Opening the black box of beauty teaching in Australian Vocational and Education Training: A case of beauty teachers forming alliances with networks

This study opened the black box of beauty teaching in Australia to investigate, firstly, what is needed to teach beauty, and secondly, how beauty teachers implemented a beauty training package. Opening the black box utilised the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach of revealing the people and materials of a little known teaching practice where clients were needed for teaching and assessing in a simulated beauty salon.

Actor-Network Theory’s (ANT) concepts of actors, networks, black box, obligatory passage points, translations, intermediaries, and an immutable mobile, were used to investigate how people and materials were assembled by heterogeneous engineers (beauty teachers), to implement the Hairdressing and Beauty Services Training Package. The sociology of translation examined the implementation of one unit of competency in that training package.

Drawing on a case study of eleven beauty teachers in Australia’s VET sector, data was collected via individual semi-structured interviews, publicly available documents, photographs, and artefacts. A six-phase thematic analysis process was undertaken.

Three findings were identified. First, beauty teachers formed alliances with three networks of the beauty industry, the VET sector, and the beauty teacher’s simulated beauty salon. Second, everybody (teachers, students, clients, and employers), and everything (a training package, beauty products, and compliance documents), in those networks counted when teaching beauty. Third, in addition to their qualifications and experience, beauty teachers’ motivation, passion and love of teaching kept competency-based teaching real in simulated beauty salons.

These findings are significant because they suggested alternatives to using human bodies for beauty teaching and are significant for mentoring teachers in transition from being beauty therapists to becoming beauty teachers.