El aislamiento de DRM de una especie monocotiledónea y dos dicotiledóneas.

VOCATIONAL TRAINING

THROUGH ALTERNATIVE

WAYS OF TEACHING AND

LEARNING

To foster innovation and learning among students, there needs to be a profound and lasting shift in methodological emphasis from the teacher to the learner.

A learner-centred approach requires that learners are active agents in their own learning, rather than being mere recipients of other people’s knowledge. Since constructivist learning theories, as described in section 2 above, adopt such an approach, they are seen as a promising way forward. Here, learners are viewed as participants, contributors and elaborators of socially mediated knowledge. However, warnings from empirical research (see, for example, Kirschner et al., 2006) need to be taken seriously so that younger students especially are not left unguided or guided only minimally. Kirschner et al. argue that “the advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance”. Thus, in reality, learning in schools, workshops or the workplace will remain in alternation, to varying degrees, between guidance-intensive

(teacher-driven) and less

guidance-intensive or unguided (primarily learner-driven) initiatives.

A constructivist way of looking at the curriculum – one that underpins the fostering of the aforementioned key competences – is to view learning as a process. Such a curriculum would provide a framework for the interaction of teachers, students and knowledge. In other words,

the curriculum is what actuallyhappensin the classroom (or other learning places) and what people do to prepare and evaluate this. In this model we have a number of elements in constant interaction.

Curriculum as a process

Teachers enter particular schooling and education situations with:

n an ability to think critically and

think-in-action;an understanding of their role;

n the expectations others have of them; and,

n a proposal for action which sets out essential principles and features of the educational encounter.

Guided by these, they encourage:

n conversations between and with people in the situation;

out of which may come: n thinking and action.

They continually evaluate the process and what they can see of outcomes.

(Jeffs and Smith, 1990)

This model is an open curriculum model in which the teacher enters the situation with a proposal for action and sets out essential principles and features of the educational encounter. This encounter is based on a genuine process involving the active participation of the learners.

New pedagogical models, tools and practices that support learner-centred approaches are being developed as a response to the increased need for sharing and collectively constructing new

perspectives, exploiting distributed expertise and increasing reciprocal understanding. Educational researchers have worked towards developing pedagogical models for cooperative

learning, such as joint experiential learning, progressive inquiry approaches,

problem-based learning and project-based learning. They include group work, debate, the joint design and solving of practical problems, the presentation of alternative perspectives, a joint reflection over practice, information sharing, mentoring and coaching, peer review and team evaluation.

Students may work in a variety of ways: individually, in pairs or in groups. This has the broader aim of developing social and interpersonal skills, including the abilities to reflect, discuss, structure, present and defend concepts, make presentations to the group and offer support to each other in the process of learning. After having agreed on a common task, students collaborate as much as possible with minimal intervention from the teacher. Students give each other feedback. Together they review what worked and what did not in terms of both problem solving and learning strategies. This shifts the focus of learning to the participants and their actions.

All these methods differ greatly in terms of learning conceptions, process, interaction and classroom leadership patterns, from traditional school classroom methods in which students spend most of their time listening to lectures or learning facts from texts and completing a set of predefined tasks at the end of each textbook chapter. As we have seen, new approaches to vocational learning place more importance on context and the social dimensions of learning. This has led to renewed attention from researchers and practitioners to tasks being embedded in ‘real-world’ contexts. The ‘situation’, as argued in section 2 above, impacts significantly on the learning process. For vocational learning it is the workplace that is the most relevant and ‘situated’ site. Under certain conditions the workplace can be a creative, motivating and effective learning place. Work-based learning bridges the worlds of education and work. It allows the curriculum to keep abreast of changes in work contents and organisation and forms the stage for solving ‘real-world’ problems in a ‘real-world’ mode. Work-based learning requires a holistic approach to practical and theoretical learning where both on-the-job and off-the-job learning are organised in such a way that learners can acquire new knowledge and skills and gain confidence by demonstrating their potential as workers and learners.

The concept of a ‘community of practice’ provides a useful model for considering

how the different partners come together and share their knowledge, their

work-based learning experience and their competence, how the learning partnerships regulate themselves and, not least,

develop their own dynamics to create new knowledge and skills. At the centre of the community are the learners who combine theoretical and practical knowledge and skills. This concept is an expansion of the ‘situated learning’ model, which

incorporates (but goes far beyond) the application and further development of key competences. The main difference

between this and previous concepts is the departure from a predominantly

individualistic approach to skill development which has underpinned vocational training strategies so far. This is not to deny the value of traditional vocational training methodologies, such as apprenticeships in the crafts sector, where students imitate their masters and in practicing certain skills again and again to eventually become equally skilful. It is to say that modern vocational training will increasingly capitalise on the new

work-based learning model which builds on socially organised activities and

collaborative, open and constructivist problem and project-based learning processes.

CONCLUSION

A strong case can be made that key competences, such as ‘learning to learn’ and ‘entrepreneurship’, are fostered primarily through a change in pedagogical strategies. To allow for their application the curriculum needs to be relatively open. A process model is recommended, in which learners come together to engage in problem-solving, to discuss, experiment and evaluate. Suitable pedagogical strategies give the learners a stake in shaping and controlling the learning

agenda and situate learning as close to ‘real-world’ settings as possible. For vocational training, the workplace is the most authentic, situated site for learning. The new learning environments require complex instructional designs that in turn call for a higher level of key, technological and pedagogical competences of teachers and trainers, as argued in more detail in Chapter 3 of this Yearbook. The emphasis in teachers’ and trainers’ roles is shifting away from arranging the learning environment and eliciting desired

responses following a behaviourist learning model. The content of learning activity is carefully structured not only to facilitate the learning of an individual but of communities of practice in which conversation and participation can occur. Learning becomes increasingly embedded in tasks that communities (and the people with their specific knowledge and identity resources within them) set and solve, whereby learning occurs in a conscious or unconscious manner.

It is clear that, if schools and classrooms remain as they are, alternative pedagogical methods will make a modest impact. Governance, policy and the curriculum need to be supportive of competent

teachers and trainers who require sufficient leeway to teach as they see fit. Schools are to develop as more autonomous,

self-managing learning communities, as elaborated in Chapter 2 of this Yearbook. This means that education ministries, their central agencies and partners might have to restrict themselves to taking

responsibility only for setting broad goals that programmes should achieve, for making resources available, for the accessibility and quality of education and for recognising and accrediting what people might have learned in unorthodox ways. But there is no longer any point for centrally prescribing what and how learning should take place.

ANNEX I: DEFINITION OF KEY COMPETENCES