A critical realist dialectical understanding of learning pathways associated with two scarce skill environmental occupations within a transitioning systems frame
- Authors: Ramsarup, Presha
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/5937 , vital:20992
- Description: Policy, environmental, social and economic factors are all driving South Africa's transition to sustainable development and a greener economy. Various policies have been developed to foster sustainable development in the post-apartheid era in South Africa (i.e. since 1994) and there are various projections on potential job creation for a green economy. However, there is a problem related to both the achievement of sustainable development and green economy objectives: South Africa is said to lack adequately qualified people to implement these goals resulting in what is termed 'scarce skills' in the environmental and sustainable development sector. This problem has, in turn, prompted various skills development studies in the environmental sector, including a national Environmental Sector Skills Plan produced in 2010. All these studies point to a reactive skills development system that provides inadequate learning pathways for existing and newly emerging green occupations, which provided the impetus for a more proactive, transformative praxis oriented system of skills development that supports environmental learning pathways in South Africa. A second problem is that the concept of 'learning pathway' is poorly defined in the South African environmental education and wider education and training policy context. This term is often used in policy discourse within the notion of 'seamless learning pathways' and is only vaguely defined. This study set out to investigate selected occupationally directed environmental learning pathways in the South African National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and green transitioning context. In attempting to characterise the nature of the environmental pathway, the study utilised critical realist metatheory which serves as an underlabourer for domain specific theory of transitioning societies and systems, life-course transitions and career development. This theoretical work allowed the characterisation of environmental learning pathways as educational and occupational progression. The study investigated the nature of learning and work transitions across the life- course of selected environmental professionals in two key occupational categories - environmental engineer and environmental scientist - both of which have been defined as scarce skills in South Africa. This enabled a nuanced examination of the formation of what emerged as 'boundaryless' career stories of professionals engaged in these two occupations. The study also sought to engage with a methodological problem in learning pathways research, notably that studies are generally framed either at the micro level career story, emphasising agency of individuals (voluntarism), or at the policy level, emphasising structural aspects of the skills development system (determinism). This study sought to bridge the macro-micro problem drawing on critical realist retroductive analysis; this facilitated the shift from a focus on events and experiences that can be empirically observed (captured in case study approaches) to the causal mechanisms influencing environmental learning pathways in these two scarce skill occupations (discussed and analysed using dialectical critical realism), shedding light on how systemic and structural dynamics and mechanisms shape and influence the emergence of learning pathways as experienced in scarce skill occupations in the environmental sector. The opening chapters of the thesis provide an historical view of how the South African education and training system, itself in a transitioning process, has had to grapple with how to respond to and meaningfully take up the new emerging environmental / sustainable development mandate, which is increasingly framed within a multi-levelled transitioning social-ecological system perspective in post-apartheid South Africa. These transitioning systems are shaped by substantive policy imperatives for societal transformation, social justice, sustainable development and equity. Since 1994, various transformations have been taking place, often in paradoxical forms, in both the environmental and educational sectors, shaping a complex multi-levelled transitioning systems perspective for the study. This background work on transitioning systems provides the foundation for the first data chapter, which provides a descriptive outline of key supply side systemic elements as these pertain to environmental learning pathways more broadly (qualifications; occupational framing; career systems; sector skills planning). It also points to the lack of adequate mechanisms for analysing demand for environmental occupations, and highlights some of the contradictions in the supply- demand relation as these pertain to newly emerging environmental occupations. This helps to explain the empirical findings of previous environmental sector studies on the slow and reactive defining of environmental education and training for environmental occupations within the transforming education and training system in South Africa. The next two chapters, using case-based qualitative data, present the analysis of the two scarce skill occupations investigated - environmental engineer and environmental scientist. These chapters outline the dominant institutional educational pathway and the key supply platforms that support these pathways (career guidance; qualifications, occupational framings, skills planning) and the learning and work transitions of professionals within the occupation. The chapters highlight the factors and causal mechanisms influencing these learning pathways and thus provide insight into the multi-level dynamics that underpin learning pathways. The final chapter uses dialectical critical realism to outline generative mechanisms influencing the construction of the learning pathways. It also highlights key absences that are shaping the emergence (or not) of environmental learning pathways, thus pointing to opportunities for how the NQF might respond to the two scarce skill occupations under study, and to the emergence of environmental learning pathways more broadly within the framework of society-in-transition. Through this, the study links the career stories as analysed within the framework of learning pathways and skills system transitioning literature, to generative mechanisms and system development elements. The study concludes with providing occupational and systemic insights into absences and disjunctures that characterise the emergence (or not) of occupationally oriented environmental learning pathways. It also provides insight into what leads to these absences, and how they are kept in place and suggests possibilities and openings for transformative praxis within a multi-levelled transitioning system framework. The study makes the following contributions: At a theoretical level, the study has shown that environmental learning pathways need to be viewed as a complex phenomenon that is emergent in open systems and constituted by dialectically interdependent planes. A deeper understanding of environmental learning pathways is driven by both educational and occupational progression. It utilises key contemporary ideas around learning and work transitions but links them to the broader analyses of transitioning societies influencing the environmental sector, indicating the significance of how environmental education and training system development is situated within the wider transitioning process oriented towards social-ecological sustainability, social justice and greener economies. This study has further identified green skills as an important focus in research work on transitioning societies. At a methodological level, the study has shown how macro-micro and laminated system research can be useful in studying transitioning systems. As a laminated systems study with a focus on transitioning societies, it provides a baseline for further systems study on green work and green skills. At a practical level, the study has made actual contributions to the conceptualisation of learning pathways in the South African NQF context, to building and informing future green skill developments in the South African post-school system, the environmental sector and to informing conceptualising in the emergent Green Skills project.
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Enabling green skills: Pathways to sustainable development
- Authors: Ramsarup, Presha , Ward, Mike , Rosenberg, Eureta , Jenkin, Nicola , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/436702 , vital:73294 , ISBN 978-0-620-79605-7 , https://www.vetafrica4-0.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Green-Skills-Sourcebook-Jul18.pdf
- Description: The purpose of this source book is to support skills planning entities to work with employers to identify and anticipate green skills needs and to build these needs into occupational de-scriptors and sector skills plans. Thus, the source book com-plements the existing Enabling Document (DEA, 2010b) and provides guidelines to support Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) to embed environmental considerations, related occupations and green skills into their skills planning processes.
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Cases of recontextualising the environmental discourse in the National Curriculum Statement (R-9)
- Authors: Ramsarup, Presha
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: Education -- South Africa -- Curricula Environmental education -- Curricula -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1444 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003325
- Description: With an intention of opening a vantage point on the story of how curriculum is actually created, this study follows the recontextualising of the environmental discourse of the National Curriculum Statement (R-9) in three case sites. These are: Grade seven Department of Education training material developed to introduce educators to the NCS (R-9), Delta Environmental Centre an environmental education non-governmental organisation, a rural primary school situated south of Durban. Using elements of the Bernstein’s (1990) framework of pedagogic discourse, the study traces how the environmental discourse was de-located from the field of production and relocated into the pedagogic practice of each case. In trying to follow the continuity, changes and discontinuities in the official [environmental] discourse as it is recontextualised, the study utilises Bernstein’s conceptual constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation. These constructs of selective appropriation and ideological transformation enabled me to ‘look into’ each case and get a perspective of how to explain the recontextualising processes. The study acknowledged that discourses are shaped and steered by historical, political and economic realities and begins by tracing the genesis of the environmental discourse within formal curriculum policy in South Africa. This socio-historical review highlights the main factors and happenings that shaped the present curriculum discourse and its production as official policy discourse. The study highlighted that within each case the recontextualising story is unique but some clear patterns emerged as factors that impacted on recontextualising processes. These were the role of history and context, knowledge and experience of the discourse, ideology and emphasis, and the depth with which the discourse was engaged. The discussion of these factors gave valuable insights into the recontextualising of curriculum discourses. The study comments on the need to clarify the environmental focus in the Learning Areas and to actualise this into practice so that the discourse becomes an integral part of teaching, learning and assessment. The study also highlights the need for professional development opportunities that will enable educators to clarify the nature and focus of the environmental discourse in the NCS (R-9), and its articulation in Learning Area in context. In particular, the environment and social justice relationships appear to require greater clarity of focus and interpretation in recontextualising processes. There also appears to be a need to develop educators’ foundational knowledge of environmental issues to strengthen the recontextualising of this discourse.
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