Developing Vocational Expertise

Principles and issues in vocational education

John Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

An ambitious book with a number of excellent chapters. It will stand out in the broad field of vocational education and training for its strong basis in the research literature. Professor Michael Young, London Institute of Education Developing Vocational Expertise offers a systematic foundation for vocational education and training. Drawing on current research, it provides a theoretical basis for teachers and trainers to develop instructional strategies.The contributors emphasise the importance of considering learning in context. They examine the core areas of literacy, numeracy, information literacy, problem-solving and creativity, as well as newer areas of instruction: flexible learning and guided learning.Each chapter takes a structured approach to developing core sets of knowledge and skills for work. Within each area of expertise, recent theoretical and research developments are outlined, and the implications for curriculum development, teaching and learning are explained. Teachers and trainers are encouraged to select an appropriate combination of approaches to suit the particular needs of their students and circumstances. Developing Vocational Expertise is an essential resource for students in vocational and occupational education, and will also interest technical and further education teachers and industry trainers.

Part I Vocational Expertise and its Development

1 Expertise for the workplace

John Stevenson

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explains important characteristics of human capacities, developed through experience and commonly called expertise. argued that vocational expertise:

• arises socially and consists of a contextualised, normative capacity-to-do;
• constructs and draws upon a meaningfulness that connects such doing with other kinds of individually constructed and shared meanings;
• connects problems encountered in workplaces with other individual and societal pursuits; and
• transforms itself in response to engagement and experience.

The chapter is structured as follows. Firstly, concepts of expertise are examined, followed by an outline of how different kinds of knowing can be differentiated. Secondly, the range of different kinds of meaning and their interrelationships are examined. Meaning is seen to be related to doing, the field of activity, practice, vocation and others’ constructions of meaning. Thirdly, these ideas of expertise as facility with meaning are examined in relation to various psychological concepts of expertise. Finally, the various ideas advanced in the chapter are brought together in a summary of the nature of expertise.

The chapter provides a basis for addressing economic and vocational education challenges and for exploring curriculum development and educational delivery implications for contemporary vocational education in Chapter 2. It also provides an introduction to the examination of various abstractions of important kinds of capacities in Part II of the book: literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, creativity, computer literacy and values.

CONCEPTS OF EXPERTISE

I will call expertise, at the outset, the ability to do something well— better than others just starting out on the undertaking. What constitutes doing something well is a social construct. Firstly, expertise is relative to others—one is regarded as expert if one can do things better than others can. Secondly, it is determined by what people in various groups would judge as expert. Expertise can refer to all walks of life. For instance, it can refer to occupational undertakings or undertakings in life more generally—for example, an expert plumber, gardener, public speaker or bike-rider. When referring to work, expertise sometimes refers to whole occupations such as an expert lawyer, motor mechanic or politician. It is also used to refer to aspects of occupations—for example an expert decision-maker or negotiator.

In all these cases, what counts as expertise is socially determined. Thus, in the building industry, there would be a consensus on what constituted good carpentry, and this would vary somewhat across communities, depending on the histories of the communities, their locations, the kinds of homes being built and the equipment and materials being used. This would also apply to undertaking medical surgery, playing the piano and solving physics problems. In everyday language, various terms are used for expertise. For instance, some homeless people are seen to be ‘street-smart’. People can be seen in positive terms like efficient, skilled, capable, gifted, clever or excellent. At the same time, a progression in expertise is usually apparent with practice. So an expert car driver can drive a car much better than someone just learning can—the car is driven automatically, fluidly, with confidence, without attention to all the sub-skills involved, and with precision; and unexpected problems that arise can be handled. An expert architect can design a new building better than a new architect can—quickly, without recourse to multiple schematics, taking the various factors into account, overcoming design problems and complexities in the brief with ease, and creating an original design. Often expertise is so automated that it cannot easily be described.

Thus various ideas of expertise are culturally and situated. At different times and in different places, acknowledgment of expertise has consisted of acknowledging capacities as varied as:

• having superior memory;
• being able to execute an action skilfully;
• being able to generate convincing arguments;
• being able to solve new problems;
• being able to innovate;
• being able to make good judgements;
• having higher status in a community, and so on.

