Internationalisation of Vocational Education and Training

Introduction

The Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector has experienced a steady growth in the number of international student enrolments since 1990 and the international student population enrolled in vocational education has significantly changed since 2005. VET was the fastest growing sector in the number of international student enrolments between 2005 and 2009 and currently ranks behind the university by volume of enrolments. In 2009, international students constituted 13.6% of the total VET student body (National Centre for Vocational Education Research [NCVER], 2009) and by December 2011, there were 171,237 international students enrolled in the vocational education sector (Australian Education International [AEI], 2012). Students from the Asian region represent 85% of international students in Australian vocational education while the VET curriculum and pedagogy has been largely influenced by European traditions. Australian contemporary VET has been characterized by the changing nature of its student body as the result of the growth of international students, its associated changing teaching and learning environment, changing workplace practices, career mobility across vocational fields, as well as global skills mobility and the demands of the rising knowledge economy. These factors have created the need for the vocational education sector to reposition its programs and pedagogy.

There has been a lack of theoretical and empirical research on the learning characteristics of international students and how pedagogy may be addressed in response to the learning needs and expectations of international students in vocational education while extensive research has been devoted to these issues in higher education (Caroll & Ryan, 2005; Doherty & Singh, 2005a; Kettle, 2005; Leask, 2009; Tran, 2009, 2011). Within the vocational education sector in Australia and overseas there is a small body of literature that has focussed on the growing diversity of the student body in VET, in particular on international students, but this has been limited to studying literacy levels, absenteeism, visa noncompliance and how internationals view the teaching practices of their host countries (Gunn-Lewis & Malthus, 2000; Leong & Pope, 1999; McCracken, 2000; Volet & Pears, 1994; Watson, 2003). Smith’s (2010b) case study with two vocational education institutes is among the very few that examines practical implications for teaching international students in vocational education. This research suggests the distinctive challenges facing the provision of training for international VET students. These include arranging work placements, preparing students for the demands of Australian workplaces, and finding part-time work.

In response to the above gaps in the literature, this article addresses how the flow of international students into the Australian VET sector has impacted on vocational education pedagogic practices. It draws on an Australian Research Council (ARC)–funded project that includes 50 interviews with teachers, program managers, and CEOs from VET institutes in three states of Australia including New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria. This article discusses the emergence of international pedagogy in vocational education that enables learners to develop necessary skills, knowledge, and attributes in response to the new demands of the changing workplace context and transnational global skills and knowledge mobility. It addresses a number of important issues concerning the interrelationship of international pedagogy in vocational education and learner-centered education, notions of productive and inclusive pedagogies, intellectual resource based approach, cultural diversity, and internationalization. The study also shows that the presence of international students in vocational education classrooms and their diverse learning characteristics have created new challenges as well as possibilities for teachers to transform their pedagogic practices and contribute to reshaping the vocational education pedagogy landscape. In many cases teachers have to “learn on the spot” and engage themselves in both professional and personal development. Most of the good practices initiated by individual teachers are ad hoc rather than being shared and recognized at the departmental and institutional levels or becoming common practices for teaching international students within Australian vocational education. In particular, this research highlights a critical need to provide more adequate and coherent professional development for VET teachers in relation to how to adapt pedagogy and work effectively with international learners.

The International VET Context and International Pedagogy

Since mid-2009, the international VET sector in Australia has been facing new challenges as a consequence of the collapse of a number of “dodgy” private colleges, the negative publicity for Australia on student security, the rising Australian dollar, the Federal government’s tightening of the issuing of student visas, and the government’s amendment of the skilled migration scheme. At the present, the government’s new skilled migration policy restrict subjects popular with many international students in vocational education, limit graduates’ ability to gain immigrant status, and require independent skills testing of graduates (Tran & Nyland, 2011). As a result, it is now unlikely for international VET students to gain migrant status to stay and participate in the Australian workforce, which has contributed to stemming the flow of international students to Australian vocational education. This suggests that vocational education programs will need to become less migration-dependent. In fact, these above changes require the sector to negotiate between the demand from the local industry to offer a country-specific program and at the same time the pressure to offer an internationalized and broader program if it is to remain a globally competitive vocational education supplier.

