title: Australian Transnational Vocational Education and Training Provisions: Sustainability, Quality, and Relevance
Creators: name: King, Louise
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2019
Subjects: subject: Transnational education
subject: Vocational education and training
subject: Australian national regulations
subject: Student needs

description: In an era of globalisation and economic competitiveness, Australia plays a major role in assisting other countries’ governments to build their workforce through the provision of vocational education programs. This is referred to as transnational education. It encompasses any educational service or product offered by an educational institution based in one country to students in another. The advantages of the provision of these programs include expanding opportunities for governments and individuals to access relevant and quality vocational education in their own country. However, the capacity of Australian educational providers to meet the diverse needs of this market is hampered by its own national regulations. The mandatory requirements for the implementation of the Australian national vocational education curricula -- known as Training Packages -- which are tied to national industry standards, restrict these provisions and frequently render them irrelevant to the needs and circumstances of other countries. Therefore, questions emerge about the sustainability of pursuing an approach to transnational education that expects and requires teachers to maintain these standards in a country for which the curriculum was not designed. To understand how teachers negotiate the needs and interests of transnational students and their sponsors amongst the imperatives of national curricula, a tentative analytical framework was synthesised from a review of relevant literature. This framework of curriculum conceptions was used as the basis for comprehending what constitutes an extensive account of curriculum in Australian transnational vocational education and training (VET). To understand further the key factors associated with teachers developing, adapting, and enacting Training Packages in another country, a phenomenological approach was used to collect and analyse data. The informants included 13 Australian and expatriate teachers who taught in transnational VET programs across nine countries. The findings contribute to an explanation of the complexity of factors that influenced these teachers’ enactment of the curriculum and how they engaged in decision-making, problemsolving, and curriculum formation to overcome the constraints associated with implementation. The aim of using a phenomenological approach was to foster an understanding of curriculum transformation in Australian transnational VET through the experiences and perspectives of teachers directly involved in the process. It is contended that their views are essential in seeking to understand the relevance, quality, and sustainability of Australia’s approach to transnational VET. The findings show that five situational factors had the most influence on these teachers’ ability to maintain Australian curriculum standards in another country: (a) information, (b) resource, (c) material, (d) institutional, and (e) student readiness. These factors were manifested quite differently across national and cultural contexts. Thus, teachers faced different forms of dissonance between the intentions of the curriculum and what was understood and supported by stakeholders in each situation. As a consequence of these situational factors, and within their scope of decision-making, teachers took on the role of developers in the enactment of the curriculum, informed by three distinct phases: (a) assessment, (b) deliberation, and (c) curriculum remaking. Teachers reported engaging in these phases to resolve the tension between the expectation to maintain Australian standards and meeting their students’ needs. In the process, they recontextualised their ideas of curriculum quality when they came to the realisation that they could not enact an Australian VET curriculum in another country with fidelity as such enactment was, by varying degrees, impracticable, irrelevant, and unenforceable. Consequently, through their deliberations, these teachers became the curriculum-makers. They remade the curriculum to increase its relevance, learnability, and attainability for students through its enactment. The outcomes of these strategies were shown to be not always consistent with the intentions of the curriculum. Moreover, the quality and relevance of the materials they developed was, in many instances, hampered by a lack of local knowledge. These findings suggest that there is a need for supporting an extended scope of the teachers’ role in negotiating with local stakeholders to develop a relevant curriculum and its measures of quality in context. The provision of customised professional development, along with material support and implementation guidelines, is also essential if such teachers are to fulfil this role. Additionally, closer monitoring of curriculum implementation by the Australian regulator would not only hold teachers accountable to, but would also legitimise, the decisions they make in another country. Such efforts may well strengthen the relevance, quality, and sustainability of these transnational educational provisions and also make transparent the worth of Australian VET qualifications obtained by students internationally.