The focus on one or more of the various characteristics of expertise has depended on the culture (e.g. modern or indigenous), the setting (e.g. in the workplace or in school), and the time (e.g. during times of economic crisis or times of plenty).

Various theoretical ideas about expertise are aimed at elaborating such questions as:

• What do we mean by doing something well?
• What enables an individual to do something well?
• Why does this capacity improve with practice?
• Is this capacity confined to a specific field, or is it general?
• Can the capacity be learned, and how?
• Where is the capacity located?

In this chapter, the capacity to do something well, or expertise, seen as being derived from meaning. That is, an expert is regarded someone who has considerable facility with meanings and their interconnections. An expert derives this facility from many experiences, connecting the various meanings that the experiences offer, as well meanings that others construct on those experiences. Expertise is being able to access and utilise the rich connections among meanings that enable an expert to perform well on routine tasks and to work out ways to solve creative and other problems.

EXPERTISE AS FACILITY WITH MEANING

In understanding what constitutes expertise, it is important to recognise what constitutes meaning. Here the Deweyan (Dewey 1966 [1916]) idea of meaning as the understanding derived from personally significant experience is taken as the primary idea of meaning. In his work, Dewey saw the object of learning as developing the capacity to engage in appropriate practice based on experience—where appropriate practice was practice seen by the individual as related to intention in pursuit of vocation. That is, Dewey connected meaningfulness to the extent to which knowing grows out of some question of concern to the learner, adds meaning and enables accomplishment of purposes. He regarded experience as the basis for constructing meaning and learning how to interpret new situations. For Dewey, experiences in pursuit of vocation provided the richest source of meaning, where vocation was seen as any calling of personal significance, irrespective of whether it was paid work. This idea of meaning combines the concepts of sense and meaning used in Russian psychology (Leont’ev 1981 [1959]; Wertsch 1981), where sense denotes personal significance to the individual, and meaning denotes comprehension of the shared collective historical understanding captured in language and in other social artefacts.

According to Ryle (1949), meaning can be of two forms: knowing-that (knowing that something is the case, such as that the sky is blue) and knowing-how (knowing how to secure a goal—for example, how to juggle, ride a bike, swim or make jokes). According to Ryle, the meaning involved in being able to do things does not rely on some counterpart knowledge-that. Rather, it is a distinctly different kind of meaning in itself. We simply know how to do things, deriving this capacity from experience, with practice. While subsequent authors have drawn upon this distinction, they have usually focused on knowledge-that, as though it were more fundamental or important than knowledge-how. For instance, the theoretical work in universities, expressed as knowledge-that, is often seen to be higher—or more important or fundamental—than the knowledge-how of skilled trades. Indeed, the knowledge-how of skilled trades is often put down in verbal descriptions in order for it to be accredited.

Moreover, meaningful experience seems to be of many kinds (Phenix 1964), and the meanings may not all lend themselves to expression in terms of language or in other symbolic forms. Following Phenix, the ways in which we construct meaning—how we understand our experiences—can be thought of in six main ways. Firstly, meaning may be in the form of symbolics—language, mathematics, gestures and rituals. Symbolic meaning is especially important in itself and in communicating other kinds of meaning. It is also important in opening up meaning constructed in other ways to inspection and evaluation (Polanyi 1969a). A second realm of meaning is empirics, scientific ways of understanding experience—for example, in terms of factual descriptions, generalisations and theoretical formulations. The meaning of scientific academic work, over centuries, has been captured in the language of texts and mathematical formulae. A third realm is esthetics, the various arts including literature: these are also powerful in communicating meaning. A fourth is ethics, or moral meanings. A fifth is synoetics, which is sometimes called personal knowing or tacit knowing (Polanyi 1969a, 1969b [1958], 1983). It is direct awareness of concrete experience. The direct, personal significance of synoetic meaning is like Leont’ev’s idea of sense. The sixth area of meaning is synoptics, referring to meanings that are comprehensively integrated, such as history religion and philosophy. According to Phenix, one can try to connect different kinds of meaning—for instance, through symbolics.

