Leesa Mary Wheelahan

• PhD
• Chair at University of Toronto

The core purpose of accrediting educational credentials is to establish their conformity with standards established for educational credentials in general, particularly those offered by other institutions and in other fields. Educational accreditation integrates educational credentials within a network of all other educational credentials and their...

This paper uses the critical realist concept of human reflexivity to develop a theoretical critique of the notion of 'skills' in current policy discourses, particularly in vocational education. We argue that current policy reifies skills as market commodities and alienates them from the minds, bodies, and hands of those who exercise them and the so...

This paper draws on the philosophy of critical realism (CR) to develop the concept of 'critical reflexivity' to theorise the nature of, and purposes of, vocational education.

This paper uses critical realism to develop a theoretical critique of the notion of skill in current policy discourses.

We develop a critique of prevailing policy discourse based on skills using critical realism. We point to a depth within us in "who we are"— our values, norms, emotions and compassion: what you can mean by saying to a friend, "I think you should follow your heart". Current post-Covid discourse reifies competencies and skills, seeking to describe a...

This article focuses on adult working learners who attend postsecondary institutions in Canada and the United States. We identify how these institutions deliver curriculum and instruction in the form of career‐technical education (CTE) and vocational education offering occupational credentials. In British Columbia and the U.S., most vocational prog...

This paper examines the difficulties in establishing the generalisability of so-called ‘generic’ skills. Whilst employers use a similar vocabulary to refer to general skills, ‘The same words meant very disparate things to different people, both between organisations and within them’ (Bennett, 2002, p.462). So-called generic skills such as critical...

We open this chapter by reviewing two varieties of human capital theory. We then review critiques of human capital theory on empirical, methodological, and normative grounds. We then consider two alternative foundations for post secondary education: human rights, and the capabilities approach. We develop the capabilities approach and its implicatio...

Different realist approaches have emerged as important positions within the sociology of education in theorizing the aims, purposes and structure of curriculum. This article discusses the philosophy of critical realism, Margaret Archer's social realist morphogenetic approach, the social realist school within the sociology of education, and transact...

This paper argues that micro-credentials are gig credentials for the gig economy. Micro-credentials are short competency-based industry-aligned units of learning, while the gig economy comprises contingent work by individual ‘suppliers’. Both can be facilitated by (often the same) digital platforms, and both are underpinned by social relations of p...

Applied degrees in colleges emerged as a distinct form of provision in many Anglophone countries around the turn of the twenty-first century. This includes foundation degrees in England, applied baccalaureates in Canada and the United States, and vocational degrees in Australia. The three rationales for this provision are that it can: expand access...

This article is published open access and so is available free from the publisher's web site. This article describes the process through which human capital theory came to dominate policy in post-compulsory education, to result in the fetishisation of skills. It relates skills policies to the contemporaneous development of policies on lifelong lea...

This article reports on a study investigating the link between education and work. Instead of looking at the labour outcomes of graduates, the study examined the qualifications held by workers in technician- and professional-level jobs from three types of occupational fields: regulated, applied, and general. The approach shifts the focus away from...

The provision of bachelor degrees in technical and further education (TAFE) institutes in Australia, further education (FE) colleges in England, and community colleges (CCs) in Canada and the United States is caught in a contradiction. On the one hand, this provision offers opportunities to groups of students who are not having their needs met in u...

Post-secondary education (PSE) is a vital part of civil society and any modern economy. When broadly accessible, it can enable socioeconomic mobility, improve health outcomes, advance social cohesion, and support a highly skilled workforce. It yields public benefits not only in improved well-being and economic prosperity, but also in reduced costs...

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to ‘discipline’ the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative labour...

The study examines what factors influence Taiwan’s Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) success in sustainable development. By using the quantitative data from survey, this study uses OLS regression and logistic regression models to investigate the relationship between TVET goals, achievements, and resources and what the factors influ...

