This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The volume presents papers on vocational education, project-based learning and science didactic approaches, illustrating with sample cases, and with a special focus on Central Asian states. Thematically embedded in the area of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), the book examines the following main topics: project-based learning (PBL), specific didactics with a linkage to food technologies and laboratory didactics, media and new technologies in TVET, evaluation of competencies including aspects of measurement, examination issues, and labour market and private sector issues in TVET, and research methods with a focus on empirical research and the role of scientific networks. It presents outcomes from TVET programmes at various universities, colleges, and teacher training institutes in Central Asia.

Teachers and Teaching in Vocational and Professional Education introduces a critical understanding of how teachers deliver occupational or vocational courses at various academic levels. Including wider coverage of work-related programmes and based on empirical research, this book uses the term occupation-related to refer to programmes spanning several academic levels and education sectors, including the further and higher education sectors. The book disassociates the English context of work-related studies, where issues of the academic-vocational division and socio-cultural dimensions have hampered critical investigations of this under-researched topic. Also, it offers a conceptual framework from the perspectives of teachers in their teaching and work-related settings derived from the understanding and development of Bernstein’s recontextualization process. Teachers and Teaching in Vocational and Professional Education will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates who are engaged in the study of education and occupation-related programmes. The programme areas include accounting, dental hygiene, equine studies, fashion and textiles, health and social care, medical training of clinicians and emergency medicine, and travel and tourism.

This book deals with teacher training for vocational education and training. In individual chapters next to the positions of relevant international organizations, donors and development banks, it also covers selected countries in their ways of shaping of Technical Vocational Education and Training and teacher training. The structure of the book aims at two objectives: To outline positions of important stakeholders of the international Technical Vocational Education and Training policies and international cooperation in TVET teacher training. To discuss the current status of Technical Vocational Education and Training and teacher training in selected countries, from developing countries, countries with emerging economies to industrialized countries. The book is meant to create a platform that supports a reference concept within international cooperation for the further development of Technical Vocational Education and Training and teacher training up to a higher quality and performance.

This book discusses what constitutes vocational education as well as its key purposes, objects, formation and practices. In short, it seeks to outline and elaborate the nature of the project of vocational education. It addresses a significant gap in the available literature by providing a single text that elaborates the scope and diversity of the sector, its key objectives (i.e. vocations and occupations), its formation and development as an education sector, and the scope of its purposes and considerations in the curriculum. The volume achieves these objectives by discussing and defining the concept of vocational education as being that form of education that seeks to advise individuals about, prepare them for, and further develop their capacities to perform the kinds of occupations that societies require and individuals need to participate in—and through which they often come to define themselves. In particular, it discusses the distinctions between occupations as a largely social fact and vocations as being a socially shaped outcome assented to by individuals. As people identify closely with the kinds of occupations they engage in, the standing of, and the effectiveness of vocational education is central to individuals’ well-being, competence and progress. Ultimately, this book argues that the provision of vocational education needs to realise important personal and social goals.

An OECD study of vocational education and training designed to help countries make their systems more responsive to labour market needs. It expands the evidence base, identifies a set of policy options and develops tools to appraise VET policy initiatives.

Across the globe, vocational education and training is characterised by a number of over-arching trends, including the increasing use of technology, the growing importance of information and communications systems, and changes to national demographics. At the interface between the education and training system and the world of work, VET faces the challenge of tackling these changes, of making a constructive contribution to solving the problems posed by the transition from education to employment, and of ensuring that the next generation has the skills it – and the economy – needs. This volume comprises thirty individual contributions that together add up to a comprehensive overview of the current situation in vocational education and training, its strengths and weaknesses, and its prospects. VET experts from Canada, the USA, India, China, Japan and Korea, as well as from a number of European countries, focus on their national context and how it fits in to the bigger picture. The contributions combine theoretical discussions from various strands of VET research with evidence from country case studies and examples from current practice.