AbstractsEngineering

Abstract

Since China’s ‘Reform and Opening-up Policy’ in the late 1970s, China’s economy and international trade has soared dramatically. The rapid ascending of economy posed a large demand on labor force. Against this background, China’s higher vocational education and training (HVE) system undertook a considerable responsibility of producing the appropriately trained graduates for the market. Relevance is the lifeline for vocational education due to the fact that they have rather direct and immediate expectations regarding their products from their ‘customers’. Unfortunately, it is widely perceived there is a ‘need for more effective links between schools and workplaces in China’, and there are extensive research discoveries which claim that employers experience a shortage of adequately skilled workers in China. This study is mainly concerned with the relevance of higher vocational education’s curricula, focusing on to which extent the demands from the work place are embodied in the development of the curricula as well as the delivery processes. Hence, the research questions are designed as following: What is the curriculum profile of the engineering program chosen in this case, especially in relation with the incorporation of employers’ demands? What efforts are taken in the curriculum development/revision processes in this engineering program with regards to incorporation of employers’ demands? What efforts are being taken to enhance students’ employability in the delivery processes of the curriculum? How is the program being influenced by the phenomenon of academic drift? This thesis is devoted to providing rich, descriptive data on the how the curriculum in question looks like in terms of its eight element in the ‘academic plan’ and trying to analyze to what extent the structure and content of the curriculum is consistent with its ultimate goal of producing graduates meeting the industry’s demands; it also digs into the curriculum development process to see what kind of efforts have been invested into identifying and incorporating employers’ demands in the curriculum; subsequently, the various tensions and conflicts among the different players will also be revealed. Key words: higher vocational education, curriculum, relevance, labor market, employer demand