I recently interviewed RMIT Vice Chancellor Margaret Gardner about her ideas for VET, for my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review. The interview focused on a number of ideas she raised in her recent Inaugural Speech. Following is an excerpt from the column.

What is distinctive about RMIT’s approach to vocational education?

RMIT has been involved in vocational education since 1887. That gives it a long history of engagement in the field and I think that has helped shape RMIT’s overall educational and pedagogic approach. And that is very important. One of the key features of RMIT is that across higher education and vocational education it is a university that is focused on professional and vocational education. It is focused on providing an educational experience that is engaged with industry, highly focused on application and very strongly work-integrated.

What are the origins of RMIT’s work-integrated approach?

Sometimes people have characterised our vocational and vocational education focus to be narrow.  Yet if you look at RMIT’s history and you look at its motto, which means “Skilled Hand, Cultivated Mind,” its beginnings were in this strong work-integration and professional vocational ethos. It began teaching one of the early beginnings of architecture as well as a range of what many people would think of as traditional vocational areas, but it also taught in a whole range of creative areas and in language and in music. In other words, RMIT has an understanding that a professional and vocational emphasis is not a narrow emphasis: it is about building a rounded and full educational experience and one that is very strongly work-integrated.

What are the features of your work-integrated approach?

An interesting thing about RMIT is the work-integrated focus in many of its courses. RMIT has a design-engineering paradigm which is a very heavily problem-solving emphasis. This is fundamentally a very creative approach to the world because what you are building when you say work-integrated is people’s ability to understand the problems as they appear in industry and the community and to problem solve. To do that, you actually have to have a fundamental generic skill – a set of tools to enable you to engage in effective problem solving.

What is the design-engineering paradigm?

RMIT’s design-engineering paradigm is different from the ‘why is it so?’ question: it’s a ‘how will we make it work?’ approach and I think that is what is characteristic of us. It is fundamentally a creative impulse, creative in the sense of how will we make this work, how will we approach this issue? You draw out of the practical, out of the industry, out of the applied. That has a long history in RMIT, but it is a rich history. It’s the underlying impetus about how we think about education. It’s about what are the issues and the problems in the world as we see them and how do we make things work.

Do RMIT staff support work-integrated learning?

One of the real joys about being here is that RMIT has had this rich history of work-integrated learning. When you talk to people here, whether they’re new or they’ve been here a long time, in the way that any institution that has a sense of itself will know, you can see that what has been built into the curriculum over time, built in to all sorts of assumptions, the ether, the culture, is an understanding that this is what we are about in education. I found when I came here that people were deeply committed to that work-integrated learning and deeply committed to that creative impulse. Both of those things are deep in the culture here and I think it is because they go back to where it started. Our motto is not a bad capture of that.

The full interview is set out in Campus Review, 7 Sept 2005.