Australia India VETConnect

AEF’s 2022 pilot program VET Connect - is a teacher professional learning program that connects Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers from Australia and India.

The aim of VETConnect is to build teacher capacity, integrate industry perspectives, positively impact student outcomes in VET and increase the quality in VET offerings across both countries. VETConnect aims to refresh this integral school engagement between Australia and India in line with the New Education Policy (NEP) and strategic industry and skilling priorities within the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Australia and India.

Building on the success of the Australia-India BRIDGE School Partnerships Program, the program will focus on teachers as key conduits to increasing the quality of in-school VET offerings. The program will:

Incorporate a collaborative, teacher professional learning program that consolidates global connections
Incorporate industry perspectives and allows VET teachers from all career stages to explore and share VET pedagogies and practice
Support teachers to implement and adapt best practice in VET pedagogies to their classroom through a cycle of collaborative action research
Establish a Community of Practice (CoP) of VET educators and schools across Australia and India.

During the program, participating teachers will build and apply their skills across four key themes:

Professional Learning Program

Educators participating in the program will undertake 20 hours of professional learning delivered online through asynchronous and synchronous platforms. The program will be broken into four key phases of learning. The four Phases include:

1.Key Themes in VET

Over four workshops, teachers will be introduced to four key themes in VET education, including global competencies in VET, Girls in VET, Assessment in VET and Digital pedagogies for VET. Teachers will hear from experts as well as share practice and explore school-based VET in Indian and Australian contexts

2.Best Practice in VET Pedagogies

Over four workshops, teachers will connect with Industry bodies, share examples of best practice and analyse new trends in VET education such as micro-credentials and competency-based frameworks. Over the course of the second phase teachers will also be supported to apply their learnings and collaboratively design an action research project based around the four key themes explored in phase 1 and 2.

3.Collaborative Action Research Project

Phase 3 will start with an intensive design summit, led by Education and Industry experts, to develop a plan to implement their action research project into their own classroom context. They will then move into a six-week action research phase, with two industry coaching sessions, in which they are supported to implement their action research project andapply their learnings to the classroom environment.

4.Sharing of Practice

Teachers will come together as a cross-cultural community of practice to share the impact of their Action Research project with the wider group. Action Research projects will be collated into case studies for publication and distribution as a professional learning resource for other teachers.