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This dissertation is a study of women's stories of learning in Vocational Education and Training (VET). / Equity strategies designed to include the interests of women students within the public Vocational Education and Training (VET) system in Australia are claimed to have been successful. Women make up almost half the current VET student population and an increasing majority of these women are mature aged. This thesis argues that VET's 'inclusivity' discourse elides the importance of the experiences, skills and knowledges of everyday life in shaping women's learning. Application of a combination of life skills, employment skills and sense of self indicates that in the VET environment an alternate type of vocational learning is operating. It is evident that women are becoming prepared for life as well as for work, and better informed to access opportunities across the spectrum of social participation. Stories that begin from the perspective of women's everyday experience of the VET system provide opportunities for understanding how women's experiences have been misrepresented in VET research and policy. / This study has found that women negotiate their 'eveyday' into their VET experience. Women understand vocational learning as a contextualised process in which the past and present, the family, the personal and the social, all play a role. Really useful learning and outcomes acknowledge this rich contextualisation of experience, producing learning that is enabling and exciting as well as skilling. Women's responses reveal that issues such as access and participation are understood differently to VET's framing of these concepts. In addition, the women offer rich descriptions of a vocational pedagogy that takes into to account the contexts of these women's lives. / Thesis (PhDEducation)--University of South Australia, 2008.

This thesis is based on a South Australian case study exploring the effectiveness of a management development project during a time of substantial change in the Department of Employment, Training and Further Education (referred to hereafter as DETAFE) a South Australian government vocational educational agency. The project took place between mid 1992 and December 1994. Like most government agencies, since the 1970s, DETAFE has been subject to major changes in the way governments have developed policies and espoused values about the role of government and the public service.

Education and training, in Australia, has experienced unprecedented levels of change in recent times. Government educational policies are now dominated by economic discourses that point to the need for all educational systems to contribute to economic development, by increasing the knowledge and skill levels of the present and future workforce. The twin discourses of new vocationalism and economic rationalism have now transformed Australian educational systems. But the effects of this transformation on the identities of teachers working in this changed environment have not been adequately examined. This study examines the impact of government policies on teachers' identities by investigating a particular group of teachers working in Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Australia. The study has chosen teacher identity as its focus, because much of recent research has involved investigating the new knowledge and skills required of teachers working in this changed environment. However, this can be seen as making an overly instrumental means-ends connection between teachers' knowledge and skills and the professional practice of teaching. It fails to appreciate that when teachers are asked to 'do things differently' in their everyday teaching practices they are also being called on to become different teachers. That is, to have different understandings of their role in education, to have different relationships with students, to conceptualise their professional and vocational knowledge differently. In short, to change their identity. In order to investigate the impact of the policies and discourses of VET on TAFE teachers' identities the study locates itself, in part, within the interpretivist tradition of social research and uses the methods and methodologies of critical policy analysis, phenomenology and ethnography to investigate the research questions. It then uses a number of diverse theoretical perspectives to challenge and interrogate the interpretation made of the data gathered. The study undertakes a critical analysis of contemporary VET policies utilising a 'policy -as-discourse' approach to the analysis and draws on the methods of phenomenology and ethnography in order to generate situated discourses that are often overlooked in critical policy analysis. The study also uses the perspective offered by poststructuralism, which foregrounds the power of discourse in the formation of both the social world and individual identity. The conclusions reached suggest that TAFE teacher identity is an ambiguous discursive achievement constructed out of the multiple, historical organisational and individual discourses that all circulate in teachers' life worlds. These discourses now interact in complex and contradictory ways with the contemporary policies and discourses of vocational education and training resulting in teachers experiencing a degree of doubt and uncertainty concerning their identification with the new institution of TAFE.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Technology, Sydney, 1999.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Author's doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1922, but not published as a thesis. / At head of title: State of New York Military Training Commission, Bureau of Vocational Training.

Thesis--University of Toronto. / Bibliography: p. 122-123.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Bern.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1980. / Typescript.