At the moment, VET qualifications are designed to provide learners with skills, knowledge, and attributes required for Australian industry practices. They consist of units of competency that specify workplace tasks and roles. The focus of competency-based training and training packages on specific industry-defined competencies has led vocational education educators to place much emphasis on performance or “doing” rather than underpinning knowledge (Smith, 2010a; Wheelahan, 2010). The knowledge classified in training packages is derived from workplaces rather than disciplinary systems of meaning (Wheelahan, 2008, 2010). In other words, training packages shape the VET curriculum and pedagogy in the manner that it aims to provide students with “access to knowledge in its particularised form” but not with “the means to relate it to its general and principled structure and system of meaning” (2008, p. 4). Wheelahan challenges the principle underpinning competency based training (CBT) because it assumes that “outcomes can be achieved by teaching to the outcomes directly and in doing so ignores the complexity that is needed to create capacity which go beyond the level of experience in the contextual and situated” (2010, p. 138). Furthermore, in a recent review of 20 years of competency-based training in vocational education, Smith (2010a) pointed out that VET teachers have learnt to passively accept competency-based training and training packages rather than engaging critically with pedagogical issues that are key to their delivery of training packages (p. 62). The need to demonstrate compliance and the auditing culture seem to be a constraint for teachers’ active and critical focus on pedagogical review and innovation (Guthrie, 2008; Smith, 2010a). In addition, the complexity of units of competency makes it challenging for teachers to deliver them and this situation clearly prevents teachers from transforming VET pedagogy (Smith, 2010a).

In the broader current context of international education, Hellesten and Reid observed the critical need to recontextualize “pedagogy to include systematic notions of teaching and learning in international contexts and with international students and curricula” (2008, p. 2). The authors highlight that many pedagogical practices that deal with international education are successfully implemented in specific contexts but remain unpublished and unrecognized. There is also a need to theorize specific teaching tools that have been effectively used by individual teachers and embed them in the broader context of international education. In relation to international vocational education and training, there should be a better recognition that pedagogies that address international education and international contexts are integral to contemporary vocational education pedagogy and curriculum development in a broader sense. The current globalized context has led to the need for all students in vocational education to be trained to work in an intercultural context, so the internationalization of the VET curriculum and pedagogy will benefit not only international students but also domestic students. In particular, there is a critical need to look for evidence-based pedagogical practices that are central for improving the teaching and learning of the growing diverse student body in the VET sector.

In the wake of research on the teaching and learning of international students within the host education systems, surprisingly there seems to be an insufficiency of scholarly work that is devoted to conceptualizing what is meant by “international pedagogy” and theorize the pedagogical practices that may exemplify “international pedagogy.” Several researchers in international education have made a connection between international pedagogy and cultural inclusivity and diversity principles (Gesche & Makeham, 2008; Hellsten, 2008; Hirst & Brown, 2008; Leask, 2008). There are four different trends in relation to this connection. An established stream of the literature has explored the divergent learning characteristics and learning needs of international students and offered suggestions on how teaching staff can develop culturally inclusive practices that accommodate the diversity of the student body (Doherty & Singh, 2005b; Leask, 2008; Volet & Pears, 1994). Another trend of the scholarly literature that also addresses the relationship between international pedagogy and cultural inclusivity principle tends to focus more on the value of making transnational connections with international students’ diverse existing and prior experience through productive pedagogies (Singh & Han, 2010; Tran, 2010). This body of the literature explores the approaches involved in validating the knowledge, experiences, and skills that international students bring with them to the international classroom and using them as useful resources for enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. Third, other authors argue that international pedagogy should advocate the integration of international examples, case studies, and knowledge and professional practices from diverse cultures into the teaching and learning discourse (Hellsten, 2008; Leask, 2008). Fourth, Hellsten (2008) proposes that an international pedagogical approach should be reciprocal and reflective in that it facilitates cultural engagements and the development of mutual cultural understandings by teaching staff and learners. Thus it can be seen that international pedagogy is most often understood as cultural inclusivity and diversity principles and practices.

