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| Keynote speeches |
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Prof. Dr. (Eng) Dayantha Wijeyesekera
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Technical Education in Sri Lanka – Past, present and future, by Prof. Dr. (Eng) Dayantha Wijeyesekera
In the first presentation, Prof. Dayantha Wijeyesekera gave an introductory view of TVET in Sri Lanka. He at first outlined the historical phases of the technical education from the early times, covering the colonial period, craft schools, technical colleges up to the recent past. After this he focused on the present situation with respect to the organizational and ministerial changes as well as technical teacher training and curriculum development. He characterised the various institutions and their roles in the TVET sector, including ministries, private engagements and NGOs. Concerning the policy issues he introduced some measures for improving the TVET in Sri Lanka and matched them to the industry’s needs, among others Sri Lanka’s “vision 2010”, the “National Policy and Action Plan for the Development of Technical Education” and the recently implemented “National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) Framework”. Prof. Wijeyesekera finally analysed the future trends of TVET and gave some significant inputs for discussions at the workshop for the development of technical education and technical teacher education in Sri Lanka. He pointed out an urgent need to rationalize TVET in the country to make it more attractive, effective and productive. Last but not the least, education of TVET teacher should be carried out at undergraduate, post-graduate and Professional levels. | |
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Prof. Dr. Felix Rauner
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Professionalism in TVET – Teacher education and practice, by Prof. Dr. Felix Rauner
Prof. Felix Rauner gave the second keynote speech. He started with a discussion of the “academic drift” phenomenon, which is supported by several countries’ politics and documented for example in the OECD statistics. Using the examples of China and Australia he pointed out the problematic aspects of this development: after completing their academic education people have to be retrained for vocational occupations in order to get a job in a national economy, which usually only can absorb about 15% of academically trained workforce. Rauner associated this phenomenon with the “dramatic shortage of TVET experts who are able to contribute not only to a high quality vocational education and training but also to the development of the TVET structures and a developed TVET research”, promoting innovation in national education systems facing global economic competition. To tackle this problem he suggests “TVET teacher professionalization against the stigmatization of TVET”, which has to cover the Master level in order to build up reproductive systems of TVET research and development at the national and global level. The core topic of this academic discipline has to be the “work-process-knowledge” related to the respective occupational field as opposed to the content of related-by-name traditional academic disciplines.
The full text can be downloaded here. |
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Updated Thursday, January 01, 2004 |
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