The multiple contexts of vocational education and training in southern Africa
OUTPUT TYPE: Chapter in Monograph
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2005
TITLE AUTHOR(S): S.McGrath
SOURCE EDITOR(S): S.Akoojee, A.Gewer, S.A.McGrath
KEYWORDS: SOUTHERN AFRICA, VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING
DEPARTMENT: Equitable Education and Economies (IED)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 2947
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/7250
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/7250
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
This volume is intended to develop and share knowledge within the southern African region regarding the challenges faced by vocational education and training (VET) systems and the responses to these challenges. Some of these challenges arise out of the history of VET in the region, whilst others relate to current international discourses about VET. The field of VET in southern Africa has been badly neglected. It is very difficult to find an article in the international journals on the topic, and it is even less likely that it will have been written by a national of the region, based at one of its research institutions. VET has also attracted little attention in the policy community for more than a decade, given the donor fascination with basic education since the World Conference on Education for All in 1990 (McGrath 2002). However, VET can play an important role in supporting social and economic development goals, and major VET policy reforms and the creation of new institutions are either underway or planned in all seven countries under study in this book. Therefore, it is my intention in this introduction to illuminate the nature of some of these changes, their origins and their likelihood of success. In so doing, I will show how VET is an important policy nexus - located as it is between economic and educational policy, between the state and the market, and between concerns with poverty and growth. Before this volume turns to examine this complexity through an exploration of the experiences of seven countries (Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland), it is important to locate these national and contemporary debates in the historical evolution of ideas about VET. In so doing, I will look at both internal trends within Africa and the impact of external ideas.-
Related Research Outputs:
- The challenges of vocational education and training reform in southern Africa
- Vocational education and training in southern Africa: a comparative study
- An examination of the vocational education and training reform debate in southern Africa
- Discursive shifts and structural continuities in South African vocational education and training: 1981-1999
- History bites: understanding the history of technical and vocational education in the context on the recent focus on skills development
- Teaching without words: tacit knowledge in apprenticeship
- Retrieving the general from the particular: the structure of craft knowledge
- Skills for development: a new approach to international cooperation in skills development?
- Danish assistance to vocational education and training: South Africa country report
- Danish assistance to vocational education and training: South Africa country report executive summary
- Technical and vocational education in South Africa from the 1920s
- Micro-finance in rural communities in Southern Africa: country and pilot site case studies, policy issues and recommendations
- PRODDER: the Southern Africa development directory 2000
- A dual mandate for FET colleges in a future South Africa
- DFIDSA poverty workshops and seminars
- Toward a sustainable transport and communication sector in Southern Africa
- Discursive shifts and structural continuities in South African vocational education and training, 1981-1999
- On global security: a suggested interpretation for Southern Africa
- PRODDER: the Southern Africa development directory 2001
- Technical and vocational education provision in South Africa from 1920 to 1970