This paper identifies the key assumptions underpinning current arrangements in vocational education and training (VET) in the UK. These assumptions, and the idea of vocational capability they denote, are rejected in favour of a more coherent conception—a conception centred not on the traditional dichotomy of ‘knowing how-knowing that’ but on what I refer to as the ‘constitutive understandings’ from which both practical and theoretical capabilities can be seen to derive. It is argued that an account of vocational capability in these (...) terms suggests a far richer conception of vocational preparation than current arrangements are able to admit. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that there has been a ‘paradigm shift’ in the field of assessment over the last two or three decades: a new preoccupation with what learners can do, what they know or what they have achieved. It is suggested in this article that this change has precipitated a need to distinguish two conceptually and logically distinct methodological approaches to assessment that have hitherto gone unacknowledged. The upshot, it is argued, is that there appears to be a fundamental (...) confusion at the heart of current policy, a confusion occasioned by the demand to know what learners know and compounded by a failure to recognise what this properly entails for assessment methodology. (shrink)

The joint forces of information and biological technologies are shaping us in ways that defy our traditional views about the figures of the human. Moreover, determinist tendencies favoured by scientists and the seemingly autonomy of technology development are creating a conceptual framework that privileges the search for technological answers concerning many of the human problems, keeping at the margin questions pertaining to the symbolic realm. The prevailing atmosphere nurtures the emergent composition of the natural and the artificial. It is this (...) reconfiguration that needs to be deconstructed. In the present situation we must take the problem of the public understanding of science and technology very serious and, in particular, we must develop a critical stance in order to uncover problematic presuppositions and expose to view the idea that technoscientific development is, in its nature, inevitable and desirable. Technoscientific development and its social and cultural consequences are neither facts inscribed in nature nor results strictly produced by technical reasoning. As social and cultural subjects and objects, they must be under the scrutiny of all interested and debated in the public sphere. (shrink)

Taking a Sartrean existentialist viewpoint towards business ethics, in particular, concerning the question of the nature of businesspersons’ moral character, provides for a dramatically distinct set of reflections from those afforded by the received view on character, namely that of Aristotelian-based virtue ethics. Insofar as Sartre’s philosophy places human freedom at center stage, I argue that the authenticity with which a businessperson approaches moral situations depends on the degree of consciousness he or she has of the various choices at stake. (...) Finally, I consider some practical changes in business ethics education, managerial decision-making, and business organizations that Sartrean reflections might prompt. (shrink)

This article builds on the author's previous research on student learning journals to explore how their use can give students a `space' to engage meaningfully and in their own way with their university work. Drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of transitional space and on notions of narrative, it is argued that the student learning journal can be seen as a hybrid genre of writing positioned between `life narrative' and the `university essay'. At the same time, journal writing can invite the (...) writer to make a psychic shift into the transitional space that enables adult play and creative activity. The discussion includes analyses of extracts from students' learning journals. (shrink)

As a step towards comprehensive computer models of communication, and effective human machine dialogue, some of the relationships between communication and affect are explored. An outline theory is presented of the architecture that makes various kinds of affective states possible, or even inevitable, in intelligent agents, along with some of the implications of this theory for various communicative processes. The model implies that human beings typically have many different, hierarchically organized, dispositions capable of interacting with new information to produce affective (...) states, distract attention, interrupt ongoing actions, and so on. High "insistence" of motives is defined in relation to a tendency to penetrate an attention filter mechanism, which seems to account for the partial loss of control involved in emotions. One conclusion is that emulating human communicative abilities will not be achieved easily. Another is that it will be even more difficult to design and build computing systems that reliably achieve interesting communicative goals. (shrink)