Curriculum connections : lessons from post-compulsory vocational education and training

This chapter explores curriculum's capacity to create educational connections by interrogating a previously marginalized field of education provision and research: post-compulsory vocational education and training, incorporating senior secondary schooling, Technical and Further Education Colleges and their non-Australian equivalents, and private providers. Framed by selected concepts from contemporary curriculum theorising, the chapter draws on evidence presented in the recent issues of VOCAL: The Australian Journal of Vocational Education and Training in Schools. Specifically, the authors argue that post-compulsory vocational education and training provides several examples of curriculum creating powerful connections for young adult learners that must be understood against the backdrop of broader socio-economic trends, enacted locally, nationally, and globally. More broadly, this field makes a distinctive and important contribution to wider research endeavors, related to teaching and learning.