James Avis
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 759585 |
|---|---|
| NOME | James Avis |
| PRENOMES | James |
| SOBRENOME | Avis |
| ASSINATURA | AVIS J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Huddersfield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7404-938X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 125 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1981 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Re-imagining VET
The paper adopts an approach derived from critical theory and structuralism. It sets itself four main tasks. Firstly, to set the discussion within an engagement with vocational education and training (VET) that serves to explore its conceptualisations, considering their limits and radical possibilities. This section morphs into the second, which examines the capitalocene, which locates the climate crisis in the context of class society. Here agai…
Vocational education and training
The paper calls for an expansive conceptualisation of VET that moves beyond instrumentalism, stressing the needs of employers and labour market. The global south has been marginalsed in VET, as have climate emergency, race and ethnicity. These concerns rest alongside a literature addressing ‘just transitions’. The paper is framed by a series of conceptual steps, initially engaging with the social construction of VET in the global north, specifica…
Work-based learning
The paper raises important questions about the relationship between Vocational Education and Training (VET), work-based learning (WBL) and social justice. It seeks to go beyond analyses that mobilise a conventional understanding of expansive learning. How then can we develop a broader understanding of WBL and VET? Such an understanding needs to acknowledge socio-economic contexts are marked by a fluidity and surplus labour and for many worklessne…
A critical review of debates surrounding race/ethnicity and TVET
The special issue (SI) TVET race and ethnicity in the global south and north closes with a critical review of debates that address race/ethnicity and TVET’. These debates focus on the crisis of care, decolonisation and whiteness as well as the manner in which we conceptualise TVET. The paper was developed in response to the special issue but also by wider debates about race, ethnicity and TVET. In a short review paper, such as this it is only fea…
Anti-work, TVET and employer engagement
The paper brings together a range of debates on the left that address TVET’s future in current context. At the heart of these debates rest two issues. The first addresses competing views of capital and the second focuses on the contradiction between the interests of capital and workers. The paper argues that capital is not all of a piece and that decent work that validates human flourishing is not completely unknown. However, as with other forms …
Re-conceptualising VET
The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pand…
Vocational Education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Beyond Neet
This article addresses NEET (not in employment, education or training) as an ideological and discursive formation, lodging the discussion within its socio-economic context – one of increasing insecurity and precariousness. It argues that frequently quasi-political and ideological constructions of NEET can readily fold over into and articulate with discourses of the underclass and the broken society, as well as, paradoxically, social recession. Co…
Comfort radicalism and Neets
Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy-makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people’s lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion, and it is feared that they will become a ‘lost generation’. This paper draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging …
Post-Fordist Illusions
The argument that post-Fordism was able to overcome the oppressions and exploitations embedded within Fordist work relations has been subject to extensive critique for its evasion of capitalist antagonisms. However, there are particular analytic currents in radical thought which assert that knowledge-based economies hold within them not only radical, but also transformative possibilities. Such possibilities flow from developments in the forces of…
The state and education policy
"The state and education policy: the academies programme.." British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3), pp. 371–372
Inbound, outbound or peripheral
This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting ‘organisational’ and ‘occupational’ professionalism, with discourses of ‘personal’ and ‘critical’ professionalism, to explore changing meanings and enactments of teacher professionalism in the 2000s. Narratives of three novice teachers, followed over…
Global reconstructions of vocational education and training
Education, Governance and the ‘New’ Professionalism
The article considers arguments that address the changing forms of governance within which education and in particular English further education is set, focusing on the relationship of these to professionalism. Specifically the article draws upon and critiques analyses of the changing forms of governance which are considered to carry progressive possibilities. These changes are thought to prefigure new forms of inter-professionality that herald d…
Further education in England
The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector – changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio‐economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates these changes to their contextual location and to a set of conceptual notions that derive from a particu…
Further education
This essay addresses a number of issues that bear upon further education (FE) in England. It examines the socio‐economic context in which the sector is located, considers its policy framework, touc
