RESEARCH AND INSIGHT FROM THE FURTHER EDUCATION SECTOR
THEKNOWLEDGE Rethinking learning Vocational, practical and creative education is different. So why are we being urged to teach it in the same way as academic education, ask Melanie Lanser and Kate Martin he bread and butter of a further education (FE) curriculum is vocational, technical and creative education. Frequently, FE students have not excelled in an academic curriculum in school and are seeking alternative ways to experience success. Approaches to teaching, learning and assessment significantly differ in academic and practical learning. Focusing on the academic content of a curriculum and assessing through high-stakes examination gives rise to the case for pedagogy ‘as science’. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology provide rich information on the cognitive functions of the brain, and there are evidence-based strategies which are effective in enhancing knowledge learning. Teachers are being urged to apply the best available evidence to inform practice. Pick up any recently published ‘teaching’ text and the likelihood is you will be reading about cognitive load, interleaving and spaced practice, elaboration and retrieval practice. Rosenshine (2012) stated that effective teachers ensure their students efficiently acquire and rehearse knowledge by using
standard instructional techniques. Experiential and hands-on activities come after knowledgelearning. The research underpinning the Education Inspection Framework (EIF) (Ofsted, 2019) draws on work on
T
memory and learning. Inspection reports published since the EIF went live discuss knowledge acquisition, sequencing and embedding knowledge in long-term memory across all curricula. The knowledge-rich curriculum draws on the work of Young (2008) who conceptualised ‘powerful knowledge’, broadly defined as the ‘best’ available knowledge that exists within a discipline. Young advocated that students deserve to learn powerful knowledge to promote social justice and social mobility, taking disadvantaged students away from the limitations of their environment and their
Overview comparison: A critical thinking framework Academic education curriculum teaching and design
Vocational, technical and creative education
Intent
Develops convergent thinking
Develops divergent thinking
Desired outcome
Development of knowledge and associated academic skills
Development of creative and abstract thinking and learning through exploring, imagining and deliberate practice
Aligned assessment methods
Examinations and academic Methods that enable judgements coursework that test only an of what student can do, rather than existing, agreed choice of knowledge what they can remember
Aligned pedagogy
Pedagogies rooted in cognitive psychology to enable students to embed knowledge in longtermmemory
Pedagogies rooted in vocational and practical learning to develop practice to theory in a context
Student role
To absorb, memorise and recall knowledge; in higher level academic learning to engage critically with different knowledge
To develop a specific craft and wider skills and sector behaviours such as experimentation, resourcefulness, empathy, imagination and interpersonal skills
Impact
Students who have knowledge in Provides different ways of specific discipline(s) who frequently learning and can enable success progress to university for students, and that success allows re-engagement with more knowledge- based learning
28 INTUITION SUMMER 2020
28-29 The knowledge - Mel Lanser_Intuition June 2020_Intuition 28
28/05/2020 08:42
