Study Of Practice-oriented Vocational Education Programs

At the present time, the vocational curriculum in our country has got into an embarrassed situation. On one hand, teachers feel difficult in teaching, and students feel difficult in learning; on the other hand, people in industry complain that vocational school doesn't give students the knowledge that is needed in work. This situation results in the low-grade education in vocational school, so the reform of vocational curriculum is necessitous. At the theory level, the systemic research on vocational curriculum is always absent too, though many practical models has been developed in other countries. I want to contribute a little to vocational curriculum by this research, which is the main reason that I choose this field as my dissertation research.I have always been sticking to the principle of combining theory with practice in this research. At the first, I have carried out many investigations on vocational curriculum in our country in order to catch the problems as exact as possible, and the experiment of vocational curriculum reform has been carried out in Shanghai Pharmaceutical School and Ningpo Xinggang Vocational School. At the second, I have collected and read much literature by library, bookshop, web and colleague. At the third, I have consulted many professionals in the related field. Step by step framework of the theory is formed gradually, and at last I finished my dissertation.I believe that we should find out the logic core before constructing a rigorous theory framework of vocational curriculum. In this work we have many choices, for example theory, technology, intellectual process, society, interest, work process and so on. In practice, we choose theory, which results in the academic drift in vocational curriculum. I think that the logic core should be work process, and so we should get vocational curriculum structure from work structure, not knowledge structure. So I call the new vocational curriculum as practice-directed vocational curriculum, which means that I want to reconstruct vocational curriculum by putting the work practice into the core of vocational. The instrument of work is technology, and so the logic core of vocational curriculum is technical practice too. So the construction of practice-directed vocational curriculum should be based on the understanding of the essence of technology and the character of technological knowledge.The academic drift of vocational curriculum was formed at the background of theoretic technology, lifelong learning, knowledge-based society and so on. With the number of knowledge increases quickly, people feel fluster, and so many educatorwant to find out a steady structure in education. In order to reach this aim, many educator put emphasis on scientific knowledge or theoretical knowledge. This is the so-called strengthening basic knowledge. This viewpoint is sustained by two paradigms, i.e. technology is the application of science, and practice is the application of theory. These two paradigms are misapprehended at present time, which result that theoretical knowledge is put to the core of vocational curriculum, and when the concept of school of general education move up, and is looked as the concept of school of the whole education system, this situation is strengthened more.Then, the character of technical knowledge is identified. I think that technology is essentially one kind of activity. The character of technical knowledge that is the key element of technology is very different from the character of scientific knowledge whose function is to understand our world. Six characters of technical knowledge are identified, which is the character of'for making', 'thing-y-ness thinking', 'embedded in context', 'complex', 'procedural', and 'organized around task'. All these character can be concluded into the character of 'practice-based', which means of practice, for practice, and by practice. This character determines that practice is the key of vocational curriculum. In this dissertation, the process of practice-directed vocational curriculum develo...