Summary
The first section of this contribution provides examples from the early stages of comparative research and documentation activities on questions of vocational teacher education and professionalism. In the subsequent section a number of more recent trends from different relevant research fields (comparative research; teacher education and professionalisation and general research on the professions) is being summarised very briefly and put into connection with international research on vocational teacher education and their profession. In the third section some remarks on research needs are being derived and their connection to questions of the development of European standards will be discussed.
Past research and future perspectives in terms of international research on vocational teachers' education and professionalisation
A short history of research and documentation measures[1]
As to my knowledge the first existing work is a follow up of two conferences, one of which held in1956 in Geneva by the ILO and the OECD and the other one dated from 1962 hosted by the OECD at the German Institute of Higher education for educational research in Frankfurt, nowadays known as the DIPF. Those two conferences had a Handbook as an outcome which gathers information on the Training of Vocational Teachers in 13 countries (ILO 1964). The country reports submitted to the co-ordination team were all provided by the respective public authorities of the participating states (see overview, Table 1).
The volume is being opened with a summarising section which deals with recommendations derived from the comparative overview on the different teacher training pathways (one week, four weeks and three months up to four years of special training) and correspondingly different entry qualifications to become a teacher (skilled worker; technician and university degree).
In light of the various ways of training the study comes to the conclusion, that there can’t be standards on how the necessary qualifications should be achieved but rather what kind of qualifications should be recommended for vocational teachers. As this is symptomatic for most of the past research outcomes a summary of the results of this first study can be found in Table 2.
Some of the publications also try to develop transparency by making up comparison-based typologies of VET-Teaching profiles (e.g. UNESCO 1977). In this detailed study for example there are four basic types of teaching profiles being distinguished:
"General technical teacher: a person teaching theoretical subjects and/or the theoretical aspects of element technical subjects usually at the lower secondary level.
Vocational teacher: a person teaching theoretical subjects and/or the theoretical aspects of practical training courses in secondary educational institutions in which skilled workers are educated and trained for occupations in the trades, crafts, industry, agriculture and/or commerce. In some countries., the vocational teacher is responsible for practical workshop training as well.
Workshop teacher: a person teaching the practical skills required by technicians and skilled workers in school workshops usually on the upper secondary level, but also in the first cycle of secondary education or on the post-secondary level. Normally, the technical or vocational teacher to whose courses the practical training activities relate co-ordinates the work of the workshop teacher.
Technical teacher: a person teaching general and special technical theory in educational institutions on the upper secondary or post-secondary level the aim of which is to educate and train technicians. Usually the technical teacher is responsible for both classroom and laboratory work, but may also supervise practical workshop training to the extent required in order to integrate the theoretical and practical aspects of technical education. He may be assisted in laboratory work by appropriately qualified laboratory technicians. (UNESCO 1977, 19-20)
The typologies being used in other studies are quite similar to this one. Usually they are comprised of a combination of the necessary qualification to enter the teaching profession on the one hand and the bundle tasks of the teachers on the other. The mentioned UNESCO study for example introduces another parallel typology for teacher education programmes.
Those typology-based approaches to the topic might be helpful to gain a first orientation when entering the research field. However, they at least in their exclusive application neglect important contextual dimensions of the reality of vocational teaching as an activity and professional task which is taking place in the particular framework of a countries' or regions' educational and socio-economic system. Table 1 provides an overview on all the past comparative studies on vocational teachers. In the following section I will not paraphrase the outcomes of the more recent studies but rather put them into relation with relevant general developments from different research branches.
Recent developments in research of relevance for international studies on vocational teachers
Traps in comparative research on education and training
In a project with Cedefop on the state of the art in Comparative Research on Vocational Education within the EU we made use of a 2x2 matrix (see Grollmann, Sellin 1999, Hörner 1997) which makes an analytical distinction between four basic purposes or underpinning ideas of comparative or international research. The following paragraph provides examples of possible research questions directly related to VET teachers clustered by this matrix:
research which would look for the particular cultural understanding and conception of the vocational educators' role in their respective educational and socio-economic embeddedness would be called ideographic;
research which looks at the very fundamental laws and principles of the functions and processes of vocational education and which makes use of the empirical evidence in different countries, regions, cultural spheres as an empirical knowledge base of variable interrelations between dependent and independent variables[2] would be called nomothetic. A possible example could be general statements on the vocational teachers' role based on research on the interconnection of the basic values and beliefs of the particular societies and their vocational teaching profession;
the so-called "best practice" research (melioristic in this connection), such as the transnational documentation of exemplary practices in different countries with the aim to disseminate them to and adapt them in other national environments;
all the activities of research and documentation which are working on a common understanding of the VET teaching profession - for example the search for standards could be called universalistic.
This distinction is based on the idea that international research can be clustered by asking if it looks for the rather specific or particular (of a culture; region etc.) or for universally observable trends on the one hand and on the other hand if it is rather academically, theoretically oriented or if it is being carried out with a rather practical aim. According to this cluster most of the research which has been carried out with a comparative or international perspective on VET teachers directly would be subordinated to the practical side of the matrix and could hence be called universalistic or melioristic.
There are other relevant branches of research, such as comparative studies on school-to-work transition to mention only one example, which are traditionally rooted in sociology and with it on the rather academic side, but which can also provide important information on teachers' professionalisation in a transnational perspective as this information might help or even be necessary to understand the particular problems of the VET Profession in a specific country. It seems to be important in this connection that traditional segmentations between so-called applied research and documentation and "pure" or "academic" research can be got away from.
Research being carried out with the aim to further "professionalise" VET teaching structures and processes on a transnational level has to widen its perspective to gain mutual understanding:
“[...] comparative social science deals with putting relationships into relation.” (Schriewer1992);
an author rather stemming from the academic branch of the discipline of comparative education puts it. Comparative research with a too narrow perspective is always at the risk to consider things the same, which are different.
I will give an example: In a comparative project on the professional reality of vocational teachers the author is currently involved in, research was carried out in Denmark, the US and Germany. Comparing the first two countries one can see that the formal requirements and the teacher training necessary to enter the VET teaching arena are similar in length and nature. In both countries a certain range of trade experience is required and has to be added with some in-service training during the first years of the work as teacher as minimum entry requirements.[3]
When we look at the schools the teachers are working in, the typical model in Denmark is a comprehensive vocational college, which offers different programmes in technical fields, mainly on the secondary but also on the post-secondary level.
Academic and vocational Instruction would be provided in the same institution under the same roof.
In the United States there do exist two basic types of vocational schools in the secondary system: one would be similar to the Danish type: a comprehensive vocational high school or career centre with academic and vocational courses under one roof, the other one the vocational area centre, which would provide only the vocational instruction of the programmes for the different "home-high-schools" ("second type", see Figure 1). This type of school is being attended by the students only once or twice a week for the vocational instruction, whereas they would receive their academic lessons in their different home-high-schools. In those cases, the staff of the vocational school is almost merely set up with vocational teachers. What is interesting about that?
There are quite similar postulations in both countries in terms of reform programmatics: the integration of vocational and academic learning, individualised instruction etc. Those goals usually imply a well reflected co-ordination and co-operation between different teachers, e.g. those for academic and vocational subjects. However, this straightforward example shows how different the framework for the realisation of those issues can be in the framework of different educational systems. There are also lot of similar traps reported for comparative research on teachers in general and their education (e.g. Popkewitz 2000).
Another remarkable example which is quite relevant for the domain of vocational education and the professionalisation of its teachers can be drawn from the sociological international comparative research scene: One of the important topics in connection with the professionalisation of teachers is the question about the content of teaching. The research on “Industrial Cultures” (Ruth 1995) has shown that there quite different cultural conceptions and practices with regard to the organisation of production and the shape of technological artefacts.[4] Hence, more so than for example in the didactics of sciences such as mathematics, it is much more difficult to develop a universal curricular and didactical basis which reflected in the different modes of organising this content in the varying teacher education programmes (see also the contributions by Toth, Varga and Gombocz; Gombocz in Toth 1995). This problem is reinforced by the different functions VET takes over for the labour market as well in different modes of career building and identity formation (e.g. Drexel 1995; Evans, Heinz1993).
Recent developments with regard to the theory and research on the teaching profession
The (comparative) research on the professions is historically rooted in functionalist theoretical approaches to society and social theory (Freidson 1994). It was one of the main research interests during this phase i.e. the beginning of the 20th century to describe and analyse the distinct features of special occupational groups which have evolved within the process of the development from the corporative state over the burgeois to the industrialised society and which took over new emerging societal functions. Generally, those approaches collected a sum of indicators empirically derived from studies on the traditional professions (such as lawyers, doctors) which made them distinguishable from other skilled work. Typical indicators which can be found in those approaches are:
high, usually academic qualification on the basis of scientific knowledge.
autonomy and professional self-regulation.
