A community for expertise development – South African vocational colleges and their internal and external social characteristics

In recent decades, reforms of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems have mostly focused on the needs of employers to produce graduates ready for the labour market. The academic literature has extensively criticised the narrow focus on the performance of work tasks at the expense of other types of knowledge in the curriculum. In our paper, we reflect on the evidence that a curriculum that delivers the appropriate development of expertise can be associated with colleges that incorporate certain social characteristics. These characteristics were found in the way colleges deliberately build collaborative relationships internally through teamwork, conflict resolution among their disciplinary experts, and externally through partnerships with employers. In addition, those colleges externally mediated employer’s skills expectations of students and internally translated the curriculum. Our analysis is based on a study of well-resourced vocational colleges in South Africa, two of which emerged as successful, in contrast to one college that failed to contribute to the appropriate professional development of its students which differed in that the latter lacked these social characteristics. Thus, in addition to resources as an appropriate precondition, we argue that the development of e