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taught through addressing the problems with customers’ cars, this approach allowed students to learn some routine practice tasks related to identified car problems. Through this, those students who leave just after one year of learning automotive mechanics may land themselves work opportunities even though these may be restricted to the competencies they have. These are what Lucas et al. (2012) call the contemporary challenges that a vocational pedagogy may have to engage in a specific setting.
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Far from it – the lecturers would not be totally idle. They had to make the best of finding some work for the students to do, and one lecturer indicated in the pre-observation interviews:
Transcription of interview
Lecturer number: MITC2 Date: 27 July 2015
We are two. We can’t say, “You do this today, I will do that tomorrow” ... you will find that maybe you are not able to do what you promised to do… then the trainees are left behind. So we just go according to our turns. We have the file for the course content. Then the other ticks, showing now I was covering this. And I know what the other was teaching, because I ask. I also teach a little bit about auto electrics, because I like that.
I ask if the other teacher has covered something, then I decide what to teach. Sometimes I decide on what we can do at the time. Sometimes we wait for the customer car, and see what we have to fix. We do training on production, so we concentrate on fixing cars that customers bring.
In retrospect, I ask myself how I didn’t see this and continued to request a teaching timetable even after these interviews. And MITC1 had made similar comments:
Transcription of interview
Lecturer number: MITC1 Date: 22 May 2015
When we started many of our trainees did not have much education... some could not write English. Now many have Form 3, even some have Form 5. Last year we had one who could not write English, and we used orals for his assessments. We are doing on the job training. They need to learn by doing. We do not do much theory… we show them… people bring cars.
Apart from an old engine that MITC 2 said he personally brought to the institution to assist his teaching, and the odd old engine or cylinder head, there were no teaching models in the workshop. Yet, despite these challenges, the lecturers found ways to specialize their students:
Transcription of interview
Lecturer number: MITC1 Date: 27 January 2016 We wait for a car to be serviced, but if there is no car we use the few models we have…like the cylinder head there. We dismantle and reassemble, but after I have done a demonstration.
Plan on my own what I want to do with the trainees...maybe I wanted to do brakes with the students. Then when a customer’s car comes we end up attending to the problem of that car.
When we dismantle we name, we identify, we describe a bit. When we are dismantling or reassembling I try to rotate learners in groups so that everyone has a chance.
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The problem we have here is that we are not able to let every trainee to do every practical task and to develop a lot of practice. You find that a car comes here, it has one problem...maybe brakes...you assign 6 trainees to work with you, the rest are not involved. You hope the next time you will give some of the others a turn but you find there is no car coming…or you find that a car that comes has a different problem.
In their quest to improve the specialization of students into automotive mechanics, the lecturers had ideas about how the institution should contribute:
Transcription of interview
Lecturer number: MITC2 Date: 22 January 2016 The institutions should buy more teaching models. Technology is moving forward and there are newer engines that we have not been exposed to. Trainees can work on these models, dismantle and reassemble them many times. We also need a complete car for trainees to learn about the various systems of a car like brake boosters. One trainee who is on attachment with a garage came here the other day to complain. They asked him to work on a car with an air brake system and he had never seen anything like it… and he was saying why we not exposed them to this braking system. The other thing is the institution should buy us consumable workshop material like oil, distilled water and brake fluid...it should not be like this is a waste of money.
The second lecturer, MITC1, when asked what changes the institution could introduce that would assist the automotive lecturers in specialising students, needed no time to think about the question. He said:
Transcription of interview
Lecturer number: MITC1 Date: 27 January 2016 Grouping of trainees…Our entry requirements are too open. You can come here with Standard 5 or with Form 5. Maybe we should have two groups and train some at a lower level and others at a higher level… Also the numbers we train are too high. The leaders want money, so they want more and more learners, yet us we are doing practicals and we need to have fewer learners to give them more practice.
Such issues as restricted resources, widely ranging student abilities and lecturers not having adequate access to newer cars with more advanced technologies, severely limited the pedagogic choices that the lecturers could make while teaching. They also impacted the level of skill and competency that the students would take with them when they completed their training and looked for work as automotive mechanics.
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During the observations of lessons, there were a limited number of instances in which the pedagogy a lecturer was using would develop would achieve the outcomes craftsmanship, business-like attitudes, or wider skills for growth. The vocational outcome of craftsmanship appeared in the first lesson on clutch fitting. There were, nonetheless, some instances in which lecturers, as part of their pedagogy, involved a learner in making decisions that dealt with the social elements of the job, which constitute an aspect of business-like attitudes. The section which follows illustrates these.