Work Integrated Learning: Opening Educator Professional Learning and Development in the TVET Sector

Abstract

For the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector to thrive in South Africa, TVET colleges need passionate, professional and appropriately qualified lecturers to educate their students. Yet while many lecturers have the passion for their work, far too few have the academic qualifications or industry experience to make TVET education as valuable an experience as it could be for students (Olowoyo et al. 2020).

Part of the reason for this is historical. At the end of apartheid, the 153 “ethnically defined” vocational colleges were rapidly merged into 50 Further Education and Training (FET) colleges (Wedekind 2016a, 2016b) – the base of our current TVET sector. This caused substantial stress for lecturers at the time (Wedekind et al. 2016). Further disputes between the then Ministries of Education and Labour for control of the colleges resulted in staff insecurity and attrition (Cosser et al. 2011) and a decline of the