Work in Progress

Advancing equity: Merging 'bottom-up' initiatives with 'top-down' strategies

• Summary
• Purpose
• Approach
• Research questions
• Methodology
• Organisations

Summary

Purpose

The purpose of this research is understand the ways VET institutions adapt to practitioner learning about how to improve equity outcomes and manage diversity - learning acquired primarily through participation in funded projects and other grounded 'bottom-up' initiatives.

Approach

Interviews, Focus Group

Research questions

There are three research questions here. The first two directly relate to the effective integration of diversity management; the third concerns the tools for qualitative enterprise research:

1. In what ways do RTOs - in particular publicly funded RTOs - change to accommodate new good practice and thinking, especially that which has been temporarily generated by in-house practitioners through project or other short-term special resourcing?

2. Is innovative good practice sustained or more effectively replicated in settings which have consciously changed in response to the original 'new' knowledge? And, if so, in what ways and how may that learning, in turn, be shared and applied? One ancillary question that will be specifically addressed is whether framing the issue as 'managing diversity' or as meeting the needs of 'targeted equity groups' makes any difference.

3. Among the tools which have been used to gauge the culture of organisations in various research domains - for example, cultural probes, story-telling, the use of metaphor, relationship mapping and policy 'impact' filters - do some lend themselves particularly well to investigating VET organisations and interactions and, if so, how exactly?

Methodology

There are three key aspects to the methodology

1. selection of projects and TAFE institutes

This iterative process will work from two directions: identifying appropriate projects undertaken between 1998 and 2003 and identifying TAFE institutes and other RTOs that illustrate a range of 'adaptive' responses. A matrix of the key factors for the final selection will be constructed (including geographic spread, equity group, type of institution, type of project, etc). Seven sites will be finally selected: five TAFE Institutes and two private RTOs.

2. analysis of parallel research and information

The literature, national and international, will be scanned to find studies and examples of systems thinking, complex adaptive systems (in the social sciences) and change agency. We would expect to contact those researchers whose work appears particularly relevant or interesting and discuss with them their work and ours. Another tactic that has worked well for us in other conceptually sophisticated research is for team members to write 'briefing papers' or 'prompt pieces' about key ideas which serve both as an on-going stimulus for team discussion and as a fulcrum for refining our thinking.

3. field work in TAFE Institutes

This project gives us an unparalleled opportunity to move beyond the standard methodology of in-depth interview, focus group and perusal of documents, evaluations and artifacts to explore new ways of acquiring qualitative insight into how organisations respond to demonstrated examples of good practice and what limits an adaptive institutional response.The array of 'imaginative tools' that we will apply in investigating the interface between bottom-up initiatives and institutional/system policies and constraints include cultural probes; story-telling; metaphors; network mapping; and 'impact' filters. One feature of the new tools that particularly attracts us is that they should make the interaction with our 'subjects' - the practitioners and managers - more interesting and stimulating for them.

Organisations

The project brings together experienced researchers from five organisations:

AAAJ Consulting Group: Jane Figgis and Anne Butorac

Ithaca Group: Rod McDonald

Quay: Mary Dickie

CIT (CURVE): Berwyn Clayton

Australian Learning and Intermediary Services: Jeff Malley

• Search VOCEDplus

• Visit LSAY website