Insights from Two Different Vocational Courses in a Further Education College

Becoming Vocational: BERA 2003

Becoming Vocational:

insights from two different vocational courses in a further education college

A report from the project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education

by Jennie Davies and Michael Tedder

presented at the

British Educational Research Association Conference,

Edinburgh, September 2003

Jennie Davies

School of Education and Lifelong Learning

University of Exeter

Heavitree Road

Exeter EX1 2LU

Tel: 01392 264787

E-mail:

Michael Tedder

St Austell College

Trevarthian Road

St Austell

Cornwall PL26 7YE

Tel: 01726 226736

E-mail:

Becoming Vocational: insights from two different vocational courses in a further education college

by Jennie Davies (University of Exeter) and Michael Tedder (St Austell College)

Abstract

The paper is based on work undertaken for the project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education which forms part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme. It draws on ongoing longitudinal case studies of two learning sites in the project, both Level 3 two-year vocational courses in the same further education college. It illuminates the nature of the formation and transformation of young people’s vocational aspirations in these sites – a BTEC National Diploma in Health Studies, and an Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education in Travel and Tourism.

Initial impressions of two strongly contrasted sites regarding students’ vocational aspirations are compared with the more complex picture of similarities that emerges. Specific attention is given to the nature of the relationship between students’ learning on these courses and their shifting vocational aspirations. Issues of identity formation and the role and status of vocational courses foryoung people are raised, with implications for FE policy and practice.

Introduction

The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC)[1] project involves close working partnerships between researchers based in universities and in further education colleges and includes a teacher from each of the learning sites[2], the participating tutor. Together they explore the recent learning experiences of tutors and students, so that the project can ‘examine learning processes, dispositions and cultures over time and in relation to a wide range of personal experiences and other factors’ (Bloomer & James, 2003). Our data are drawn from two learning sites at a further education (FE) college in the south west of England: a BTEC National Diploma in Health Studies and an Advanced Vocational Certificate (AVCE) in Travel and Tourism. Our case studies (Davies, 2003; Tedder, 2003)

focus on data derived from the first cohort of students during the academic years 2001/02 and 2002/03.

We have conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with a sample of students towards the beginning and at the end of each year of their course. Other data that inform this study derive from repeated interviews with the participating tutor in each learning site, entries from their reflective journals, researcher observations and a questionnaire survey administered to all students in the learning site at the start of each academic year and at the end of their course.

The paper begins by describing the research context and then focuses on the shifting vocational aspirations of students in our two sites, with a short student case study from each. The case studies were not chosen as a conventionally representative sample, but for the insights they provide into the relationships between students’ learning, their vocational aspirations and their developing identities. The ensuing discussion draws out similarities between the two sites which have implications both for those teaching and managing vocational courses in FE and for policy makers.

Context

Our findings here have links with other research into young people’s lives, in particular with research that focuses on the formation of identities and on the decisions young people make as they move from education into employment. Our findings show how students’ vocational aspirations are inextricably bound up with other aspects of their lives, with issues of identity, with becoming a person.

It is acknowledged that young people today are growing up in a world characterised by rapid change, increased complexities and uncertainties (Beck, 1992; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997).

This is a world where many of the old certainties have gone, where lives are multi-dimensional (Dwyer and Wyn, 2001) and where adulthood is often deferred (the ‘post-adolescence’ described by Wyn and Dwyer, 1999). It is a world which includes an unprecedentedly wide range of possibilities in employment and further and higher education, a range which can appear to individuals at its extremes as either bewildering or incomprehensible. Giddens (1991) claimed that, for the ‘reflexive project of the self’:

Modernity confronts the individual with a complex diversity of choices and…

at the same time offers little help as to which options should be selected (p 80).

We are interested in the way young people confront such diversity and try to select options.

The recognition of ‘choice biographies’ (du Bois Reymond, 1998) does not imply a discounting of long-standing structural constraints like class, gender and ethnicity on many young people’s choices. As Furlong and Cartmel (1997) have explained:

Young people can struggle to establish adult identities and maintain coherent

biographies, they may develop strategies to overcome various obstacles, but their

life chances remain highly structured, with social class and gender being crucial to

an understanding of experiences in a range of life contexts (p109).

Frequently, however, these constraints are unrecognised: ‘The young people see themselves as individuals in a meritocratic setting, not as classed or gendered members of an unequal society’ (Ball et al 2000).

