4.3 Mapping desired outcomes onto the three ‘kinds’ of vocational education Different kinds of vocational education call on different approaches. For simplicity’s sake in chapter 3, we suggested clustering the vocations into three groups, according to their central focus: 1 One group has a focus on working with certain kinds of physical materials: wood, pipes, electrical wire and fittings, foodstuffs, hair, etc. 2 The second group has a predominantly people focus, involving working with people: the elderly, small children, adults with learning difficulties, students of many kinds including musical and sports.
While these groupings are necessarily overly clear-cut we think they begin to help us to make sense of the kinds of pedagogies that can be appropriate in different vocational domains. In Table 1, we explored the way each of the six vocational desired outcomes could be relevant for plumbers, as individuals working predominantly with physical materials. Table 2 and Table 3 repeat the process for child care – a people-oriented vocation, and accountancy – an abstract concepts-oriented vocation. The three examples used are chosen because they can be clearly situated as involving media of either ‘materials’, ‘people’, or ‘abstract concepts’. As shown in Figure 4, many vocational courses involve much more of a mix of the three media.
3 The third group work predominantly with symbols: words, numbers, text, accounts, spreadsheets, digital software, etc.
How to teach vocational education: A theory of vocational pedagogy
55