societal influence as Experts on their respective field (here: vocational education)
professional field must be considered as a basic pillar of the society
practice derived from a systematic body of knowledge and the reproduction of this knowledge
professional associations usually combining the academic as well as the occupational interests of the specific occupational group
societal monopoly of the profession fulfil those tasks, but the individual freedom of
the client to select the respective professional individual
higher-than average payment
(see the summary of Fasshauer 1997)
Consequently this approach was also used for the teaching profession. A lot of sociologists, then, came to the conclusion that teaching can at most be called a semi-profession (Etzioni 1969). Most of the past comparative approaches (see Table 1) to vocational education as a profession seem to be deeply rooted in the indicator- or attribute-approach to the profession[5] albeit to a different extent. What comes out finally is rather a juxtaposition of different existing systems of VET teacher education and teaching profiles. Those approaches often ignore important relationships between dimensions which strongly shape the teaching reality, similar to the example given above.
The inadequacy of the traditional sociological paradigm to professions has also led to the fact that there are a lot of approaches from the educational discipline to teachers' professionalisation and their education which are not making use of the term "profession" anymore or change the conceptualisation with regard to the specific purposes.
In addition, there has been drawn more and more attention to the rather individual side of professional agency[6] and its prerequisites, namely the skills, knowledge and competencies a "professional" teacher needs. In this connection there have to be mentioned approaches which stress the importance of what the American Educator Lee Shulman called "pedagogical content knowledge" (Shulman 1984). This is especially relevant for vocational teaching as that has to deal with the following unique problem in terms of content:
"[...]the professionalisation of the education of vocational teachers for the teaching of non-professional skills and knowledge."(Bannwitz, Rauner 1993, 10-11; emphasis and translation by the author)."
Shulman proposes that for the development of occupational competence of teachers there are different types of knowledge. The one he labels "pedagogical content knowledge" is the knowledge which enables the teacher to find out the best mode of conveying a specific content to a particular individual person. This knowledge can best be acquired by the study of pedagogical cases, he argues. Here, he comes full circle with the underpinning ideas of professions, because he also mentions the tradition of law education (a traditional course of professional education) which has made use of case-studies since its existence. The shift to a rather micro-level or interaction-based model of professional agency can also be seen in branches of the general sociological research (e.g. Oevermann 1996) the professions and goes in line with the often stated international trend of a pressure to individualise educational programmes.
Another development we can see in the research on teacher education is that it increasingly merges with the perspective of school-development[7]. The prominent idea of "reflective practice" brought into the discussion by D. Schön (Schön 1983) or books such as the "Meaning of Educational Change" by the Canadian Educator Michael Fullan (Fullan 1999) are only a few examples of this trend. What they have in common is that they are also in favour of a rather process and interaction oriented model of Teachers' professionalisation which sees the teacher as an individual learner as well as a member of collective learning processes and the development of socially shared cognitions and conceptualisations. This research also suggests fundamental implications for the shaping of the institutional environment of teaching, namely the schools and their relationship to the surrounding community (see the summarising article by Hopkins and Stern 1996).
A lot of those recent trends were reflected in the design as well as in the outcomes of the LEONARDO-project EUROPROF, which aimed to develop a pan-European Master-level qualification for VET-professionals. Beside a huge number of articles surrounding the idea of common "cornerstones" by members of the project (e.g. Attwell 1997), one of the substantial outcomes of this project however was the insight that for a pan-European process of professionalisation of vocational teaching it is an important precondition to get the involvement of the "professionals" themselves, e.g. through their professional associations. Another outcome was, that the project showed once again how difficult it is to develop a common framework or set of standards taking into account the vast differences between the different ways in which vocational education and training is being organised through Europe. The development of cornerstones, however, seems to be quite a promising way of finding a common basis.(Attwell 1997a).
International comparative research on teachers in vocational education and its relationship to the development of standards
The preceding sections have very briefly summarised the development of international comparative studies on vocational teachers starting from the early sixties. A comprehensive international or pan-European piece of research which entails all different relevant aspects is still overdue. A project like this would have to widen its perspective from the pure aggregation and description of single discrete indicators (which are of course an important part) to a perspective which takes into account the interrelations between those indicators themselves as well as to neighbouring domains within the triangle of education and training; technology and economy and work and employment. With regard to a possible research design it might be sensible to cluster the field horizontally by rather static aspects, such as institutional factors, existing professional profiles etc. and vertically by process variables which take into account the dynamics, such as the relations between different institutions; institutional changes, innovation modes etc. This scaffold could additionally be fleshed out by a number of qualitative case-studies. The older research approaches provide useful information for the horizontal layer, whereas more recent contributions, such as the EUROPROF cornerstones, provide useful starting points for the vertical layer of such an endeavour.