This report observes several limitations of human capital theory, both as a description of the way qualifications are used in the labour market, and in severely limiting the potential roles of technical and vocational education and training (TVET). It proposes as an alternative the human capabilities approach which posits that the goal should be fo...

Recent research on technical and vocational education and training (TVET) argues that vocational education contributes to local social, economic, and cultural development by cultivating sustainable capabilities and promoting social justice in educational access (Wheelahan & Moodie, 2016). The paper examines the TVET systems and current situation in...

The paper examines the strengths and challenges of Technical Vocational Education (TVET) under the influence of Confucian tradition in paralleled structure of Taiwan’s education system. Through analysis of qualitative interview data, the paper investigates the whole-person education perspective and its disadvantage of low status under the social va...

The paper examines Taiwan’s technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system using a capabilities approach framework. Specifically, the paper investigates the system’s goals, achievements, resources, and challenges. Although findings suggest that Taiwan’s TVET meets various stakeholder needs, the system still faces challenges due to so...

Taiwan is often held by scholars to be successful and they attribute the economic advantage and the rising prosperity of Taiwan to its system of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) (Chen & Shih, 1989; Yuen, 1993), which provides sufficient human capital for this economic prosperity (International Affairs Office, 2016). The distin...

This chapter argues that competency‐based education training denies students access to the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It focuses on vocational education to demonstrate that competency‐based education results in impoverished curriculum offered ma...

This report on further education in England was undertaken as part of a project funded by Education International to examine national case studies of technical and vocational education and training as a framework for social justice. The report applies the capabilities approach to technical and vocational education and training. The report argues t...

This international comparative analysis of higher level vocational education examines developments across five countries: England, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the USA. The authors consider how current developments address two key policy concerns: an emphasis on high skills as a means of achieving economic competitiveness and raising productivit...

During the past two decades community colleges and technical institutes in several jurisdictions, including parts of Canada, the United States and Australia, have been given the authority to award bachelor degrees. One of the motivations for this addition to the mandate of these institutions is to improve opportunities for bachelor degree attainmen...

This chapter considers the nature of ‘applied’ bachelor degrees. It concludes that there are four characteristics common to many understandings of applied degrees: the curriculum is specific to an occupation rather than a general preparation for work, life or further education; the pedagogy includes more practical work, often at a work place, than...

This research explores links between tertiary education institutions and between tertiary education and the labour market as determinants of provincial and national transition patterns in Canada. The study consists of a provincial analysis that maps the typology of transition systems across Canada’s devolved federated tertiary education structure....

This report is the culmination of a research project that explored the impact of college degrees on colleges and on students. We conclude that college degrees are largely fulfilling their intended purposes. The labour market outcomes for college degrees are strong, stronger than for lower level credentials. Degree programs are career-focused and ap...

The links between vocational qualifications and occupational destinations are weak in many Anglophone countries, even though the explicit purpose of vocational qualifications is to prepare individuals for occupations. Using Australia and Canada as case studies, this is explained at three levels of analysis: at the national level by systems of skill...

Australia’s vocational education and training (VET) qualifications comprise units of competency that are bundled together in qualifications and nestled in training packages developed for particular industries. This article argues that this model is broken and cannot be fixed by patching bits of the system. Competency-based training (CBT) is based o...

This double session presents, in the first part, data on transfer pathways of receiving and sending institutions, student transfer rates, and the geographical proximity of transfer partners. Findings suggest that most articulation agreements are being under used by students, and for the students who do transfer, most are coming from institutions wi...

Contributing to the four years of substantial research, knowledge building and reflection by ONCAT, this study synthesises current theories and research on student mobility, institutional partnerships and pathways, and presents the current patterns of student flows and institutional agreements in Ontario. The analysis and findings show unexpected r...

This article analyses the expansion of higher education offered by technical and further education institutes in Australia and it compares this provision with the expansion of higher education in further education colleges in England, and baccalaureate degrees in community colleges in the United States. It argues that this provision can open new op...

