip them to sustain their ongoing dual professional allegiances and obligations.