CCCS Selected Working Papers
This chapter considers the 'strange fate of progressive education' in the postwar period and explores the way in which its ideas and themes have been taken up and distorted by the new vocationalism of the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of progressive education had to some extent been reflected in liberal and general studies in the 1960s and were echoed by the 'humanism' of the Crowther Report. The aim of liberal and general studies was to move stu…
Post‐compulsory education and training
The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post‐compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio‐economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the paper addresses the manner in which state policy impacts upon the sector and is followed by a discussion of curricula issues. I…
How do I cope with that?’ The challenge of ‘schooling’ cultures in further education for trainee FE lecturers
The development of professional identity amongst lecturers training to teach in further education (FE) colleges in England involves processes of adaptation. These partly take place during teaching placement in FE, as trainees navigate between their own anticipated professional identity and the identities which they feel under pressure to assume as they engage in their work with students. This article explores these processes of development, focus…
From reproduction to learning cultures
This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post-compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio-economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropriation by 'new labour' modernisers
Beyond performativity
The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control…
Discursive shifts
Social-democratic parties, or rather social-democratic leaders, have long ceased to suggest \nto anyone but their most credulous followers (and the more stupid among their opponents) \nthat they were concerned in any sense whatever with the business of bringing about \na socialist society. (Miliband, 1973, p. 244) \nDenis Lawton has written a valuable and useful history that charts the early origins \nand ‘development’ of the Labour party’s educa…
Re-thinking trust in a performative culture
This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argued that this model of the English economy does not sit well with existing relations. The paper then …
Work-Based Knowledge, Evidence-Informed Practice and Education
This paper starts from an examination of an epistemological framework that underpins practice in particular educational contexts. It examines work-based knowledge, relating this to practitioner research and evidence informed practice. This is followed by an exploration of arguments that call for increased rigour in educational research as well as the use of systematic reviews. The paper examines tensions within educational research located in par…
Social Capital, Collective Intelligence and Expansive Learning
The paper seeks to draw out the connections between social capital, collective intelligence and expansive learning, interrogating the terms for their progressive potential. It sets these concepts within their socio-economic context, one which asserts that the development of social capitalwill be a vehicle for economic regeneration and competitiveness as well as a mechanism for the generation of social inclusion and cohesion. It concludes by argui…
Beyond performativity
The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control…
Re-thinking trust in a performative culture
This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argued that this model of the English economy does not sit well with existing relations. The paper then …
Comfort radicalism and Neets
Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy-makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people’s lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion, and it is feared that they will become a ‘lost generation’. This paper draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging …
Policy talk
This paper explores the policy contextualization of teaching and learning within post-compulsory education and lifelong learning (PCET) in England and aims to locate PCET in a range of arguments that frame discussion. These arguments are necessarily discursive in that whilst they bear some relation to socio-economic conditions they move beyond these to construct an understanding of the nature of society, the economy and education. The paper criti…
Policing the Subject
This discussion paper examines the links between learning outcomes, managerialism and research into teaching and learning in further/higher education. It constructs a worse case scenario which explores the dangers flowing from a managerialist appropriation of both learning outcomes and research into teaching and learning. It suggests this leads to a technicised practice which limits creative and critical engagement with the curriculum. The paper …
(Im)possible dream
This paper explores the new conditions and ideational framework within which post‐compulsory education and training is placed in England and Wales. It does so by examining the impact of ideas derived from post‐Fordist analyses and stakeholding theory as well as the arguments put forward by left modernizers. It seeks to consider the limits and possibilities that surround these ideas which have provided a new inflection or accenting of educational …
A New Orthodoxy, Old Problems
The paper explores the emerging consensus around post‐compulsory education and training. It argues the notion of settlement needs to be developed to incorporate concepts of race and gender. It suggests a settlement is developing amongst the major political parties and other constituents who have a stake in post‐compulsory education and training. These constituents share a common analysis of the problem facing education and training. Whilst these …
