LIFE LONG LEARNING ENGLISH NEW FUNCTIONAL SKILLS & PRACTICALITIES

Life Long Learning English New Functional Skills & Practicalities



Life Long Learning English New Functional Skills & Practicalities

Introduction

The cultural ethos of universities and colleges has shifted markedly in recent years. Radical legislation affecting the post-compulsory education sector, allied to major reorganisation of the vocational curriculum and new arrangements for funding and quality assurance have combined to contribute to major changes in institutional organisation. Governing bodies are now comprised of a majority of business representatives, the funding for non-vocational adult education has collapsed, and decision-making takes place within a closely-coupled financial framework. The interim report of the Dearing Review of 16-19 qualifications (Dearing 1995) and the announcement of the Dearing review of the purpose, structure and funding of higher education (to include further education) makes it clear that further changes and re-organisations will continue to characterise the sector.

The speed and scope of change is unprecedented. It can be argued that lecturers have experienced acute loss of control of their work situation and that the barriers to change invoked by lecturers in response to that loss are one expression of the working out in practice of the ethical basis of their educational conceptions. There is a developing real tension in the sector between the management imposed imperatives of satisfying quantitative performance indicators, and lecturers' conceptions and priorities based upon their value judgements. One result of squeezing resources, increased vocationalisation of the curriculum, and increasing external accountability, is that lecturers are led to engage in trading off learners' needs, course needs, and their former ideas about practices which count as teaching. In many cases, lecturers' personal biographies have been built around a conception of teaching which would deny the very market model they are required to implement. There is a growing climate of suspicion, which fosters distrust of initiatives such as flexible learning and work-based assessment. The fear is that such developments are purportedly introduced to serve students' needs, but will be used by unscrupulous managers to further undermine lecturers' ownership of legitimate work. It is therefore important, in order to understand the potential for change and development in the sector, that both managers and lecturers question traditionalised and, it is argued, outmoded, notions of teaching.

In this paper, three models of teaching in post-compulsory education are explored: the professional model, the occupational model and the reflective practitioner model. Whilst it is recognised that these models are not mutually exclusive, nonetheless each is commonly represented and clearly identifiable within current debates on contemporary practice within the sector.

Teaching as a profession

Little work has been done specifically on teaching in post-compulsory education as a profession; the work in this area is predominantly school-based. Educational theory has relied heavily upon the notion of teacher professionalism in order to describe and explain teachers' educational conceptions and their view of the world (eg Hoyle 1969, 1980; Darling-Hammond 1989; Ozga 1992). A difficulty with the notion of profession is that it invites unhelpful comparison between different professions (Lawn ...