Welcome to the New Journal

Abstract

Welcome to Vocations and Learning: Studies in vocational and professional learning a truly interdisciplinary and independent journal that seeks to inform the fields of vocational and professional education. This journal focuses on two related concepts: Vocations, those practices that have personal and/or cultural significance, and learning, the processes of individual change and the remaking and transformation of those practices that arise through that learning. The ambition for Vocations and Learning is to make significant contributions to scholarship about vocations and learning, particularly as they apply to the fields of vocational and professional education, and to impact upon theory, policy and practice in these fields. The journal has a particular emphasis on those vocational practices that comprise paid occupations, their enactment and learning. This includes considerations of what constitutes work, occupations, working life and how individuals learn about working life, particular occupations and secure the capacities required for engaging in their chosen vocational practice, and the ongoing development of those capacities across their working lives, including transitions within and across different kinds of occupational practice. These considerations seem equally pertinent to the range of paid occupations, regardless of their being labelled as ‘trade’, ‘skilled’, ‘professional’, ‘para-professional’ work. Qualitatively, there seems to be little difference in the qualities of forms of knowledge required to participate in this range of occupations. Consequently, for these reasons, the contributions to and deliberations within this journal are held to be equally applicable to fields of practice labelled vocational and professional education. However, considerations of vocations and learning also extend to those vocational practices that are not paid, yet which constitute activities that are personally and/or culturally significant. These kinds of vocations reflect many of the qualities and Vocations and Learning (2008) 1:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s12186-007-9005-7