Further education in England
The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector – changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio‐economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates these changes to their contextual location and to a set of conceptual notions that derive from a particu…
Imaginary Friends
The paper draws together a number of themes concerned with managerialism, the labour process and the attempt to shape an educational settlement in post-compulsory education and training (PCET) in England. In particular it examines the place of managerialism as a central plank in the PCET settlement in which there is an attempt to construct a social bloc organised around these interests. This discussion involves an examination of the relationship …
Global reconstructions of vocational education and training
From reproduction to learning cultures
This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post-compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio-economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropriation by 'new labour' modernisers
Strategies of Survival
The paper is concerned with student attitudes and views of the certificate of further education and illustrates that the marker against which students assess both the course and college is school. It also explores the nature and forms of student resistance, arguing that for those students who stay the course, the most significant form of resistance is against youthful dependence and the process of infantalisation. In addition it is argued that mu…
Work-based learning
The paper raises important questions about the relationship between Vocational Education and Training (VET), work-based learning (WBL) and social justice. It seeks to go beyond analyses that mobilise a conventional understanding of expansive learning. How then can we develop a broader understanding of WBL and VET? Such an understanding needs to acknowledge socio-economic contexts are marked by a fluidity and surplus labour and for many worklessne…
Beyond Neet
This article addresses NEET (not in employment, education or training) as an ideological and discursive formation, lodging the discussion within its socio-economic context – one of increasing insecurity and precariousness. It argues that frequently quasi-political and ideological constructions of NEET can readily fold over into and articulate with discourses of the underclass and the broken society, as well as, paradoxically, social recession. Co…
Inbound, outbound or peripheral
This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting ‘organisational’ and ‘occupational’ professionalism, with discourses of ‘personal’ and ‘critical’ professionalism, to explore changing meanings and enactments of teacher professionalism in the 2000s. Narratives of three novice teachers, followed over…
Post‐compulsory education and training
The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post‐compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio‐economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the paper addresses the manner in which state policy impacts upon the sector and is followed by a discussion of curricula issues. I…
How do I cope with that?’ The challenge of ‘schooling’ cultures in further education for trainee FE lecturers
The development of professional identity amongst lecturers training to teach in further education (FE) colleges in England involves processes of adaptation. These partly take place during teaching placement in FE, as trainees navigate between their own anticipated professional identity and the identities which they feel under pressure to assume as they engage in their work with students. This article explores these processes of development, focus…
The Validation of Learner Experience
Universal claims have all too frequently turned out to be very particular, supposed commonalities false, abstractions deceptive. (Barrett and Phillips, 1992; 1)
Social and Technical Relations
This paper stresses the complexity of further education (FE). In order to take cognisance of this complexity a number of themes are discussed. The role of FE in ‘reproducing’ social and technical relations is discussed and it is argued that social relations are crucial in the formation of technical relations. However, in order to grasp the nature of FE, technical relations need to be accorded ‘relative autonomy’. An additional thematic of the pap…
Further education
This essay addresses a number of issues that bear upon further education (FE) in England. It examines the socio‐economic context in which the sector is located, considers its policy framework, touc
Social Capital, Collective Intelligence and Expansive Learning
The paper seeks to draw out the connections between social capital, collective intelligence and expansive learning, interrogating the terms for their progressive potential. It sets these concepts within their socio-economic context, one which asserts that the development of social capitalwill be a vehicle for economic regeneration and competitiveness as well as a mechanism for the generation of social inclusion and cohesion. It concludes by argui…
Post‐compulsory Education
The paper explores the emerging and contradictory curricular forms present in post‐compulsory education and training in England. It locates these within the policy and socio‐economic context, the changing patterns of state relations as well as within the emerging settlement over post‐compulsory education and training. It explores the significance of an implicit alliance between curriculum modernisers and educationalist organised around post‐Fordi…
Social Difference and Antagonism Within the 16‐19 Core Curriculum
