Name: DEISI DEFFUNE
Sector: Vocational Education and Social Service of Industrial Workers Affiliated Organization: (optional)
E-mail: ddeffune@uol.com.br
DEISI DEFFUNE is a Brazilian economist specialized on economic and social planning. She now works for the corporative board of the Industrial Social Service-Sesi and the National Service of Industrial Apprenticeship – Senai, in the state of São Paulo. She worked in the Industrial Economics Department of the Technical Research Institute of the State of São Paulo (IPT) during the 1970s and as occupational analysis and labour market researcher at Senai during the 1980s. From 1990 to 2003 worked as independent consultant in the fields of professional profiles, national standard classification of occupations and labour market.
CVA Report - May 2010
Historicity as pedagogical tool for vocational education
It is possible to perceive the prejudice against vocational education when we watch the French film called “Entre les Murs”. At the end of the film, a young student tells the teacher that she did not learn anything during the school year and that she does not want to follow the route of VET.
In Brazil, this kind of prejudice is more common among middle class. In general, academic study is more socially prestigious than vocational education. On the other hand, VET is high valued for the lower income classes and constitutes a hope for a better salary. But even for the lower income classes, there is a difference in social prestige among the occupations. Some are most valued and others are less valued.
In 1993-94 Brazil was undergoing a period of low growth and high inflation. The apparel industry tried to increase its productivity to remain on the market. There was a great effort to adopt new ways of organizing work that involved changes in VET and therefore an occupational and labour market survey was carried out in 192 industries of two geographical areas in order to subsidize the updating of the offered course in the state of São Paulo.
The aim of research was the sewing phase which employed 64% of the workers in apparel industry and had a low educated contingent of workers, which schooling oscillated between 5 to 8 years of elementary education.
After the systematization and analysis of the research data, a team of educators was in charge of carrying out the VET engineering in order to organize a modular curriculum.
Assuming that all occupations are equally important the educators used pedagogical tools in order to try to overcome prejudice in one of the less prestigious occupation – sewer machine operator - in which the work conditions are often precarious.
One of the first duties of the team was to aggregate apparel products in families in order to organize the modules for teaching. In the industrial sewing, a family of products is an aggregation of pieces of clothing made with similar machines, fabrics and operations, like the family of shirt, jacket and blouse.
The following example illustrates a way in which the historicity was introduced to humanize the VET curriculum, in order to give the students an opportunity to learn beyond the techniques, to understand the cultural artifacts produced by their occupations throughout the times, in a contextualized way. Students were taught the historical functions of the artifacts and their parts and were invited to create new functions and combine them with old ones. They learned how to transfer skills among different situations and above all, they developed the sense of research.
One of the learning tools developed by the team was a catalog of the parts of clothing, such as types of collars, types of cuffs. The products and their parts were historically contextualized, trying to help students to understand that changes in the clothing come from social, political and economic situations - in other words, to give them the idea that they are producing a cultural product and to teach them how to relate the design of some pieces with different periods of history and culture. On the head of each page of the catalog the name of the piece was written in four languages: ex cuff, “punho”, “puño”, “manchete”. In this way, the students were encouraged to consult catalogs and fashion magazines in other languages than Portuguese.
For the “family” of the “shirt, jacket and blouse” various didactical materials were prepared to show how the function of the shirt changed over time. In past times, shirts were used as underwear by men and by women in order to protect them from the sweat and, during the bath, to protect the skin at the time of rubbing. T-shirts were also used as underwear by men before they became a popular external cloth.
The published material showed that the shirt was also not equal for everybody. The fabrics and details of clothing, the collars, the cuffs and the sleeves varied according to the social class of the individual.
The process of historicity covered all components of the shirt, like the pockets that were supposed to store tools and the yoke, used to strengthen the shoulder and back region where the parcels were transported. A short film was made to illustrate the historical evolution of the shirt and with interviews with shirt makers. Day by day the students became more familiar with the historical development of their crafts. Students with low level of literacy, many of them functionally semi-illiterate, now began to dominate the technical jargon and became interested in seeking the history of other parts of clothing, in magazines, in the wardrobes of the movies and so on.
In the lower social class of the Metropolitan Area of Sao Paulo, from where the VET students of apparel industry came from, the program was known as “tree course”, due to the alternatives of the learning itineraries presented in the leaflet of the course. These gave them the opportunities of employability and workability during the course route. Each week new entrants were admitted and welcomed. The learning process was personalized and sometimes the students worked in teams, simulating cellular manufacturing. During the course the students used to visit industries to plan the next step of their itineraries.
With the worsening economic crisis, it was impossible to maintain the coaching system due to expenditure reasons and the project was discontinued after five years. But while it lasted, it resulted in a great service to students and industry.
As economy recovers, some ideas nurtured during the reported experience have been cloned to other VET programs.
The historicity, in ”lato sensu”, used as a pedagogical tool, helped to create in students a sense of belonging, an identity with the culture of their occupations and furthermore to understand the importance of the previous workers in building the expertise and skills of today.
