Knowledge and Agency in Vocational Education: An analysis of competency-based training and student counselling utilising a lens of critical realism to cultural historical activity theory

Relational agency is a knowledge-laden but not knowing-determined concept derived from cultural historical activity theory, characterising social and collaborative activity and work as being object-related. Objects in the world exist independently of the human mind. Through our engagement with the world, we can attribute meaning to them via our capacity for reasoning. The premise of critical realism’s depth ontology is that our knowledge about the world is fallible. However, we can still theorise about objects in the social and natural worlds (world before word). Knowledge, hence, is based on beliefs for which we continuously must seek justification. Justification of knowledge relates to the fundamental idea of education, which is inquiry for truth. Prior research has shown that competency-based training (CBT) is not only a weak informer of learning but is based on in-action assessment, ignoring what is not practical and the non-observable. The CBT reform to vocational education and training (VET) generates a twofold problem: a tension between relational agency and techno-economic rationality (adjusting means to ends), and it enhances confusion about the difference between knowledge and knowing (what works in practice). Justification of knowledge in VET based on CBT is both unclear and problematic.

My aim with this thesis is to analyse observed events in relational practices in competency-based VET to theorise about the premises for learning and spheres of relational agency in relation to the justification of knowledge. In VET, the importance of student counselling as a support for learning grew stronger due to the competency-based training reform and the emphasis on individualised study. The research questions address how the premises for relational agency and conceptualisation of learning are created through counselling activity and how knowledge is justified in competency-based VET. The thesis summarises three sub-studies which are based on design-research approaches. The sub-studies operationalise relational practices through student counselling in VET in Finland within an ethnographic methodology. Participatory observations of counselling opportunities (N=32) and interviews with counselling professionals (N=12) from two VET institutions in Finland yielded qualitative text data supported by publicly available policy documents on VET. The analysis of three sub-studies used abductive methods. The results from the sub-studies were published in three peer reviewed journals. A theoretical reflection of the results from the sub-studies is presented in this thesis.

Results from the first sub-study demonstrate that commitment to responsibility for jointly agreed-upon actions was conflicted with the increasingly blurred focus on outcomes, splintered in fragments of measurable targets. The knowledge-laden relational agency needed in counselling and work-based situations that students must be educated for gained dubious resonance in the strictly defined managerial approach. The latter adhere to accountability structures, showing quality outwards while depleting relational learning processes inwards.

The second sub-study indicates assumptions of social engineering and calculated competency units in a ‘Competency-Tetris’ framework, occasionally rejecting relationships and community as important life domains in VET ensuring that students learn how to work together in the world. Learning became biased by social inequalities and a focus on instrumental abilities, viz., the ‘go-forward-engine.’ In succession, the concept of equal learning for all students made a U-turn as CBT’s commercial significance and economic mobility consolidated the grip on VET. Consequently, orthodox human capital theory confuses relational object motives like social generosity with the rationalisation of outcomes.

The third sub-study explores how actual needs and individualised goals differ. Student counselling was skewed to focus on individualised goals while recognition of human uniqueness and students as people is needed. Technical rationality cannot inform wise deliberation and responsible actions in different situations; the knowledge-laden portrayer and conceptualiser of objects, which students and professionals together could relate to, vanishes. What could not gain resonance as direct and demonstrable competency was ignored. That is, ‘the grey zone’ where the tension between the use value and exchange value of object extends between regulation-producing and student counselling activity systems.

Theoretical reflection shows the revitalisation of Dewey’s transactional theory of knowing through CBT which fails. The revitalisation fails because of the problematic aggregation of fragmented bits of knowing, attached to educational accountability based on speculation of future prosperity. This reminds us of how experiential approaches to knowing differ from realist perceptions of justified knowledge. Justification of knowledge becomes inaccurate as students’ epistemic access to systems of meaning gets restricted, leading to social reproduction. CBT detaches the depth-ontology of social and material worlds from how we can make sense of their objects and ignores our need to form confidence and trust in each other in ways beyond techno-economic rationality. Hence, the ego-centred rationality mistake is becoming the normative policy approach based on the pretence of how the world is: diminishing the significance of relational agency in VET as a form of wise deliberation and thoughtful action. This makes VET’s affordances both less educational and less vocational at the same time.