The paper considers models of the core curriculum, which it argues are inadequate as their understanding of social difference is truncated. Although these models recognise difference this is located within a pluralist framework and is implicitly viewed as an impediment that hinders equal opportunities. The effect is to normalise the white, male middle class subject and to ignore social antagonism. Skill in the core curriculum becomes technicised,…
The Ambiguities of Conformism
The paper examines the way in which some students in non-advanced further education (NAFE) make sense of and understand that experience. This is placed in the context of the current significance of NAFE. No general attempt is made to comprehend the total range of student orientations, but the paper 'closes in' on the experience of particular students. It adopts a qualitative approach, informed by the cultural studies tradition which asserts that …
Post-Fordist Illusions
The argument that post-Fordism was able to overcome the oppressions and exploitations embedded within Fordist work relations has been subject to extensive critique for its evasion of capitalist antagonisms. However, there are particular analytic currents in radical thought which assert that knowledge-based economies hold within them not only radical, but also transformative possibilities. Such possibilities flow from developments in the forces of…
Social and Technical Relations
This paper stresses the complexity of further education (FE). In order to take cognisance of this complexity a number of themes are discussed. The role of FE in ‘reproducing’ social and technical relations is discussed and it is argued that social relations are crucial in the formation of technical relations. However, in order to grasp the nature of FE, technical relations need to be accorded ‘relative autonomy’. An additional thematic of the pap…
Strategies of Survival
The paper is concerned with student attitudes and views of the certificate of further education and illustrates that the marker against which students assess both the course and college is school. It also explores the nature and forms of student resistance, arguing that for those students who stay the course, the most significant form of resistance is against youthful dependence and the process of infantalisation. In addition it is argued that mu…
The Ambiguities of Conformism
The paper examines the way in which some students in non-advanced further education (NAFE) make sense of and understand that experience. This is placed in the context of the current significance of NAFE. No general attempt is made to comprehend the total range of student orientations, but the paper 'closes in' on the experience of particular students. It adopts a qualitative approach, informed by the cultural studies tradition which asserts that …
Social Difference and Antagonism Within the 16‐19 Core Curriculum
The paper considers models of the core curriculum, which it argues are inadequate as their understanding of social difference is truncated. Although these models recognise difference this is located within a pluralist framework and is implicitly viewed as an impediment that hinders equal opportunities. The effect is to normalise the white, male middle class subject and to ignore social antagonism. Skill in the core curriculum becomes technicised,…
A New Orthodoxy, Old Problems
The paper explores the emerging consensus around post‐compulsory education and training. It argues the notion of settlement needs to be developed to incorporate concepts of race and gender. It suggests a settlement is developing amongst the major political parties and other constituents who have a stake in post‐compulsory education and training. These constituents share a common analysis of the problem facing education and training. Whilst these …
Post‐compulsory Education
The paper explores the emerging and contradictory curricular forms present in post‐compulsory education and training in England. It locates these within the policy and socio‐economic context, the changing patterns of state relations as well as within the emerging settlement over post‐compulsory education and training. It explores the significance of an implicit alliance between curriculum modernisers and educationalist organised around post‐Fordi…
The Validation of Learner Experience
Universal claims have all too frequently turned out to be very particular, supposed commonalities false, abstractions deceptive. (Barrett and Phillips, 1992; 1)
(Im)possible dream
This paper explores the new conditions and ideational framework within which post‐compulsory education and training is placed in England and Wales. It does so by examining the impact of ideas derived from post‐Fordist analyses and stakeholding theory as well as the arguments put forward by left modernizers. It seeks to consider the limits and possibilities that surround these ideas which have provided a new inflection or accenting of educational …
Policy talk
This paper explores the policy contextualization of teaching and learning within post-compulsory education and lifelong learning (PCET) in England and aims to locate PCET in a range of arguments that frame discussion. These arguments are necessarily discursive in that whilst they bear some relation to socio-economic conditions they move beyond these to construct an understanding of the nature of society, the economy and education. The paper criti…
Policing the Subject
This discussion paper examines the links between learning outcomes, managerialism and research into teaching and learning in further/higher education. It constructs a worse case scenario which explores the dangers flowing from a managerialist appropriation of both learning outcomes and research into teaching and learning. It suggests this leads to a technicised practice which limits creative and critical engagement with the curriculum. The paper …
Social Capital, Collective Intelligence and Expansive Learning
The paper seeks to draw out the connections between social capital, collective intelligence and expansive learning, interrogating the terms for their progressive potential. It sets these concepts within their socio-economic context, one which asserts that the development of social capitalwill be a vehicle for economic regeneration and competitiveness as well as a mechanism for the generation of social inclusion and cohesion. It concludes by argui…
Imaginary Friends
The paper draws together a number of themes concerned with managerialism, the labour process and the attempt to shape an educational settlement in post-compulsory education and training (PCET) in England. In particular it examines the place of managerialism as a central plank in the PCET settlement in which there is an attempt to construct a social bloc organised around these interests. This discussion involves an examination of the relationship …
Re-thinking trust in a performative culture
This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argued that this model of the English economy does not sit well with existing relations. The paper then …
Work-Based Knowledge, Evidence-Informed Practice and Education
This paper starts from an examination of an epistemological framework that underpins practice in particular educational contexts. It examines work-based knowledge, relating this to practitioner research and evidence informed practice. This is followed by an exploration of arguments that call for increased rigour in educational research as well as the use of systematic reviews. The paper examines tensions within educational research located in par…
Beyond performativity
The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control…
Discursive shifts
Social-democratic parties, or rather social-democratic leaders, have long ceased to suggest \nto anyone but their most credulous followers (and the more stupid among their opponents) \nthat they were concerned in any sense whatever with the business of bringing about \na socialist society. (Miliband, 1973, p. 244) \nDenis Lawton has written a valuable and useful history that charts the early origins \nand ‘development’ of the Labour party’s educa…
From reproduction to learning cultures
This paper examines recent empirical work on the lived experience of learners in post-compulsory education. The starting point is a brief examination of the socio-economic context of the sector. Despite the sophistication of analyses of learning cultures, a more radical approach is needed. Failure to do so renders these analyses amenable to appropriation by 'new labour' modernisers
CCCS Selected Working Papers
This chapter considers the 'strange fate of progressive education' in the postwar period and explores the way in which its ideas and themes have been taken up and distorted by the new vocationalism of the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of progressive education had to some extent been reflected in liberal and general studies in the 1960s and were echoed by the 'humanism' of the Crowther Report. The aim of liberal and general studies was to move stu…
Post‐compulsory education and training
The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post‐compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio‐economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the paper addresses the manner in which state policy impacts upon the sector and is followed by a discussion of curricula issues. I…
How do I cope with that?’ The challenge of ‘schooling’ cultures in further education for trainee FE lecturers
The development of professional identity amongst lecturers training to teach in further education (FE) colleges in England involves processes of adaptation. These partly take place during teaching placement in FE, as trainees navigate between their own anticipated professional identity and the identities which they feel under pressure to assume as they engage in their work with students. This article explores these processes of development, focus…
Further education in England
The paper explores the changing forms of governance currently being applied to the English further education sector – changes that emphasise the importance of locality. The paper sets the sector within its socio‐economic and policy context, examining current policy changes that intend to alter the way in which the sector is managed. It relates these changes to their contextual location and to a set of conceptual notions that derive from a particu…
Further education
This essay addresses a number of issues that bear upon further education (FE) in England. It examines the socio‐economic context in which the sector is located, considers its policy framework, touc
Education, Governance and the ‘New’ Professionalism
The article considers arguments that address the changing forms of governance within which education and in particular English further education is set, focusing on the relationship of these to professionalism. Specifically the article draws upon and critiques analyses of the changing forms of governance which are considered to carry progressive possibilities. These changes are thought to prefigure new forms of inter-professionality that herald d…
Global reconstructions of vocational education and training
Post-Fordist Illusions
The argument that post-Fordism was able to overcome the oppressions and exploitations embedded within Fordist work relations has been subject to extensive critique for its evasion of capitalist antagonisms. However, there are particular analytic currents in radical thought which assert that knowledge-based economies hold within them not only radical, but also transformative possibilities. Such possibilities flow from developments in the forces of…
Sociology (33 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Pedagogy (21 obras) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (18 obras) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (17 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Education Systems and Policy (14 obras) · Economics (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras)