Paper short abstract:

Conventional VET approaches have retained an urban and industrial bias. Yet more than 3 billion people living rurally learn skills. We draw on the growing social ecosystemic skills research tradition to probe its potential for guiding research on rural skills.

Paper long abstract:

Conventional formal vocational education and training (VET) approaches emerged in response to the industrial revolution and have retained an urban and industrial bias. Yet the more than 3 billion people living rurally learn many skills through a range of mechanisms that are poorly understood in mainstream VET research and policy circles. Here we draw on the growing social ecosystemic skills research tradition in the wider VET research sub-field to probe the potential for such a conceptual and theoretical framework for guiding research on rural skills. The significance of social ecosystem models in skills research is that they seek to develop skills development approaches that forge stronger connections between working, living and learning. They foreground regional, place-based models for skills planning that require interfacing with vertical facilitatory mechanisms, and horizontal connectivities, and are aligned with adaptive management approaches to social-ecological systems research in landscapes of practice and sustainable economies where market, home, commons and state intersect. We will draw empirically from cases in South Africa and Uganda to illustrate the potential application of social ecosystem models to research on rural skills.