Influenced by Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology and Bakhtin’s notions of dialogicality and addressivity, Hirst and Brown (2008) refer to international pedagogy as a “dialogic relationship.” They argue that this relationship requires “managing the tensions in collaborative activity and enabling diverse student representations of problem tasks to be utilized by all as creative resources” (p. 195). At the heart of this dialogical practice is the negotiation of different interpretations and ways of constructing knowledge between students of diverse backgrounds. Thus international pedagogy is seen from this perspective as being related to fostering the diversity of the representations of resources from diverse students through collaborative learning.

The Study

This research involves 50 interviews with VET teachers, student coordinators, and managers. The directors of international programs were approached and asked to circulate an invitation to participate in the study to staff involved in teaching and working with international students. The interviewees were from a range of fields including cookery, hairdressing, hospitality management, law, finance, accounting, building, and carpentry. Semistructured interviews with open-ended questions were undertaken. The interviews aimed to document teachers’ perspectives on the validity of competency-based training in teaching international students and how they have adapted their teaching content and pedagogy to address the learning characteristics of international students. The author has also maintained e-mail and telephone dialogues with a number of staff respondents and subsequently held informal meetings with some teachers to clarify issues that remained unclear during the first interviews. Ethics approval was sought prior to data collection from the University Human Research Ethics Committee where the author is based. To protect the confidentiality of the participants, their names and institutes are kept anonymous.

The face-to-face interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The analysis was inductive and aimed to identify emergent themes and patterns (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The researcher read the interview transcripts several times and coded interview data. A short report that focuses on preliminary analysis of selected quotes under specific themes was then sent to teacher participants for further comments and reader checking. The principal features of international pedagogy in vocational education presented in this article have been conceptualized based on the empirical data. The teaching practices and strategies shared by the teachers have been analyzed and linked to the conceptual principles about internationalization of the curriculum and teaching and learning in vocational education suggested in the literature. The researcher then located these approaches in the broader context of international VET in Australia.

In particular, to interpret different dimensions of international pedagogy employed by the vocational teachers this article focuses on, I have drawn on the concept of professional self-narratives (Sachs, 2001). According to Sachs (2001), “teachers themselves construct these self-narratives, and they relate to their social, political and professional agendas . . . These self-narratives provide a glue for a collective professional identity” (pp.157-158). I have viewed the open-ended interviews with these teachers as the process where they unfold their professional self-narratives and make connection with the contextual and professional factors shaping their adaptation of pedagogy in response to internationalization.

The Development of International Pedagogy in Vocational Education and Training

In this section, I draw on the data from interviews with teachers to analyze teachers’ attempts to adapt their teaching and the different ways international VET pedagogy is indeed intertwined with learner-centered education, inclusive and productive practices, empowering pedagogy and pedagogy that promotes global skills mobility.Importantly, the process of internationalizing the content of the VET course and adopting the international pedagogic approach constructs international students not only as valued members in the class but also as global mobile citizens who are trained and empowered to be capable to work across national borders. In the following excerpts, interviewees articulated on how they position international students as active participants and contributors to the learning process, which is an important dimension of learner-centered pedagogy. There are 19 teachers from the study who supported this view.