There are other views of the distinctive forms that meaning can take. For instance, Hirst (1974) separates forms of knowing differently (as Mathematics, Physical Sciences, History, Religion, Literature and the Fine Arts, Philosophy and Morals). A more recent work (Gardner 1983) distinguishes multiple intelligences: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinaesthetic and personal. This work is based on reviewing evidence from studies of ‘prodigies, gifted individuals, brain-damaged patients, idiots savants, normal children, normal adults, experts in different lines of work, and individuals from different cultures’ (Gardner 1983, p. 9). Gardner argues more for the multiplicity of intelligences than for the particular set that he advances.

Another important work on understanding the nature of meaning is that of Polanyi, who conceptualised tacit knowledge. This idea that not all meaning can be made explicit in language corresponds with Phenix’s synoetic meaning. However, Polanyi makes the important point that we afford legitimacy tacitly to language and to other ways of constructing and communicating meaning. In this way, Polanyi’ s tacit knowledge is like Leont’ev’ s sense. Phenomena become meaningful when we extend ourselves into them and dwell in them, using physical and other tools to understand them. For Polanyi, the physical and other tools become subsidiary as we focus on the whole and derive meaning tacitly. these processes are like Leont’ev’ s (1981 [1959]) idea of the need for activity in understanding socially constructed meanings, as in language. Such tools may in fact be our ‘frameworks’ of anticipation (Polanyi 1969a, p. 108) (e.g. theoretical frameworks—symbolic frameworks of anticipation). Polanyi called judgement the reconciliation of different ways of knowing—for example, reconciling explicit (codified or symbolic) meaning, the ideas suggested by those codes and direct experience.

Thus both Phenix (1964) and Polanyi (1969a, 1983 [1966]; Polanyi & Prosch 1975) have elaborated the ways in which we can seek to connect meaning and reconcile these different ways of knowing. As for Leont’ev, this involves activity—active engagement which is quate to making the necessary connections. However, it needs to be remembered that, while we can recognise different kinds of meaning, we should not confuse one with the other, or give more value to one over the other. In the end, according to Polanyi (1969a, 1983) [1966], all legitimacy comes from tacit meaning.

RELATIONSHIPS OF MEANING

If expertise is facility with meanings and their interconnections, then we need to know more about the relationships of meanings. Meanings here are seen to be related to their function and purpose; to one’s sense vocation; to the experience/situation from which they were derived; other meanings that one can derive from that and similar experiences/ situations, and to the meanings that others can derive from/contribute to that experience/situation. These relationships are outlined below.

Meaning and doing

Firstly, meaning is related to doing, where doing refers to direct expe-rience—for example, in undertaking a task (hammering a nail, building a house, feeding a child, writing a journal article, playing chess, ancing a budget), which may or may not involve solving a problem (in any field, such as personal, chess, physics, planning, composition, managerial, financial). Doing involves subjective and intersubjective engagement, overcoming the detached separation of one from what one is experiencing. Meaning in doing is concrete rather than abstract, and specific rather than general. Dewey gave primacy to active doing as the cornerstone of meaning:

The knowledge that comes first to persons, and that remains most deeply ingrained is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read, write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely . .. When education . .. fails to recognize that primary or initial subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving the use of body and the handling of material, the subject matter of instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand (Dewey 1966 [1916], p.184).

Dewey saw meaning as arising from and residing in the capacity to do things. This relation of meaning to doing applies to activity whether it is generative or reproductive—one has a capacity-to-do whether it be the routine teaching of a class or the design of a new building. We seek to understand experience in order to handle new experiences. He saw meaning as conscious and continuous with doing, morality, intention, judgement of worth and criticality. He regarded various organised bodies of information (e.g. theory) as arbitrary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: VOCATIONAL EXPERTISE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
• PART II: DEVELOPING VOCATIONAL EXPERTISE FOR KEY PURSUITS
• PART III: EMERGING CHALLENGES IN INSTRUCTIONAL DELIVERY
• Index