This project examined pathways within and between fields of education, and between fields of education and occupations, in Ontario and Canada. Using the 2013 National Graduate Survey, the project found that links between qualifications within the same field of education were weak, as were links between fields of education and occupations.

This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curriculum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and train...

The session reports new data from the 2013 National Graduates Survey on graduates’ progression to further postsecondary education and the methods used to access the data. Of interest for policy-makers and institutional researchers, the research group finds that the NGS can provide valuable information on student pathways to inform policy and that m...

This reports an investigation of the feasibility of introducing a new approach to qualifications which would involve:  identifying 4 types of qualifications;  supporting 3 roles of qualifications;  introducing vocational streams; and  introducing ‘productive capabilities’.

This report tests these policy objectives by exploring the nature of educational pathways and the links between educational pathways and the labour market in Ontario, and it compares these outcomes with Canada as a whole. Its purpose is to inform policy and practices at the departmental level within PSE institutions, at the institutional level and...

This presentation reports on an Ontario government funded project on educational pathways. It explores whether graduates stay within the same field of study when they undertake a second postsecondary education qualification. It examines educational pathways within fields of study between educational institutions (college to college; college to univ...

This article argues that the current social settlement underpinning vocational education and training (VET) in Australia is fractured. The current settlement is low trust and consists of qualifications based on competency-based training models of curriculum and competitive markets. The result is narrow qualifications that do not prepare people for...

Higher education is being changed in two ways. First, it is becoming more utilitarian and specifically vocational as a consequence of the dominance of economic values in contemporary society and policy which subordinates higher education and its institutions as instruments of micro-economic policy. Second, the rhetoric of 'the knowledge society' se...

The boundaries between vocational and academic post compulsory education have been blurred by students combining vocational and academic studies and by students transferring increasingly between the two types of education. Institutions are also blurring the boundaries between the sectors by increasingly offering programs from two and sometimes thre...

What should we teach in our schools and vocational education and higher education institutions? Is theoretical knowledge still important? This book argues that providing students with access to knowledge should be the raison d'être of education. Its premise is that access to knowledge is an issue of social justice because society uses it to conduct...

The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) is a ‘first generation’ qualifications framework (Tuck 2007: 1) that was established in 1995. Its purpose was to create ‘a comprehensive, nationally consistent yet flexible framework for all qualifications in post-compulsory education and training’ (AQFAB 2007: 1). It encompasses all post-compulsory qua...

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Vocational education provides an educational but not a social ladder of opportunity to Australian higher education. The five dual-sector universities with significant enrolments in both vocational and higher education admit about twice the proportion of students transferring from vocational education as other universities. However, since the studen...

A key assumption of equity policies in Australia, as in many countries, is that pathways from lower-status, vocationally oriented ‘second’ tiers of tertiary education to ‘first’ tier higher education are able to act as an equity mechanism. This is because students from low socio-economic backgrounds are over-represented in former and underrepresent...

This paper develops a social realist critique of competency‐based training (CBT) by drawing on the philosophy of critical realism and the sociology of Basil Bernstein as complementary modes of analysis. CBT is the mandated model of curriculum in the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia. It results in an impoverished education...

This paper considers higher education programs that are offered by institutions that have historically and still predominantly offer vocational education programs. These arrangements are called higher education (HE) in further education (FE) in England. The paper compares HE in FE in Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand and the US. The paper not...

The purpose of this support document is to: (1) provide a fuller version of the literature review than in the report and issues paper; and (2) provide the interview schedules that were used to gather the data for this project. (Contains 7 footnotes.) [Funding for this report was provided through the Australian Department of Education, Science and T...

The government is going full steam ahead with market design for VET. But the cost of failure is high and the consequences won't necessarily be known for many years. No Yes

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This paper explores the extent to which pathways from technical and further education institutes (TAFE) to higher education in Australia are able to act as a mechanism for social justice, access and equity. Like Britain, Australia uses the market as the mechanism to distribute access to a near-universal system of higher education and, like Britain,...

