Vocational education and training and conceptions of the self

Abstract

In this article it is suggested that many of those responsible for the development of Australian vocational education and training (VET) policy, and the teachers and trainers responsible for implementing education and training within the prescribed policy framework have an inadequate conception of persons (or selves). It is suggested that VET policy, and practice deriving as it does from these inadequate behaviourist conceptions is, thus, less successful and less moral than it should be. A number of conceptions of the self and of persons are given brief exposition in the article, and the concept of a socially extended self is supported. This concept of the person, it is argued, is incompatible with current competency-based training approaches that characterise VET policy imperatives and, to some extent, VET practice. VET practitioners, it is suggested, can and should develop richer conceptions of their students, particularly conceptions that provide an account of persons as social beings who may internally be multiplied along a temporal axis.