As part of the discourse on the transition from school to work, Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997) put forward the theory of ‘careership’, which discounts both structural determinism and individual agency alone. This theory provides a more complex awareness of career decisions than the traditional concept of career trajectory with its inherent emphasis on the feasibility of technically rational decision-making. As they explain:

In this theory, three artificially-separated parts are completely inter-related. They

are pragmatically rational decision-making, choices as interactions within a field,

and choices within a life course consisting of inter-linked routines and turning-points. We coined the term ‘careership’ as a shorthand title for the whole (p32).

Indeed, young people will always make their career decisions within ‘horizons for action’: ‘By horizon for action we mean the arena within which actions can be taken and decisions made’ (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997, p34). Such ideas help to make sense of the unfolding stories of our students during a different time of transition, from school to a vocational course in college.

The complexities of the relationships between young people’s decisions about their education and other aspects of their lives have been explored in a number of recent longitudinal studies (for example, Ball et al, 2000; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 1997, 1999; Dwyer and Wyn, 2001). The concept of ‘learning career’ (Bloomer, 1997; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000) is helpful in understanding some of these complexities. Bloomer (1997) challenges the assumption that learning careers are susceptible to prediction and rational planning:

Learning careers describe transformations in habitus, dispositions and studentship, over time. They cannot be planned in any technical or rational sense; they happen

or ‘unfold’. Their futures are unpredictable to the extent that there is much that

is unpredictable about the conditions under which unfoldment or happenstance

takes place (p 153).

This paper focuses on students’ learning careers in two specific vocational courses and explores the relationship between those learning careers and the students’ vocational aspirations and decision-making. From our interview data we can provide an account of the ways in which the learning careers of some vocational students are ‘unfolding’.

The learning sites

Our initial impression of the two learning sites, which are both Level 3 two-year courses - BTEC National Diploma in Health Studies (HS) and AVCE in Travel and Tourism (TT) - was one of superficial similarities but an essential difference. Of the similarities, one was the overwhelmingly female nature of both groups (there was just one TT male student and none in HS). In addition, all students were aged 16 or17 at the start of their course, apart from one TT student aged 25. They looked similar in that they dressed in conventional rather than conspicuousyouth fashion, and sported no visible tattoos or flamboyant piercings. Of the less visible aspects, all had met the entry requirements of their course (4 subjects at grade C or above for the AVCE and the BTEC, with the option also of BTEC First Diploma award for the HS course). The majority in both TT and HS had gained nine or ten GCSE passes with at least a grade C. Another similarity was the fact that they all had either already acquired part-time jobs by the start of their course in 2001 or else acquired them soon afterwards, and for many the number of hours at work increased considerably during our two years’ relationship with them. This aspect of their lives was to prove increasingly significant in relation to their studies, as we discuss later.

The main difference seemed to concern vocational aspirations. At the start of the autumn term 2001, most HS students were aiming for a career in the health service, the majority wanting to be nurses and aware that this would involve an HE course after their BTEC. One student had her sights set on HE, but not on a specifically health-related course. Perhaps as a result of this reasonably strong vocational bonding, the classroom dynamics of this group initially appeared to be more cohesive than those in TT. The TT students, in contrast, appeared to be bound together more by a shared commitment not to go to university than by any firm vocational aspirations to work in TT. Such aspirations as they expressed appeared to be vague, sometimes founded on ideas of cabin crew or overseas representatives gained from the media or holidays abroad, sometimes simply on a general wish to travel. Sometimes they were avowedly non-existent. Subsequent interview sweeps, however, revealed a more complex picture of aspiration-setting in both HS and TT, with more profound similarities rather than differences emerging as significant.

Travel and Tourism

AVCE TT, a ‘Vocational A-level’, has been available at the College since September 2000, replacing the GNVQ Leisure and Tourism Advanced qualification. Course knowledge consists of 12 discrete units (6 compulsory and 6 chosen by our participating tutor from a list of options) and is assessed two-thirds by assignments, and one third by external examinations. TT students can also take optional additional subjects, many with clear vocational relevance. There is, however, no work experience included in the AVCE.

The following table maps the vocational aspirations during the two years of their course of each of the seven students who were being interviewed in 2002/03, two of the original sample having left at the end of the first year. It maps both changes and the consideration of options, as well as some apparently consistent aspirations. But such a table can present only the bald outline of each student’s developing vocational aspirations and identities. It is followed by a short case study tracing the changes expressed by Hayley Abbott which fills in some of the rich detail that lies beneath and between her shifting aspirations.