Training packages are based on the divorce of learn ing outcomes from processes of learning and curriculum. Policy insists that traini ng packages are not curriculum, and that this 'frees' teachers to develop creative and innovative 'delivery strategies' that meet the needs of 'clients'. This paper argues that training packages deny students access...

This paper argues that competency‐based training in vocational education and training in Australia is one mechanism through which the working class is denied access to powerful knowledge represented by the academic disciplines. The paper presents a modified Bernsteinian analysis to argue that vocational education and training students need access t...

This paper draws on Margaret Archer's morphogenetic realist social theory, the philosophy of critical realism upon which it is based, and activity theory to analyse the relationship between the individual and society, and the implications this relationship has for the way we understand learning. It is important that we theorise this relationship, b...

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The Commonwealth Government's Learning and Teaching Performance Fund (LTPF) is not about improving the quality of teaching and learning in Australian universities, it is about creating winners and losers in the higher education market. This article critiques the LTPF on two levels. First, it argues that it is conceptually and methodologically flawe...

This paper uses a Bernsteinian analysis to argue that vocational education and training (VET) qualifications in Australia deny students access to theoretical knowledge that underpins vocational practice. Australian VET qualifications are based on training packages, which are the equivalent of English National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). Train...

The aim of this paper is to defend the place of theoretical knowledge in vocational education and training curriculum in Australia by drawing on the theories of Basil Bernstein and critical realism. Competency-based training is the mandated model of curriculum for publicly funded Australian VET qualifications. Such a defence is required by the near...

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This chapter opens by outlining the structure and institutions of Australian post compulsory education. The most consistent and pervasive organising element of Australian post-compulsory education is qualification level, and the Australian qualifications framework is described, with particular attention to the 'cross-over' qualifications of diploma...

In a recent paper, Ronald Barnett (2004) called for an 'ontological turn' in curriculum and pedagogy away from a focus on knowledge and skills to a 'pedagogy for human being', which seeks to develop the human qualities and dispositions needed to thrive in an uncertain future. He counter-poses his approach with the 'generic skills' approach, arguing...

This paper explores the relevance for VET of Basil Bernstein's analysis of the structuring of knowledge and the framing of pedagogic practice. Bernstein argued that education was not a passive relay for external power relations. Pedagogic practice is an important structuring mechanism for power relations in the way in which knowledge is classified...

This paper argues that neo-liberal market-oriented reform to vocational education and training (and also other sectors of education) is much more than a tool for intensifying the work of VET teachers, through making them more 'responsive' and their institutions more 'effective and efficient'. The aim of these policies is the creation of the 'market...

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This article explores how Australian governments have responded to global trends for reform of vocational education and training and the pressures for change. Australian VET policy is changing as a consequence of three interrelated factors: the need for VET to develop a sectoral identity in relation to the school and higher education sectors; the i...

The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) was established in 1995 to provide a national framework for post-compulsory education and training qualifications in Australia. Common global trends have resulted in similar pressures on governments to reform education and training systems, which has included the establishment of qualifications framewor...

Report summary: One of the key objectives of the Australian Qualifications Framework Advisory Board is to facilitate pathways to formal qualifications that are based on, or include, prior learning that has occurred outside formal education and training. Learning occurs in many contexts that include work, involvement in social, community or sporting...

Student demand for seamless education and lifelong learning is leading to increased levels of cross-sectoral provision by publicly funded education and training institutions. However the sectoral divisions that characterise Australia's education funding frameworks make it difficult for institutions to provide cross-sectoral courses and inhibit the...

Incl. abstract, graph, table, bibl. National training packages have become the mandated framework for course delivery in Australia's vocational education and training sector. Each training package contains: qualifications that can be issued, industry-derived competencies, and assessment guidelines but do not contain an endorsed curriculum component...