electro-textual

Certificate of General Education for Adults (CGEA) level 3 is considered “foundation level training”, under the new regime.

However, Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) Intermediate is considered “Skills Creation”, and comes under a different set of funding criteria.

The fact that i’m struggling with here is that intermediate VCAL is based on CGEA level 3. In many respects they are the same.

If you already have a Certificate 2 in Anything, the Victorian government will fund your study of the CGEA 3.. but they will not fund you to study the VCAL intermediate. Apparently.

i’m confused.

i’m not alone in that.

i’ve heard that the briefing meetings are full of officials who say things like, “i’ll have to take that question on notice”, because even they can’t find their way around the morass of contradictory regulations.

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The real catch with this new “demand-driven” policy framework is that the government will fund their demanding citizens to study only one course at any certificate level above “foundation” (ie above certificate 2). If you have done a certificate 2 in horticulture, you will not be funded to re-train in hospitality, unless you can start at certificate level 3.

Even if you can only get 2 days work gardening and you need to supplement with some evening bar work, and your gardening income is all going on the massive Melbourne rental rates, or you’re living in a boarding house where the operators are taking all your invalid pension and more.

One bite of the cherry.

No more life-long learning.

User pays. And pays. Or is left at the bottom of the heap.

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For those who don’t already know, the Victorian adult education sector is grappling with a new funding regime. Adult Community and Further Education (ACFE) has been quartered (its funding reduced to 25%), and Adult Community Education (ACE) organisations must now go through “Skills Victoria” to fund their accredited programs (the ones that lead to official “competency-based” certificates recognised by official training boards).

For many years, ACFE has pushed the ACE sector toward accredited training, away from the non-accredited programs* – now known as “pre-accredited” training. Now they’re pushing the other way, because it’s the only kind of training they’re allowed to fund.

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Good on the Victorian government for attempting to change the sector. Change can be really good when it’s informed by compassion, understanding and the need for balance. Maybe there is a need for change here:

• Maybe there are some unscrupulous education providers who take the money and don’t deliver. [They're in the minority.]
• Perhaps some Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes smudge the funding a little, by packing classes so full that people withdraw, but still taking the money for all who enrolled.
• Perhaps some ACE providers need to think about expanding their funding options, and increasing their full-fee-paying loads.
• Perhaps some students keep studying for years without returning to work, because they’re lazy and incompetent. [Most are struggling with our "post-capitalistic" economy which is increasingly weighted against people with low-level education.]

However this set of changes is giving every impression of being a massively foul bungled operation, with rules that exist only inside the heads of whichever operative you ask at the time.

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(*Non-accredited programs have traditionally been denigrated by economic hard-heads in blue suits as airy fairy macrame and water aerobics for middle class retired citizens.. however these pre-accredited programs are accurately recognised by community development workers and adult literacy and basic education (ALBE) teachers as vital to strengthening community cohesion and providing a means for disadvantaged and marginalised people to re-connect with community, employment options, as well as their own ability to learn.)

[These statements do not reflect the opinions of my employer or any of my colleagues. i wouldn’t want to suggest for a moment that the ACE sector is seething with rage.

In fact the Victorian ACE sector is well versed in responding to change and adversity with an extraordinary level of level-headed creativity and flexibility.

Some people have said that this could be a time of great opportunity for organisations prepared to be creative and flexible.

Okay fine the glass is half full.

But why is the glass locked in a glass cabinet?

..and who set the glass on fire?

Links:

• AceVic response to the initial reform proposals
• Skills Victoria, formerly known as OTFE or office of training and further education
• Adult Community and Further Education (ACFE)
• Cath Campbell from the Australian education union (AEU) tells us how these changes are impacting in TAFE too, at TAFE4all.
• (ACFE is now part of the former Department of Victorian communities (DVC), currently known as Dept of Planning and community development (DPCD))
• The AQF is the Australian qualifications framework, from which we derive all the information about certificate levels: (a) direct link (b) on wikipedia
• Photo credits: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks:  photo credit: roberthuffstutter,  photo credit: Jeremy Brooks, photo credit: ?ellie?

Wendell the Canadian adult literacy blogger recently had me thinking about the nature of hope, and also hopelessness.

He wrote recently, in “Pedagogies for the Oppressed” about how the adult literacy learners in his classroom became interested in public affairs, during the Obama Hope campaign, and enthusiastically studied the stories of the US civil rights movement. However now that enthusiasm has faded and been replaced by a more familiar apathy or even cynicism.

In my experience, adult literacy learners often have a sense of helplessness in the face of public affairs (don’t we all!) This usually expresses itself in a lack of interest. It’s one of the ironies of modern democracy, that most people wind up feeling disempowered and apathetic.

What was amazing to me was the way Obama’s election stirred so much positive regard around the world, and yes the US civil rights movement became like a beacon of possibility.

It’s inspiring that Wendell’s learners were so interested at the time.

He’s right though, over time, unless people are actively involved in some local community action.. they’ll start to see that high-level politicking as out of their reach and irrelevant once again. Paulo Freire was very much about using literacy to get people actively involved in taking local action for change.

i’ve never found it easy to inspire learners into community action.

But back in the days when the “employability skills” were known as the General curriculum options (GCO) of the Certificate of General Education for Adults (CGEA).. learning activities based around community action could be matched to the certificates reasonably well. Community action could be relevant not only in people’s lives, but also to their accreditation and literacy learning processes.

i wonder if that’s still the case..

One thing i found inspiring about the ’08 US campaign was the way that Obama’s people trained about 11,000 local community activists in the ways of taking action. So that the election win would not be just about change in Washington, but also enabling local change in communities across the nation.

(Or am i imagining that? i can find no reference to it among the anti-socialist bile washing through the US internet airwaves.)

You’re so right Wendell, pinning your hopes on a distant leader won’t wash in the long run.

People need to get active in their community to feel really empowered.

So, how do we make that happen..?

Links:

• Wendell’s Qualities Literacies Communities blogspot
• His post on “Pedagogies and the Oppressed“
• photo credit: JSmith Photo
• photo credit: JSmith Photo

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing all my data…

How many times do i have to learn the lesson: don’t use your portable usb drive as your only backup option, even if it does have over 300Gb of space on it. This is the 3rd time in 2 years i’ve had a usb portable drive collapse under the pressure of.. ordinary daily use.

Windows tells me there’s a “read/write error” and suddenly that 160Gb of precious data is unavailable. Corrupt. Vanished. Collections of software, videos, backup data from various work projects.. plus many articles relating to digital literacies and e-learning.

Aaaagh.

Boo.

Time to send the disk off to a data recovery shop?

Reminds me of a double-page spread once featured in the Age Green Guide, where 3 writers told of their dramas with backup, lessons learned, and the software apps they’d decided to trust with their weekly backup shifts. They all recommended apple mac time machine, from memory.

The 4th article said basically, “Don’t worry about it, you’re going to lose all your data at some point, stop hoarding information, and stop being so attached to it.”

After the fact, that 4th article was the most useful with its Zen, non-technical approach.

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Post-script:

The other day my home windows machine refused to boot, so i loaded kubuntu Linux from a USB stick – which worked perfectly. Strangely enough, this operating system could see all the data on that portable usb drive that failed last year. The one that neither windows nor mac could read.

Hooray.

Recovery.

Thanks Ubuntu Linux!!