Quality of Lecturing Staff at TVET colleges (South Africa) 

Project summary

Project 6.1 ‘Quality of lecturing staff at TVET colleges’ is part of the Department of Higher Education’s (DHET) research programme on TVET, funded by the South African government. At the heart of TVET lecturing within TVET colleges is an educational process that includes teaching, learning, a curriculum, the learning relationship between students and teachers and daily decisions taken by TVET lecturers in response to contextual factors that affect student learning in local college settings. A TVET lecturer needs to face students as individuals, meet the needs of employers and the workplace, deal with the expectations of government and the local community, and hold all of these factors in balance when working through a learning task with students. Debates continue about the role of technical ability versus professional qualifications and the implications for supporting TVET lecturer quality. 

TVET lecturers exist and function as individual agentic actors within the internal educational and student learning processes of a TVET college and the wider socio-economic and institutional environment. In South Africa, different progression pathways exist for TVET lecturers, with the resultant possibility of differing dimensions of TVET lecturer quality. The project also recognises the complexity of the student base in South Africa. TVET students can range from young school leavers, older people seeking to re-skill, and individuals seeking to re-adjust in the face of extremely difficult socio-economic circumstances.

In response Project 6.1 aims to develop an evidence-based understanding of the quality related aspects of the TVET lecturer role and complementary tools that support the identification, development and measurement of the various dimensions of TVET lecturer quality. This requires a broader definition of ‘quality’ as it pertains to TVET lecturers and the complex internal and external contexts within which they exist. Consequently, Project 6.1 adopts a broader notion of TVET lecturer quality in relation to student learning, knowledge, pedagogy and the curriculum, recognising that institutional structures and varying degrees of autonomy and agency can enable or constrain a TVET lecturer’s ability and capacity to understand and manage these domains. This is conceptualised in Framing Quality TVET Lecturers: holistic competencies, TVET knowledge and mediation within the skills system.

Project Aim

• Developing an evidence-based toolkit for TVET lecturers that aids the identification, development and measurement of quality related aspects of the TVET lecturer role
• Produce a final report that synthesises the findings on the dimensions of TVET lecturer quality

Project Objectives

• Produce a literature review of the key concepts and evidence base that supports a broader agentic and institutional understanding of TVET lecturer quality
• Identify how key stakeholders understand and define TVET lecturer quality
• Gather evidence of the institutional factors and agentic pedagogies, practices and skills that support TVET lecturer quality
• Develop a Quality Vocational Lecturers (QVL) Framework that draws on theoretical approaches to identify, support and measure the quality of TVET lecturers
• Produce a toolkit for TVET lecturers based on the QVL Framework