Vocational education and training teacher professional development: tensions and context

Planning and implementing teacher professional development is a process of engaging in organisational learning and change. Yet our planning and implementation of professional development is at times a series of one-off sessions and can be quite ad hoc. This paper argues that teacher learning takes place not only through formal sessions but also through everyday activity in the workplace. In this paper, a small, exploratory case study of a team of vocational education and training teachers in an Australian regional training institution provides an illustration of the ways in which workplace structures, cultures and histories create possibilities and constraints for teacher professional learning and development. The introduction of new pedagogical models, tools and/or directions sets up tensions between the new and the old. This paper analyses tensions between espoused and current pedagogical practices in a team of trade teachers as they adopt information communications technological (ICT) tools. It is argued that planning for teacher professional development needs to be highly contextualised. In order to undertake this planning, three layers of analysis are required: identification of the learning needs of the teachers themselves, analysis of the tensions within the activity of the teachers along with the ways in which, social, political and economic contextual conditions influence and are influenced by the activity of the teachers.