Teaching doesn’t always come from the teacher only and it also comes in from other students to the class; particularly in a practical situation where we might be doing something the way that we, the teacher, would be just demonstrating it but we might have an international student there that would demonstrate it the way that their country does it and therefore that helps everybody else as well. So we’re all learning from the student rather than just the teacher. And that, I think, is a good part of that. (Bakery, TAFE, VIC)

Their contribution is in the fact that they bring the way they do it in their country, which everybody does it differently and you find out there’s always good ideas and bad ideas. You don’t have to use all the ideas but you can change things to suit what they do. Fortunately with our Building Code of Australia, it is a performance based code, it’s not a prescriptive code where you must do this, this and this. If you, as a prospective builder, can prove to me that the house you’re going to build out of matchsticks will stand up, I can pass it. And the same with internationals. If they come here and bring a different building method and they can prove that it’s going to work, we can use it. Why not? I mean, that’s what makes the world great, different ideas. (Building, TAFE, VIC)

I love working with international students. They are a great contribution, not only teaching us different cultures from their own country and what they, customs and experiences are. They also bring a lot of other skills and knowledge that we can learn from as well. So they bring a lot. They’re usually very good. I love my international students. They’re my preferred class to have to be honest. (Cookery, TAFE, QLD)

Other teachers mentioned how they drew on improvisation to help students contextualize the learning content and develop international vocational knowledge and skills

The students might be asked to pick a country—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam—and told, okay, your clients wants you to sell this product that’s unique for this particular country, say to a different audience than that you have a different target audience. So in that regard you could re-contextualise it. (Finance, TAFE, VIC)

In these above excerpts international students are seen as a resource for collective learning and as coproducers of alternative knowledge and skills that can contribute to broadening the vocational perspectives and practices of the whole student group, international and domestic students alike. Through this learning process, the whole class is given the opportunity to enhance their understandings of international experience, skills, and knowledge within the classroom context. Drawing on improvisation and contextualization of content, teachers engage class members in a reflective process to enhance their understanding of industry practices in different countries. This may be an important foundation for students to develop the ability to navigate different skills and knowledge and adapt to different cross-sectoral and transnational workplace contexts. Boud and Hawke (2003) criticize training packages as privileging technical skills over the development of learners’ capacity to navigate prescribed competencies and adapt them to new and diverse workplace contexts. Adopting international pedagogy as illustrated above, teachers indeed engage learners in the process to develop more adaptive attributes and prepare learners for more responsive and engaged workforce. In addition, such exposure to international experience and practice in a vocational field value-adds to the learning of the whole student population particularly in the Australian VET context where mandatory competency-based training and training packages are designed to equip learners with specific competencies suitable for the Australian industry only. International VET pedagogy thus reaches out beyond training packages and competency-based training to include the wider cross-border contexts and enrich students’ perspectives of transnational vocational practices.

Also the fact that the teachers position themselves as colearners in international education who are committed to enhancing their knowledge about industry practices in students’ home countries has an important educative implication. In so doing, the teachers demonstrate that this is a mutual learning process and both learners and teachers should take the responsibility to learn, adapt, and progress along with each other. Such a positive learning attitude is vital to building a learning community in the classroom and making all students feel encouraged to contribute to the collective process of developing skills, knowledge, and attributes. In a recent report that identifies the developments in pedagogic practices in vocational education, Figgis (2009) highlights exchanging professional knowledge and practices with other colleagues as one of the key qualities for vocational education teachers in their process of revisiting and transforming their practices. The teachers in this research demonstrate that actively exchanging professional skills and knowledge with their international learners is valuable, especially in the VET context where vocational practices are dynamic and contextually situated and many VET international learners used to be practitioners in their field of study in their home countries.

Internationalizing the content of the vocational education course nurtures the fundamental principle underpinning inclusive and diversity pedagogy. The pedagogic practices promoted by some of the teachers in this research offer a meaningful ethnorelative view on addressing the diversity associated with the growing presence of international students in the vocational education sector. That is, the diverse vocational practices in different countries should be valued and treated equally in the classroom. Within the current context in which Australian practices are often viewed to be superior to those of many Asian countries where around 85% of international VET students are from (Marginson, 2008), such an approach to internationalizing the learning content highlights that the Australian practice in their vocational field is not considered central to all realities or a superior way of doing things. Instead it should be regarded as one of the vocational practices relevant to a specific national context. Importantly, such an endeavor conveys the message that industry practices appear to be contextualized, deeply rooted in local contexts and appropriated based on distinctive characteristics of specific contexts. This pedagogical approach aims to raise the awareness of diversity with students and give them the opportunity to discuss the application of diverse practices in different contexts. In this respect, international pedagogy in vocational education echoes with the practice of internationalizing the curriculum as highlighted in the literature (Hellsten, 2008; Leask, 2008). Such an approach to internationalizing the teaching and learning content indeed moves beyond simply respecting and recognizing diversity to validating and utilizing diversity as important resources for the development of disciplinary knowledge and skills. Such an approach also assists with the enhancement of intercultural sensitivity and intercultural capacity among the class members. These attributes are imperative for both domestic and international students’ effective engagement in the increasingly interconnected future workplaces and particularly prepare students for transnational skills mobility.

Recognition of prior learning is an important dimension of teaching and learning vocational education and this is clearly demonstrated in the following examples offered by a hairdressing teacher and a hospitality teacher. Of the 50 teachers participating in the study, this view is quite common:

Yeah, respecting that if someone has been involved in hairdressing. There’s only so many ways you can cut hair. If you’re going to cut a straight line with a pair of scissors, how many different ways can you do it? And from what I’m gathering, as I said, I’m not a subject matter expert, I’m just a facilitator, but I’m getting international students that are qualified overseas and they’re learning one length hair cuts again. And there’s only so many ways that you can cut a straight line. That is so important. (Hairdressing, private college, VIC)

Recognition of prior learning . . . Especially when they did learn the cooking, so they know what happens back of house and they understand what happens front of house. And same with supervision to manage people and lead people and we related directly to hospitality. They have good experiences and that’s very good because they give good examples in the class rooms. (Hospitality, TAFE, QLD)

A large proportion of international VET students have already been practitioners in their home countries in the vocational field they are enrolled in and they have brought along a wealth of experience and skills to Australian learning context. International pedagogy in vocational education represents productive pedagogies as vocational knowledge and skills are extended based on critically validating and sharing students’ prior experience and existing knowledge. Pedagogy that focuses on critically validating international students’ intellectual and skills resources opens up the possibility for students themselves to engage in the process of construing and reconstruing their own experiences and existing skills. This approach is empowering for international students because they see themselves as playing a role in enriching the knowledge and skill formation of those involved in the learning process. This in turn nurtures the interest in learning. Thus, in addition to engaging students through productive pedagogies, international pedagogy in vocational education demonstrates features of empowering pedagogy. In this sense, vocational education pedagogy extends the scope of student-centeredness beyond simply making students feel respected and accommodating students’ learning needs (Knowles, 1990) to situating and validating their experiential and scholastic knowledge through the VET program and enriching vocational knowledge through making transnational skills and knowledge connections (Singh & Han, 2010).

The presence of international students in their classroom has placed VET teachers in the position to adapt their pedagogical practices to cater more effectively for this student cohort. Some teachers mentioned they have surveyed, read widely, and consciously searched for information related to their international students’ sociocultural backgrounds and industry practices in different countries. Teachers in the study were engaged in this learning process illustrated,

So I try to relate what we’re doing back to what they explain that they do in their country and then show them the differences. And sometimes I will go into Google or whatever and find out what they do in their country for a roof or whatever, and then give them a comparison.

A news junky, I watch SBS news and find information out all the time. Just when it comes up, I’m a great believer in using examples. And if I can say, well, in China you do it this way, but here we do it this way. And I always try to say, it’s like Road A and Road B getting to Blacktown, we’ll both get there but we’ll go a different way and try and make it simple like that. And then if the students are interested, they ask more questions, that kind of thing and we can take it from there. (Hospitality management, TAFE, NSW)

Teachers’ efforts to enhance their own professional knowledge and make a connection between the learning content and the vocational practices in the students’ home contexts have a number of important implications. This assists with engaging international students in the classroom activities because they feel they are learning something relevant to their home countries and feel included in the learning process. This reflects the primary principle of the inclusive practice in international education (Hellsten, 2008). Once students see what is connected and meaningful to them is indeed valued in the curriculum, they often feel more intrinsically motivated to learn. This process also has an important implication beyond the teaching of international and local students to include the professional advancement of teachers themselves. Researching effective pedagogic practices to address the learning needs and characteristics of international students is thus intimately associated with the process of broadening teachers’ professional horizons and enriching their own intercultural experiences.

Challenges to Adopting International Pedagogy in Vocational Education

However, the teacher respondents mention that such an incorporation of the approach to adapting pedagogy is an individual effort rather than a community of practice and VET teachers are not well prepared to respond to the needs of international students. Fifteen teaching staff endorsed this view.

I don’t think it’s a common practice. Without being flattering, I, myself, I’ve recently had my performance appraisal. It was a classroom observation which I was glad to have. And my head teacher who is Chinese picked up on that and complimented me on that, the linking back to students’ home practices. So she said it’s something she didn’t see in a lot of cases. (Law, TAFE, NSW)

Staff are not being appropriately trained to properly engage with international students through alternative methodologies and curriculum adaptation and the organization has failed to devote time and resources towards these issues. (Management, TAFE, VIC)

So first of all I would have all teachers properly trained so that they understand the cultures of the people that are in the class rooms so they can effectively work with them. That would be probably the number one for me. (Business, TAFE, VIC)

Teachers in this study have made various attempts in adapting pedagogy to respond to the learning needs and characteristics of international students. These teachers have stepped beyond their own comfort zone and have seriously invested in broadening their professional knowledge and adapting pedagogical practices to make it more relevant to their international student group. Nevertheless, most of them revealed that such adaptation has not become a community of practice due to a number of reasons. There seems to be an absence of guidelines in teaching international VET students. In particular teachers do not tend to be provided with adequate professional support and development to address the complex needs and unfamiliar learning characteristics of the diverse student group that the institution puts in their hand. Some private commercial institutes may not see the need to invest in equipping teachers with background knowledge about international students’ home countries. Most teachers have learnt on the spot and very often it is left on their own effort to explore their ways of working with international students. Some of them have indeed developed effective pedagogic approaches to teaching international students within their classroom context. However, they have received little incentive and systematic and structured guidelines to publicize and institutionalize these good practices so that other VET teachers can learn from.

In particular, teachers’ pedagogic adaptation, which embraces the notion of a responsive and learner-centered pedagogy and an internationalized curriculum, appear to conflict with the demands of compliance in VET. In some cases, international students’ learning needs are compromised at the expense of the pressure for teachers to conform to the fixed requirements of the curriculum they are teaching. For example, the following interviewee explained it is complicated and impossible to have an institutional or departmental approach to adapting the curriculum because of the demand of compliance:

Well you see, we are so compliantly driven in TAFE and the penalties are so harsh for not being compliant that it’s difficult to openly do this [modifying the curriculum] at the institutional level. I mean, it’s almost like encouraging a revolution. We wouldn’t want to do that. But I think it’s, for many, many years I’ve observed that it’s an issue, a lack of alignment and a compliance system issue that is essentially being spoken of very, very quietly, in whispers. (Business, TAFE, VIC).

Australian VET institutes are audited and they must demonstrate compliance. The government auditors would expect teachers to focus on the standardized competencies in accordance to training packages. This interviewee who is a program manager reveals that teachers in his program endeavor to go beyond training packages and expand the curriculum to include knowledge and skills that they think are important for international students. However, the need to be compliant has prevented them from openly acknowledging this effort and developing a structured and coherent departmental and institutional approach to adapting the curriculum. In this sense, teachers’ effort in modifying the VET curriculum occurs at the individual level rather than being formalized at the institutional level and becoming a community of practice due to the auditing culture. Therefore, the current CBT system and its associated auditing regime tend to hinder the adaptation and responsiveness of the VET curriculum to accommodate the diverse, multiple, and shifting learning needs of international students. Guthrie (2008) pointed out that in juggling between compliance and innovation, training providers often have to sacrifice innovative practices at the expense of the compliance pressure.

Conclusion

This article reveals that international pedagogy in vocational education and training recognizes and harnesses teaching and learning situations by which all students and teachers can develop and enrich their “international” knowledge, skills, and attributes. It involves an approach to teaching and learning, which adds value to student learning and incorporates international examples, case studies, and broader dimensions of knowledge and skills. It reaches out beyond competency-based training to include the wider cross-border contexts. International pedagogy in vocational education extends the scope of student-centeredness beyond accommodating students’ learning needs to situating and validating their experiential and scholastic knowledge through the vocational education program and enriching vocational knowledge by making transnational intellectual and skill connections. It recognizes that students from a variety of cultural backgrounds bring along to the VET teaching and learning environment tremendous potential and invaluable resources, which are linked to their different ways of constructing vocational knowledge, their different experiences, their understanding of different vocational practices and cultural contexts, and different expectations of teaching and learning. All of these factors have the potential to contribute to enhancing learning for all. International pedagogy is thus integral to preparing students for career mobility across vocational fields and national borders.

The research captured in this aticle has found that teachers find it challenging to juggle between their professional commitment to respond to international students’ divergent needs and the pressure to demonstrate compliance within the Australian current VET system whose mission is focusing on standardized training products. In addition, currently there are no structured guidelines and requirements at the sectoral level to facilitate the adaptation of the vocational education programs for teaching the international student cohort whose study purposes and learning characteristics appear to differ from those of local students. At the institutional level, much of the international policy and practice focus of VET providers has been on the marketing of VET programs, student visa requirements, and the support provided for international students including language and learning skills support and welfare support. In particular, the empirical data of this research shows that most of the teachers involved in teaching international students have to learn from their own practice and there is a lack of adequate and coherent professional development for VET teachers in relation to how to adapt pedagogy and work effectively with international learners. Indeed the adaptation of vocational education pedagogy and training programs to respond to changing international education, to the multiple study purposes and divergent learning characteristics of the international learners appears to be accorded less emphasis from different VET levels. Though a lot has been said about the need to sustain the flow of international students into the VET sector and the prestige and high quality of the programs has often been cited as one of the attractions of Australian VET to international students, the relevancy of the programs for international learners within the current changing context seems to be overlooked. Yet what constitutes high quality training and “standard” is context based. Thus it is important to avoid assuming that high quality training programs offered for students in Australia will be automatically relevant to the Asian region settings and maintaining the ethnocentric view that the Australian programs attract Asian students because of their desire for a superior Australian or Western education.

Within the current context, the development of an internationalized and broader program will place the Australian VET sector in a better position to attract international students. If Australian VET providers are to sustain a strong role in global exports, the “product” will need to provide strong vocational training geared to the needs of international students, in their home country’s work environments. Such an internationalized program is also the key to addressing the needs of domestic students who wish to work in an international context beyond their national border. VET providers need to match their rhetoric as “world-class education providers” with a vocational program of relevance and utility to international students from other countries to project itself on the global education market.

Even though this study focuses on vocational education and training, the insights from the teachers and their process of learning to adapt their pedagogy are useful for teachers and institutions across different educational levels and national contexts. In particular there is much that can be learnt from the teachers’ approaches to create a learning environment that enables students to develop “international” knowledge, skills, and attributes related to their vocational fields and to nurture an “extended” notion of student-centeredness in response to internationalization. These features are fundamental to teaching and learning in international classrooms within the current context of global skills and knowledge mobility. It would also be very useful if further research is undertaken in other national contexts on what an international pedagogy may look like when the focus of the learning is on vocational and technical skills and knowledge.