Table 1: Changing vocational aspirations - AVCE Travel & Tourism interviewees

Pseudonym / 1st interview / 2nd interview / 3rd interview / 4th interview
Hayley Abbott / Redcoat at Butlins / HE Foundation Degree: marketing
(market research executive) / Year out, possibly in Greece; maybe
television work / Ground crew at nearby city airport
Becky Carr / Long-term goal: house renovation business
Administrator,
possibly abroad / HE Degree: public relations / Possibly degree, but not public relations; not TT career / Temporary work in USA visiting father; not TT career
Tamsin Ellis / Overseas rep; hotel work / HE Foundation Degree: tourism management;
marketing via her job at local tourist attraction / Children’s rep, but keeping options open / Children’s rep; hotel management
Lindsay Fletcher / Events organiser, not necessarily in TT / Events organiser; possibly HE Foundation Degree - subject not decided / Year out, then possibly HE Foundation Degree / Applying for HE Foundation Degree in events management; not necessarily aiming at TT career
Dennis Giddings / Not yet
interviewee but in 2nd interview said he had had no goal at this stage / Modern apprenticeship (construction); cabin crew; overseas rep; outdoor activities instructor / Cabin crew / Any local job; later - overseas rep or cabin crew
Helen Newman / Not yet interviewee / Not yet interviewee / Camp America next summer; work in local tourist office / Any local job; possibly with tourist board in future
Carol Nichols / Not yet interviewee / Not yet interviewee / Travel agency work; airport work; HE Foundation Degree: tourism management / Hotel management; work-based NVQ at local hotel (where she works); HE Foundation Degree: leisure and tourism management

Hayley Abbott - ‘It depends on what you want out of life really.’

Hayley, a confident and articulate young woman, had left school a year before starting the AVCE TT, with 9 GCSEs (4 B grades and 5 C grades). After leaving school, she started AS courses at the College ( Sociology, Psychology, English, Drama, Politics and General Studies) but left when she developed glandular fever. She had decided against returning to A-levels because she was adamant she did not want to go to university and she seemed to have drifted into the AVCE TT before deciding that it might lead to a possible career for her.

Her choice did not appear to be based on any substantial decision-making process; it seemed more the product of happenstance. Her interest in tourism was apparently triggered by working as a waitress in a local hotel, when recovering from glandular fever:

So, I mean to begin with I was thinking of going back to do the A-levels but

once I found I had an interest, I thought it might be a better avenue to go down.

(1st interview, Nov 2001)

With a long-standing interest in drama she also confessed, ‘I wanted to be a Redcoat at Butlins and I still kind of do, and this is of course another avenue into going into it.'

By her second interview in May 2002, there was evidence of a clearer goal, although not one necessarily focused around travel and tourism. With an interest awakened by the marketing unit on the course, she was considering a two-year foundation degree in marketing, in order to become a market research executive, and the earlier idea of becoming a Redcoat had now vanished.

The vocational insights from her third interview in November 2002 could be summarised in her own words, repeated several times, ‘I keep just having different ideas’. She spoke at length about possible future plans, which no longer included a career in marketing. Other aspects of her life now appeared to be more influential, like the desire to move away from the locality and to have some time apart from her long-term boyfriend (‘I need to do stuff before I settle down properly anyway’) and she appeared to be toying with several new ideas, namely going to work in Greece or trying to enter the world of television.

Hayley was now formulating a desire for an interesting job with a reasonable salary away from her home village. She stressed the value of qualifications for her generation:

Well there's not really much you can do [without qualifications]. I mean

I've got friends who left school and didn’t go to college and they're like chambermaiding and waitressing which is fine - you know they wanted

to do that. But I wouldn’t want to be barmaiding in the pub for the rest of

my life or anything, so it depends what you want out of life really.

(3rd interview, Nov 2002)

She valued the AVCE TT, but not for specific vocational reasons; Hayley’s emphasis was on its generic qualities: ‘It leads, you know, it doesn’t just lead to jobs in travel and tourism…. I'm getting lots more skills that can be used outside of the scope of travel and tourism’.

However, by the fourth interview in May 2003, Hayley’s vocational focus had moved from the general to the particular, and she now sounded firmly focused on a specific career in the travel industry:

I’m applying for jobs at the moment. I’ve applied at [the local] airport as a

passenger service rep…I’ve also applied for a temporary position at [a regional] airport as a customer service rep and I’ve also sent my CV to Britannia, Air 2000

and My Travel…I want to start off on a like a check-in desk and then, hopefully, move up to like an airport controller… [it’s] probably the first step in the career.

Her part-time job appeared to have been the most influential factor in these latest decisions, as it had helped her develop confidence in customer service: ‘I like working with the general public and … I know how to deal with like awkward customers and stuff like that, which you do get at airports’. This job had also contributed towards crystallising her priority, to earn a decent wage soon; she had spent enough time ‘doing the menial jobs that don’t pay very well and stuff like that’. So her earlier passing vocational aspirations, including the possible university course, had all now disappeared, because