Professor Leon Tikly
KEYNOTE: Transforming TVET for Sustainable Futures: Challenges for theory, policy and practice?
Keynote Abstract: TVET is identified in global and regional policy discourses as having a significant contribution to make to the realisation of the SDGs and 'inclusive green growth' in Africa through supporting sustainable livelihoods and entrepreneurship, reducing youth unemployment and the provision of green skills. However, the idea of inclusive green growth it is argued is both contradictory and largely rhetorical given the continuing reliance within many African economies on extractivist policies that are highly destructive for the environment, for inequalities and for the realisation of sustainable livelihoods. TVET policy and practice also continues to be framed largely within Western, productivist discourses that see TVET as developing entrepreneurial citizens within increasingly fragmented and privatised systems of education and training. These agendas it is argued present an idealised view of education and training as a panacea for the contradictions inherent within dominant, growth-led models of development. The paper argues instead for a greater emphasis on the idea of just transitions in which transformation in TVET policy and practice is linked to wider processes of economic, social and environmental transformation. Important here is for TVET to focus on the development of a wider range of democratic, environmental and cultural as well as practical capabilities (opportunity freedoms) that can empower young people to realise futures that they have reason to value. The paper concludes with some implications for policy, practice and research.
Presentation from JVET Conference 2021
Slides from JVET Conference 2021
Questions to Professor Leon Tikly at JVET Conference 2021
About Leon Tikly: Professor Leon Tikly is UNESCO Chair in Inclusive, Good Quality Education and Global Chair in Education at the University of Bristol, alongside co-directing the Centre for International and Comparative Education in the School of Education.
His key focus is education and training in low income countries and in particular, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently PI on a Global Challenges Research Fund Network Plus entitled Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures, having previously directed projects on language supportive textbooks and pedagogy in Rwanda, and a DfID funded Research Programme Consortium on Implementing Education Quality in Low Income Countries.
Whilst much of Leon’s empirical work has a practical focus, his work is underpinned by theoretical questions. These include how to conceptualise education and training for sustainable development as an aspect of the ‘postcolonial condition’, the impact of globalisation on the low-income world, and how to understand the relationship between the quality of education and training, inequality and social justice. His recent (2020) book published by Routledge on Education for Sustainable Development in the Postcolonial World: Towards a Transformative Agenda for Africa, seeks to bring together these theoretical concerns.’
