This is the final post in a four-part series on intergenerational learning ecologies and what young people already know about living and learning in a time of compounding crisis. The series began with silences running through ‘tertiary harmonisation’; then moved to fire, VET, and disaster-preparedness learning the credential system cannot quite see; then to food and farming, and learning the system sees and reaches for, but struggles to value. This post gathers those threads and asks what follows.
Across the series I have tried to hold two things together. First, that the reform of Australian education, organised around the promise of harmonisation, does not name the crises shaping young people’s lives – ecological breakdown, wars, housing precarity, algorithmic technologies and the changing conditions of labour and livelihood. Second, that young people, teachers and communities are already learning otherwise in some places, for example, in brigades, communities and VET programs, in youth-led food and farming projects, in everyday practices of resistance and change.
In the longer paper behind this series, I ask whether tertiary harmonisation is better understood not as a solution to enduring problems but as a discursive event reproducing particular notions of what students, teachers, and academics can be and become. It is part of what I have described as a neoliberal education apparatus: a heterogeneous ensemble of policy documents, qualification frameworks, funding architectures, curriculum designs, assessment regimes, institutional cultures, and the subject positions they produce. Tertiary harmonisation seeks to rearrange this architecture – VET, schools, universities – without reference to the structural conditions – housing access and affordability, food security, precarious employment, gig work, youth and study allowances – that make their futures in education and training not a lifestyle choice but a survival condition for many young people.
The Australian Qualifications Framework is a key condition of possibility here. Sally Kift (2024) argues that ‘there is furious policy agreement about the economic and social imperative to unlock a connected tertiary sector’, identifying the ‘structural dismantling of the VET-HE hierarchy, which is entrenched and reinforced in Australia in the current AQF’ as central to systemic reform. Kift (2024, p. 7) suggests that this ‘serves mainly to reinforce perceptions of VET’s lower (hierarchical) status and cements the devaluing of skills acquisition by locating qualifications that favour skills attainment over knowledge towards the bottom of the AQF ladder’. Kift’s structural diagnosis can be extended: the problem is not only that the AQF encodes hierarchy, but that the metaphorical architecture of the AQF – the very idea of a qualifications ladder with levels, with higher and lower, with upward movement as ‘progress’ – is what makes the hierarchy thinkable in the first place.
In a recent conversation in the To Imagine the World lecture series, Henry Giroux (2024) argues that every project – whether committed to democratic renewal or to market logics, has an educational project at its core which permeates not only classrooms but the whole of social life. The practices and places discussed in this series have sought to illustrate what some young people’s everyday practices might reveal about the limits of technocratic, neoliberal futures. But also, possibilities for place-based learning, collective care, ecological responsibility and democratic systems beyond credential logics.
In this sense, there are many more threads to follow, and there is much more genealogical work to be done. Scott Jukes (2020) traces the pedagogical possibilities of remaking – of reusing waste materials, working junk into something useful – as a form of learning that attends to the ecological history of the materials it works with. Nina Ödegård (2012) suggests that junk materials, saved from the bin, invite construction without the need to name, define or label. What disturbs this process, she argues, is practitioners’ expectations: the arrival of categories too early. That is one of the cruxes of a credential-bound apparatus. It arrives with its labels ready, and names what young people make before they have even ridden their bike home from the tip.
The question for those of us working with/in education and the tertiary harmonisation project, might not be how to build young people a better pipeline or pathway, but how to change the conditions we are responsible for. That might mean undoing the academic/applied, theory/practice binary; questioning the ladder metaphors that sort futures into higher and lower; rethinking funding and governance arrangements that make ecologically vital learning more difficult to offer. It might mean treating community-led learning not as a resource to be partnered with or drawn on, but for universities, TAFEs and schools to follow, support and be accountable to, without capturing or extracting it.
What grows in those conditions has to be led by the young people already living these crises – those marginalised by current systems – on terms they set, with an orientation to what they know, need and want in the places that they live. Our work, is to change those conditions, to attend to the ecologies of learning that are emerging, and to stay with the trouble of doing so in institutions that are themselves entangled in the reproduction and distribution of the crises we face.
‘Honeyeater at the Tip’ — April 2024, James Goring
References
Australian Government. (2023). Australian Universities Accord: Interim report. Department of Education. https://www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord/resources/accord-interim-report
Australian Government. (2024). Australian Universities Accord: Final report. Department of Education. https://www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord/resources/final-report
Giroux, H. A. (2024). To Imagine the World. YouTube. https://youtu.be/LCMXKt5vRQk
Jobs and Skills Australia. (2025). Tertiary harmonisation roadmap: Strategic alignment of the VET and higher education sectors. Australian Government. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/publications/opportunity-and-productivity-towards-tertiary-harmonisation-roadmap
Jukes, S. (2020). Thinking through making: Junk paddles, distant forests and pedagogical possibilities. Environmental Education Research, 26(12), 1746–1763. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1806991
Kift, S. (2024). The tertiary transformation imperative: issues and opportunities. International Journal of Training Research, 22(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14480220.2024.2375150
Noonan, P. (2019). Review of the Australian Qualifications Framework: Final report. Department of Education. https://www.education.gov.au/aqf-review
Ödegård, N. (2012). When matter comes to matter – working pedagogically with junk materials. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.3402/edui.v3i3.22042
Banner image: Cinescope Creative via Unsplash