PEDAGOGY


Professor Kevin Orr is professor of work and learning at the University of Huddersfield. Before this he taught in further education colleges for 16 years. Kevin is co-editor of Studies in the Education of Adults and the Yorkshire and Humberside Convenor for the Learning and Skills Research Network. k.Orr@hud.ac.uk


Putting theory into practice to help trainee vocational teachers


As interest grows in pedagogy in vocational subjects, one study is adapting concepts and


approaches from research to make them relevant and influential for trainee teachers By Professor Kevin Orr


Pedagogy is a surprisingly controversial term in vocational education and training. For the government’s Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning (CAVTL 2013, 13) it was “the one that gets people most agitated”. Yet, as Lucas et al noted (2012: 13),


vocational learners are the ones who miss out as a result of this omission to take pedagogy seriously in vocational subjects. There has, however, been growing


interest in this area of pedagogy with reports from, among others, City and Guilds (Lucas, Spencer and Claxton 2012) and, most recently, one on enhancing science, engineering and technology (SET) teaching at level 3 produced by academics from UCL Institute of Education (Guile, Tersh and Tiris, 2016). Our project at the University of Huddersfield, funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, has drawn on this and other existing research to produce an intervention that is designed to improve the pedagogy of trainee teachers in vocational SET. Our study, ITE-VocSET, seeks to apply and adapt concepts and approaches from the literature on subject-specialist pedagogy to make them relevant and also influential for trainee vocational SET teachers based mainly in FE colleges. The project comprises three phases:


research and design of the intervention; implementation; and evaluation. We are about to carry out our first implementation of the materials and activities we have developed. For our project, pedagogy describes


how teachers explain the decisions they make in relation to a particular


14 SPRING 2017 • INTUITION RESEARCH


curriculum or body of knowledge, in this case occupational knowledge, and in relation to a particular group of students, in this case students on vocational SET courses. We have designed our intervention


to inform these decisions. So, the activities and materials are based on concepts such as Shulman’s (1986, 1987) pedagogical content knowledge that identifies the crossover between subject and teaching knowledge. We have drawn on Loughran et al’s


(2008) content representation exercises that focus on the big ideas that learners need to grasp in order to progress. We have adapted all of these concepts to


articulate with


vocational SET, at the same time as


identifying how the college and


the occupational workplace might be brought closer. Importantly, we are attempting to


evaluate what, if any, difference this makes: so evaluation is integral to our project. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ interviews, as well


as questionnaires and observations, will allow us to gather both general information about the experience and work context of the participants, which we will report, as well as what lasting effect the intervention has had. That is hard, though. How do you separate the intervention from all


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