Examining barriers to internationalisation created by diverse systems and structures in vocational education and training

In a global society, all educational sectors need to recognise internationalism as a core, foundational principle. Whilst most educational sectors are taking up that challenge, vocational education and training (VET) is still being pulled towards the national agenda in terms of its structures and systems, and the policies driving it, disadvantaging those who graduate from VET, those who teach in it, and the businesses and countries that connect with it. This paper poses questions about the future of internationalisation in the sector. It examines whether there is a way to create a VET system that meets its primary point of value, to produce skilled workers for the local labour market, while still benefitting those graduates by providing international skills and knowledge, gained from VET institutions that are international in their outlook. The paper examines some of the key barriers created by systems and structures in VET to internationalisation and suggests that the efforts which have been made to address the problem have had limited success. It suggests that only a model which gives freedom to those with a direct vested interest, students, teachers, trainers and employers, to pursue international co-operation and liaison will have the opportunity to succeed

When worlds collide - examining the challenges faced by teacher education programmes combining professional vocational competence with academic study, lessons from further education to higher education

This paper examines the challenges faced by higher education institutions in designing, teaching and quality assuring programmes of study which, of necessity, must combine the gaining of professional vocational competence with academic study. The paper gives recognition to the policy framework in which these programmes fit – with particular reference to teacher education. It presents the challenges at each stage, from ensuring that curriculum design meets the needs of the profession, to the quality assurance mechanisms which ensure standards and compliance. Initially the paper draws on published research to examine how and why these policy decisions have been taken in much of the developed world. The paper goes on to present a new perspective, however, by comparing current teacher education mechanisms with those that have developed in the past twenty years in further education, looking at the parallels and addressing how far we can learn from the experiences of further education colleagues to ensure that we manage to combine the two different worlds of academia and vocational training without compromising either. It suggests ways in which higher education institutions can learn from further education to tackle the challenges to ensure that concentration on training students to be good teachers is done without compromising personal growth and intellectual development, and examines how far it is possible to meet the demands of higher education quality controls which are applied with differential emphases

Seeing Is Believing

A discussion of the suffix -ing

Some of the First Shall be Last

Transpositions where a letter at one end of a word can be moved to the other end to make a new word are quite common.However, transposing two or more consecutive letters from end to end is another matter

Seeing Is Believing

An essay on words with the suffix ending ing

Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Internalist Challenge

The paper highlights how a popular version of epistemological disjunctivism labors under a kind of 'internalist challenge'—a challenge that seems to have gone largely unacknowledged by disjunctivists. This is the challenge to vindicate the supposed 'internalist insight' that disjunctivists claim their view does well to protect. The paper argues that if we advance disjunctivism within a context that recognizes a distinction between merely functional and judgmental belief, we get a view that easily overcomes the internalist challenge

What’s in a Convention? Process and substance in the project of European constitution-building. IHS Political Science Series: 2003, No. 89

The paper studies aspects of the process and substance of the deliberations of the Convention on the Future of the Union, against the backdrop of the longer term development of a Constitution for the European Union. It examines some of the issues which have arisen over the course of the longer term debate about European constitutionalism, including the normative basis of a putative Constitution for the EU. In the main part of the paper, the primary objective is to elaborate in more detail the ways in which the Convention’s work was structured by the complex procedural and substantive heritage of the Union’s constitutional acquis. It focuses on the Convention as an addition to an already complex and multi-facetted constitution-building process, and looks at some of the principles which it has proposed to bring into the constitutional architecture, such as the explicit articulation of the supremacy principle. It concludes that at times the fit between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in the constitutional process and substance developed by the Convention is far from satisfactory

Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart

Review of Alan Smart and Josephine Smart’s Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights