Summary

The first section of this contribution provides examples from the early stages of comparative

research and documentation activities on questions of vocational teacher education and

professionalism. In the subsequent section a number of more recent trends from different

relevant research fields (comparative research; teacher education and professionalisation and

general research on the professions) is being summarised very briefly and put into connection

with international research on vocational teacher education and their profession. In the third

section some remarks on research needs are being derived and their connection to questions of

the development of European standards will be discussed.

Past research and future perspectives in terms of international research on vocational teachers' education and professionalisation

A short history of research and documentation measures1

As to my knowledge the first existing work is a follow up of two conferences, one of which

held in1956 in Geneva by the ILO and the OECD and the other one dated from 1962 hosted

by the OECD at the German Institute of Higher education for educational research in

Frankfurt, nowadays known as the DIPF. Those two conferences had a Handbook as an

outcome which gathers information on the Training of Vocational Teachers in 13 countries

(ILO 1964). The country reports submitted to the co-ordination team were all provided by the

respective public authorities of the participating states (see overview, Table 1).

The volume is being opened with a summarising section which deals with recommendations

derived from the comparative overview on the different teacher training pathways (one week,

four weeks and three months up to four years of special training) and correspondingly

different entry qualifications to become a teacher (skilled worker; technician and university

degree).

In light of the various ways of training the study comes to the conclusion, that there can’t be

standards on how the necessary qualifications should be achieved but rather what kind of

qualifications should be recommended for vocational teachers. As this is symptomatic for

most of the past research outcomes a summary of the results of this first study can be found in

Table 2.

1 I will limit myself to studies which explicitly deal with comparative or international questions of vocational teacher training and their professional reality. Hence, studies comparing teachers and teacher training in general are not within the scope of this section, such as those recently carried out by the OECD (see Hopkins and Stern  1996) or studies which compare different systems of Vocational Education or other aspects than teacher education, training and professionalism (such as Lauterbach 1997ff. or the Cedefop Country Studies).

Some of the publications also try to develop transparency by making up comparison-based

typologies of VET-Teaching profiles (e.g. UNESCO 1977). In this detailed study for example

there are four basic types of teaching profiles being distinguished:

"General technical teacher: a person teaching theoretical subjects and/or the theoretical aspects of element technical subjects usually at the lower secondary level.

Vocational teacher: a person teaching theoretical subjects and/or the theoretical aspects of practical training courses in secondary educational institutions in which skilled workers are educated and trained for occupations in the trades, crafts, industry, agriculture and/or commerce. In some countries., the vocational teacher is responsible for practical workshop training as well.

Workshop teacher: a person teaching the practical skills required by technicians and skilled workers in school workshops usually on the upper secondary level, but also in the first cycle of secondary education or on the post-secondary level. Normally, the technical or vocational teacher to whose courses the practical training activities relate co-ordinates the work of the workshop teacher.

Technical teacher: a person teaching general and special technical theory in educational institutions on the upper secondary or post-secondary level the aim of which is to educate and train technicians. Usually the technical teacher is responsible for both classroom and laboratory work, but may also supervise practical workshop training to the extent required in order to integrate the theoretical and practical aspects of technical education. He may be assisted in laboratory work by appropriately qualified laboratory technicians. (UNESCO 1977, 19-20)

The typologies being used in other studies are quite similar to this one. Usually they are

comprised of a combination of the necessary qualification to enter the teaching profession on

the one hand and the bundle tasks of the teachers on the other. The mentioned UNESCO

study for example introduces another parallel typology for teacher education programmes.

Those typology-based approaches to the topic might be helpful to gain a first orientation when

entering the research field. However, they - at least in their exclusive application - neglect

important contextual dimensions of the reality of vocational teaching as an activity and

professional task which is taking place in the particular framework of a countries' or regions'

educational and socio-economic system. Table 1 provides an overview on all the past

comparative studies on vocational teachers. In the following section I will not paraphrase the

outcomes of the more recent studies but rather put them into relation with relevant general

developments from different research branches.

Recent developments in research of relevance for international studies on vocational teachers

Traps in comparative research on education and training

In a project with Cedefop on the state of the art in Comparative Research on Vocational

Education within the EU we made use of a 2x2 matrix (see Grollmann, Sellin 1999, Hörner

1997) which makes an analytical distinction between four basic purposes or underpinning

ideas of comparative or international research. The following paragraph provides examples of

possible research questions directly related to VET teachers clustered by this matrix:

- research which would look for the particular cultural understanding and conception of

the vocational educators' role in their respective educational and socio-economic

embeddedness would be called ideographic;

- research which looks at the very fundamental laws and principles of the functions and

processes of vocational education and which makes use of the empirical evidence in

different countries, regions, cultural spheres as an empirical knowledge base of

variable interrelations between dependent and independent variables2 would be called

nomothetic. A possible example could be general statements on the vocational

teachers' role based on research on the interconnection of the basic values and beliefs

of the particular societies and their vocational teaching profession;

- the so-called "best practice" research (melioristic in this connection), such as the

transnational documentation of exemplary practices in different countries with the aim

to disseminate them to and adapt them in other national environments;

- all the activities of research and documentation which are working on a common

understanding of the VET teaching profession - for example the search for standards

could be called universalistic.

This distinction is based on the idea that international research can be clustered by asking if it

looks for the rather specific or particular (of a culture; region etc.) or for universally

observable trends on the one hand and on the other hand if it is rather academically,

theoretically oriented or if it is being carried out with a rather practical aim. According to this

cluster most of the research which has been carried out with a comparative or international

perspective on VET teachers directly would be subordinated to the practical side of the matrix

and could hence be called universalistic or melioristic.

There are other relevant branches of research, such as comparative studies on school-to-work

transition to mention only one example, which are traditionally rooted in sociology and with it

2 In a rather positivistic tongue

on the rather academic side, but which can also provide important information on teachers'

professionalisation in a transnational perspective as this information might help or even be

necessary to understand the particular problems of the VET Profession in a specific country.

It seems to be important in this connection that traditional segmentations between so-called

applied research and documentation and "pure" or "academic" research can be got away from.

Research being carried out with the aim to further "professionalise" VET teaching structures

and processes on a transnational level has to widen its perspective to gain mutual

understanding:

“[...] comparative social science deals with putting relationships into relation.” (Schriewer 1992);

an author rather stemming from the academic branch of the discipline of comparative

education puts it. Comparative research with a too narrow perspective is always at the risk to

consider things the same, which are different.

I will give an example: In a comparative project on the professional reality of vocational

teachers the author is currently involved in, research was carried out in Denmark, the US and

Germany. Comparing the first two countries one can see that the formal requirements and the

teacher training necessary to enter the VET teaching arena are similar in length and nature. In

both countries a certain range of trade experience is required and has to be added with some

in-service training during the first years of the work as teacher as minimum entry

requirements.3

When we look at the schools the teachers are working in, the typical model in Denmark is a

comprehensive vocational college, which offers different programmes in technical fields,

mainly on the secondary but also on the post-secondary level.

Academic and vocational Instruction would be provided in the same institution under the

same roof.

In the United States there do exist two basic types of vocational schools in the secondary

system: one would be similar to the Danish type: a comprehensive vocational high school or

career centre with academic and vocational courses under one roof, the other one the

vocational area centre, which would provide only the vocational instruction of the

programmes for the different "home-high-schools" ("second type", see Figure 1). This type of

school is being attended by the students only once or twice a week for the vocational

instruction, whereas they would receive their academic lessons in their different home-high-

3 In Denmark vocational teacher training is taking place in a special Vocational Teacher Education Training Institute, whereas in the US. the programmes ar being offered at their Universities. Of course there are a lot of other differences, too, beteween the two systems of Vocational Education.

schools. In those cases, the staff of the vocational school is almost merely set up with

vocational teachers. What is interesting about that?

There are quite similar postulations in both countries in terms of reform programmatics: the

integration of vocational and academic learning, individualised instruction etc. Those goals

usually imply a well reflected co-ordination and co-operation between different teachers, e.g.

those for academic and vocational subjects. However, this straightforward example shows

how different the framework for the realisation of those issues can be in the framework of

different educational systems. There are also lot of similar traps reported for comparative

research on teachers in general and their education (e.g. Popkewitz 2000).

Another remarkable example which is quite relevant for the domain of vocational education

and the professionalisation of its teachers can be drawn from the sociological international

comparative research scene: One of the important topics in connection with the

professionalisation of teachers is the question about the content of teaching. The research on

“Industrial Cultures” (Ruth 1995) has shown that there quite different cultural conceptions

and practices with regard to the organisation of production and the shape of technological

artefacts.4 Hence, more so than for example in the didactics of sciences such as mathematics,

it is much more difficult to develop a universal curricular and didactical basis which reflected

in the different modes of organising this content in the varying teacher education programmes

(see also the contributions by Toth, Varga and Gombocz; Gombocz in Toth 1995). This

problem is reinforced by the different functions VET takes over for the labour market as well

in different modes of career building and identity formation (e.g. Drexel 1995; Evans,

Heinz 1993).

Recent developments with regard to the theory and research on the teaching profession

The (comparative) research on the professions is historically rooted in functionalist theoretical

approaches to society and social theory (Freidson 1994). It was one of the main research

interests during this phase - i.e. the beginning of the 20th century - to describe and analyse the

distinct features of special occupational groups which have evolved within the process of the

development from the corporative state over the burgeois to the industrialised society and

which took over new emerging societal functions. Generally, those approaches collected a

sum of indicators empirically derived from studies on the traditional professions (such as

lawyers, doctors) which made them distinguishable from other skilled work. Typical

indicators which can be found in those approaches are:

4 That this is also true for business and economics can be derived from the work of Schefold 1995 and his reception of the term "Wirtschaftsstil" which was marked the historic school of econnomics.

- high, usually academic qualification on the basis of scientific knowledge.

- autonomy and professional self-regulation.

- societal influence as Experts on their respective field (here: vocational education)

- professional field must be considered as a basic pillar of the society

- practice derived from a systematic body of knowledge and the reproduction of this knowledge

- professional associations usually combining the academic as well as the occupational interests of the specific occupational group

- societal monopoly of the profession fulfil those tasks, but the individual freedom of

the client to select the respective professional individual

- higher-than average payment

(see the summary of Fasshauer 1997)

Consequently this approach was also used for the teaching profession. A lot of sociologists,

then, came to the conclusion that teaching can at most be called a semi-profession (Etzioni

1969). Most of the past comparative approaches (see Table 1) to vocational education as a

profession seem to be deeply rooted in the indicator- or attribute-approach to the profession5 -

albeit to a different extent. What comes out finally is rather a juxtaposition of different

existing systems of VET teacher education and teaching profiles. Those approaches often

ignore important relationships between dimensions which strongly shape the teaching reality,

similar to the example given above.

The inadequacy of the traditional sociological paradigm to professions has also led to the fact

that there are a lot of approaches from the educational discipline to teachers' professio-

nalisation and their education which are not making use of the term "profession" anymore or

change the conceptualisation with regard to the specific purposes.

In addition, there has been drawn more and more attention to the rather individual side of

professional agency6 and its prerequisites, namely the skills, knowledge and competencies a

"professional" teacher needs. In this connection there have to be mentioned approaches which

stress the importance of what the American Educator Lee Shulman called "pedagogical

content knowledge" (Shulman 1984). This is especially relevant for vocational teaching as

that has to deal with the following unique problem in terms of content:

"[...]the professionalisation of the education of vocational teachers for the teaching of non-professional skills and knowledge."(Bannwitz, Rauner 1993, 10-11; emphasis and translation by the author)."

5 On different approaches to the professions see also Robson in this dossier6 This is also true for contemporary sociological approaches to the professions, which more and more take into account the specific relationship between the client and the professional (see for example Oevermann XXX)

Shulman proposes that for the development of occupational competence of teachers there are

different types of knowledge. The one he labels "pedagogical content knowledge" is the

knowledge which enables the teacher to find out the best mode of conveying a specific

content to a particular individual person. This knowledge can best be acquired by the study of

pedagogical cases, he argues. Here, he comes full circle with the underpinning ideas of

professions, because he also mentions the tradition of law education (a traditional course of

professional education) which has made use of case-studies since its existence. The shift to a

rather micro-level or interaction-based model of professional agency can also be seen in

branches of the general sociological research (e.g. Oevermann 1996) the professions and goes

in line with the often stated international trend of a pressure to individualise educational

programmes.

Another development we can see in the research on teacher education is that it increasingly

merges with the perspective of school-development7. The prominent idea of "reflective

practice" brought into the discussion by D. Schön (Schön 1983) or books such as the

"Meaning of Educational Change" by the Canadian Educator Michael Fullan (Fullan 1999)

are only a few examples of this trend. What they have in common is that they are also in

favour of a rather process and interaction oriented model of Teachers' professionalisation

which sees the teacher as an individual learner as well as a member of collective learning

processes and the development of socially shared cognitions and conceptualisations. This

research also suggests fundamental implications for the shaping of the institutional

environment of teaching, namely the schools and their relationship to the surrounding

community (see the summarising article by Hopkins and Stern 1996).

A lot of those recent trends were reflected in the design as well as in the outcomes of the

LEONARDO-project EUROPROF, which aimed to develop a pan-European Master-level

qualification for VET-professionals. Beside a huge number of articles surrounding the idea of

common "cornerstones" by members of the project (e.g. Attwell 1997), one of the substantial

outcomes of this project however was the insight that for a pan-European process of

professionalisation of vocational teaching it is an important precondition to get the

involvement of the "professionals" themselves, e.g. through their professional associations.

Another outcome was, that the project showed once again how difficult it is to develop a

common framework or set of standards taking into account the vast differences between the

different ways in which vocational education and training is being organised through Europe.

7 Sometimes this is being criticised because it usually goes in line with the strenghtening of in-service training and the decrease of funds for university teacher education, which is mainly seen as a strategy of de-professionalisation by some researchers.

The development of cornerstones, however, seems to be quite a promising way of finding a

common basis.(Attwell 1997a).

International comparative research on teachers in vocational education and its relationship to the development of standards

The preceding sections have very briefly summarised the development of international

comparative studies on vocational teachers starting from the early sixties. A comprehensive

international or pan-European piece of research which entails all different relevant aspects is

still overdue. A project like this would have to widen its perspective from the pure

aggregation and description of single discrete indicators (which are of course an important

part) to a perspective which takes into account the interrelations between those indicators

themselves as well as to neighbouring domains within the triangle of education and training;

technology and economy and work and employment. With regard to a possible research

design it might be sensible to cluster the field horizontally by rather static aspects, such as

institutional factors, existing professional profiles etc. and vertically by process variables

which take into account the dynamics, such as the relations between different institutions;

institutional changes, innovation modes etc. This scaffold could additionally be fleshed out by

a number of qualitative case-studies. The older research approaches provide useful

information for the horizontal layer, whereas more recent contributions, such as the

EUROPROF cornerstones, provide useful starting points for the vertical layer of such an

endeavour.

The increasing number of relevant "cases" in Shulman's sense going along with the

internationalisation of the educational business could lay an interesting fundament for the

further conceptualisation of the meaning of "professionality" also on the very micro-level, as

long as cases are re-embedded to their cultural or national origins as well as examined on their

potential for innovation transfer.

What could this imply for the development of European standards?

Past research and documentation measures and previous experiences suggest that the

development of standards is quite a challenging task due to the complexity of factors

influencing the actual performance of a profession. This is especially true, when the proposed

standards should be of transnational validity. This is reinforced by current developments in

the field such as individualisation of learning processes, increasing institutional autonomy,

curricular flexibilisation, gaining importance of work-placed learning which lead to a

rethinking of possible role models for vocational and which make the objective of

standardisation even more unclear.

This implies that beside a number of common standards, which in an international or

European setting at first can merely be more than minimum standards, there would have to be

some set of rather process-oriented statements which entail attributes of the profession itself

as well as to the circumstances of their professional agency, such as institutions and relation

to other neighbouring domains.

In one of the German volumes on the problem I found the following sentence:

"A homogenous Profession can only be achieved and maintained when it finds a common set of realistic tasks and a common understanding of its function as well as its significance for the society!"

(Fasshauer 1997, translation by the author)

The standards themselves can only be developed by practitioners or their representatives

themselves, because they have to be build on a basis of shared cognition and mutual

understanding. All different strands of international and comparative research as described in

the first section can be valuable for this process:

"I believe that comparative and historical comparison of the professions needs guidance not by a mere checklist of attributes, but rather by a systematically developed model that eschews over-concrete attributes important only in one historical time and place, instead employing abstract concepts that can embrace a variety of concrete circumstances. Properly articulated into a series of interconnected concepts, such a model can serve as a template to guide the collection and organization of information by students of different professions in both past and present, and in many places . This does not prevent the analysis of unique circumstances and different cultures, while facilitating the discovery of commonalities and their importance. And it could prevent the degeneration of scholarly discourse into a Babel of anecdotes and case studies, and debates that talk past each other." (Freidson 1994).

In the international setting the development of common professional visions has to struggle

with problem of achieving a balance between the necessary abstractness on the one hand,

which makes the statements valid for all the individuals in each of the different contexts they

refer to, and the necessary concreteness on the other, which make them relevant and

meaningful for the individual practitioner. To achieve this, a close co-operation between the

relevant fields of research and the practitioners themselves is indispensable. Forums such as

the TT-Net can play an important part in this connection.

Finally, one important problem remains:

If "life-long learning" takes more and more place at other venues than those genuinely

designed for processes of learning, a lot of professional assistance to learning will be

necessary out of those traditionally tangible institutional settings. Who assures the quality of

this emerging field?

Philipp Grollmann

May 2001

Tables and Figures

Table 1: Chronology of past international research and documentation measures on Vocational TeachersStudy/Publication/Project

Length Region(s) or countries covered Content: Focus/Methodology/Aims/outcomes

ILO 1964 250pp. 13 industrially developed countries country reports by national authorities; comparative synthesis; Recommendations for standards

Geminard 1971 247pp. France; United Kingdom; Germany; Italy

individual study by one author with comparative overview; academic study

Mitter et al. INTERAGLA

country reports à 40pp.

9 industrialised countries from the eastern and western block

descriptive country studies by national researches or team of researchers;

UNESCO 1977 250pp. examples from industrialised countries and developing countries (over 30 altogether)

country reports by national authorities; Questionnaire; two stages; expert opinions; typologies of teachers and trainers and of teacher education institution; knowledge transfer to developing countries

Tarrou 1993 78pp. 10 EU-countries and Norway Working group 3 of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) Focus on in-service education and training; comparative volume based on national reports

Toth 1995 89pp. 8 EU countries and Norway One chapter on comparative questions; based on a questionnaire and the other articles in the Volume

UNEVOC 1997 107pp. different socio-geographic regions Commonwealth; Caribbean; Asian Pacific; Africa; Poland

round table report; contributions by single authors; summarising and comparative introduction

Cedefop 4 Volumes à 130pp.

EU Member States country reports by experts or groups of experts; reciprocal review

EUROPROF Several publications in Journals

14 EU countries national reports on selected topics by the involved researchers; common project cornerstones for collaboration; steps to the development of a European master programme for VET-Professionals

TT Net Website/dossiers

EU Member States case studies and country reports;

EUROFRAME Follow-Up of EUROPROF with the aim of the establishment of a European Master Degree/University Institute; selected country level reports and memorandum will be finished in 2001

Table 2: Outcomes of the ILO Study

Recruitment

Vocational Teachers should be given the same status and the same remuneration commensurate with those accorded to staff in general education;

Not possible to suggest a specific line of training universally applicable

But the following qualifications should be achieved:

Training programme and Content

a). Level of general education should be considerably higher than that acquired by the average vocational school student

b). technical education and scientific instruction corresponding to that of a higher technician

c). considerable practical experience of working conditions, safety measures, ergonomics and the organisation and practices of industrial production and maintenance operations

d). knowledge of philosophy and principles of education as well as general and applied pedagogy: planning training programmes; general and industrial psychology; physiology and sociology; special regard to the youth at work and social institutions of industry;

e) advanced training in the didactic methods of teaching technical subjects with special emphasis on teaching based on experimentation

Because of shortages there should be in-service measures to get those qualifications

Continuing Training

Keeping up-to date with developments of theoretical aspects of their subject; industrial practices and teaching techniques

Measures proposed:

Release for work in industry or special courses

Facilitation of distance learning and participation in conferences

Research

Research should be carried out by teaching staff qualified in the scientific and technical specialisiations

Research should be result of teamwork of persons from industry, education and persons concerned with the theoretical side of the technical subject and the psychology of learning

Measures of co-ordination

Better integration of the theoretical and practical learning has to be gained

Teacher education has to be articulated with other policies of general and technical education

More extensive use of combined training in school workshops which blurs the difference between practice and theoretical teachers

Figure 1: Different types of institutional settings for similar qualified VET-Professionals

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