Session Information
02 SES 13 B, Learning VI: Identity
Paper Session
Contribution
Despite the importance of dispositional behaviours being a long-standing issue (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000), it is now attracting renewed interest. On June 2016, the European Commission adopted a new and comprehensive Skill Agenda for Europe. Under this new framework, competences are defined as a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes. The novelty is the inclusion of attitudes in the definition of each key competence. At the same time, attitudes are defined as the ‘disposition and mind-sets to act or react to ideas, persons or situations’ (European Commission, 2018). Following Perkins's et al., (2000) seminal work, a disposition concerns not only what people can do but how they tend to invest their capabilities and what they are disposed to do. Some of these traits are for example open-mindedness, reasonableness, curiosity, critical thinking, and readiness.
In the vocational educational field, research has highlighted the need to develop more comprehensive competences that go beyond knowledge-specific domain, such as communication (Kyndt et al., 2014), entrepreneurship (Rocha, 2014) or generic competences (Renta Davids, Van den Bossche, Gijbels, & Fandos Garrido, 2017). While knowledge-specific domain competences are important, research show that generic competences are highly valued among employers (Kyndt et al., 2014) and that social skills are increasingly rewarded by the labour market (Deming, 2015). This poses great challenges to vocational education institutions as attitudes or dispositions are very difficult to teach and assess in predefined learning environments.
In this article, we delve into school-based and work-based supervisors ideas about students’ attitudes development as part of their professional competence. We draw on a second analysis of a set of interviews conducted to study school-company’s collaboration. The participants are 16 school-based supervisors and 5 work-based supervisors affiliated to Health, Industry, Social Services and, Administration. Data were collected through individual semi-structure interviews, transcript and analysed using procedures of applied thematic analysis. Three main categories emerged: 1) the importance of attitudes, 2) attitudes acquisition process, and 3) attitudes impact on assessment. Our data reveal some supervisors’ ideas about how attitudes are developed.
Method
Based on this framework, our paper aims to report on partial results of a research about how school- and work-based supervisors can strengthen cooperation between schools and companies. However, in this paper, we delve into the issue of students’ attitudes as a dimen-sion of the professional competence. The research did not intend to address this issue as a main goal, but it emerged from the data itself as we analysed it. A qualitative methodology was employed to investigate the scope and nature of school- and work-based supervisors' roles. The study draws on semi-structured individual interviews conducted with sixteen school-based supervisors and five work-based supervisors engaged in the traditional scheme of VET programmes in Spain. Following qualitative methodological guidelines (Creswell 2014), we selected a convenient sample. In addition to the professional fields considered and to the two different roles of the participants, our sam-ple is heterogeneous with respect to gender (11 female and 10 males), age (M=45 years old, SD=8 years old) and job tenure (M=15 years, SD=10 years). The interview questions were intended to stimulate narrative and argumentative discourse to allow the participants to express their experiences and views on the object of the study. We defined the same questions to both groups of interviewees (school- and work-based supervi-sors), adapting them to each participant's profile. The interviews lasted between 50 and 70 minutes. All of the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We applied an exploratory approach to the data analysis (Guest et al. 2012). Following this approach, the researchers carefully read the transcripts while identifying keywords, trends, themes, and ideas to help outline the analysis. It involved the following steps: 1) read verbatim transcripts, 2) identify potential themes, 3) compare and contrast themes, identifying structures between them, and 4) build a model while continually validating it against the data (Guest et al. 2012).
Expected Outcomes
Our data shows a great concern among supervisors about students’ attitudinal behaviours in their professional practice and highlights the need to find strategies to teach and assess the attitudinal dimension of the professional competence. This attitudinal dimension of the competences emerge today as key to allow people to develop good-quality jobs and fulfil their potential as active citizens (European Commission, 2018). But how can these new aspects to competences be described and acquired? We observed that all supervisors have a certain concern on the need to work on attitudinal competence, and that although students show good knowledge-specific competences, super-visors argue that sometimes they lack good and positive attitudinal behaviour. Most common-ly demanded attitudinal behaviours are communication with others, taking initiative, collaboration, and professional-related ethical issues. Our data reveal some supervisors ideas about how attitudes are developed. For some of them, gaining the expected attitudes is a matter of maturing. Others believe that by doing the practice module and being involved into a workplace, students would be prompt to develop the expected attitudinal outcomes. Some other school-based supervisors put emphasis on transmitting positive attitudes during the students’ training at the school. It called our atten-tion that for one supervisor, some students would not be able to acquire the right professional attitudes due to personality traits. Finally, we observed that showing the wrong attitudes may have a negative impact on the evaluation process, but we did not observe the reverse. This analysis is not without limitations. First, investigating on attitudes was not the main goal of the research, thought it emerged with great strength among research participants. Second, our sample is rather small. Third, further studies are needed to deepen on what pedagogical strategies supervisors can use to foster positive attitudes.
References
Deming, D. (2015). The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market, (December), 1593–1640. European Commission. (2018). Proposal for a Council Recommendation on Key Comptences for Lifelong Learning. Guest, G., MacQueen, K., & Namey, E. (2012). Applied Thematic Analysis. Thousen Oaks, California: Sage. Kyndt, E., Janssens, I., Coertjens, L., Gijbels, D., Donche, V., & Van Petegem, P. (2014). Vocational Education Students’ Generic Working Life Competencies: Developing a Self-Assessment Instrument. Vocations and Learning, 7(3), 365–392. Perkins, D., Tishman, S., Ritchhart, R., Donis, K., & Andrade, A. (2000). Intelligence in the Wild: A Dispositional View of Intellectual Traits. Educational Psychology Review, 12(3), 269–293. Renta Davids, A. I., Van den Bossche, P., Gijbels, D., & Fandos Garrido, M. (2017). The Impact of Individual, Educational, and Workplace Factors on the Transfer of School-Based Learning into the Workplace. Vocations and Learning, 10(3), 275–306. Rocha, M. (2014). Predictors of the acquisition and portability of transferable skills: a longitudinal Portuguese case study on education. Higher Education, (541), 607–624.
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