(Re)thinking equity: the spatial and racial dynamics of managing learning and learning to manage

Abstract

The vocational education and training (VET) sector has experienced substantial change in the past decade, characterised by ascendant industry‐driven needs and mantras of flexibility and responsiveness. A number of public policies underpin these changes and simultaneously point to the need to manage diverse employing bodies, industry standards, learning pathways and flexible pedagogies. Learning is big business, as indeed is the business of managing learning, and women are increasingly visible as workers, educators and managers in Australian VET. This article draws on interview and focus‐group data provided by seven women to explore the challenges of managing learning and learning to manage, in systems which are simultaneously spaces of equity and racialised spaces of sustained inequality. While much work has addressed the managerialist ethos underpinning funding arrangements for contemporary VET providers, an unexplored dimension of this context is the complicated and complicitous position women managers find themselves in as they manage the colonial spaces of VET. This article attempts a conversation across contemporary equity discourses, postcolonial and critical interrogations of whiteness, and educational management literature questioning the usefulness of contemporary literature on managing learning and learning to manage, premised as it is on Eurocentric views of management theory.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by an Australian Technology Network Grant made available through the University of South Australia. The project gained ethics approval from the university’s Human Research Ethics Committee. I am deeply indebted to Lyn Kerkham and Lana Zannettino for research assistance in earlier phases of the project, to an anonymous reviewer who prompted me to make the links with Bourdieu more explicit, and to the women who provided the data for this article. They continue to press me to listen to their experiences of learning to manage.