Research On Vocational Curriculum For Service Occupations

In this thesis the researcher studies on the curriculum for service occupations in the vocational education, including the general cultural curriculum and professional curriculum. With the fast development of economy in our country, service industries continuously lead the way and the number of people working has grown more rapidly in the service sector than other sectors. The growth of service industries has fuelled the development of service vocational education. Therefore, the past few years have witnessed the dramatic increase of the service professions in vocational schools. According to competence-based theory, vocational curriculum must incorporate the competence and be designed to assess in the real work situation. While in terms of the job activity which makes up the work and the competence performs by the worker, service occupations are too different from the industrial occupations to share the same vocational curriculum model. Under this situation, the thesis concentrates on a comparative study on these two types of occupations by identifying differences in job activity and competence and thus gives some ideas on the service curriculum, taking current puzzles into consideration.The entire thesis is divided into four chapters.Chapter 1 is a brief introduction including what and why is being researched, how the research began, definition of key conceptions in the thesis and literature filing. It is a basic work of the study.Chapter 2 conducts a deep analysis on job activity and competence. Firstly it identifies some differences in job activity between these two types of occupations and concludes features of service job activity, presenting a classify model for the service occupations. Then it finds the competence needed for successfully fulfilling the effective performances of both the service-producing and goods-producing job through compare and contrast and concludes competence characteristics of service talents. This chapter sets the stage for those that follow.Chapter 3 and 4 synthesize the former study and try to present the curriculum suitable for service occupations in the vocational education, taking the contemporary puzzles into consideration.Chapter 3 is divided into three parts. The first part points out the orientation of the general cultural curriculum objectives and analyzes the feature of the orientation of the professional curriculum objectives after presented the facing problem. The second part focuses on how to make establishment decision for service curriculum, understanding the current challenges. And the evaluation of the task-based approach is provided. Then follows the part of curriculum content. After introduced the current difficulties on this matter, traits of ways of curriculum content may be selected and organized are provided. Finally the applicability of the task-based approach is explained.Chapter 4 is concerned with various aspects of implementing a service curriculum. Under consideration of common puzzles, several suggestions on flexible delivery are in detailed. And it also deals with the necessity and possibility of building practice centers for service occupations.These four chapters are closely inter-related, which form a complete framework for research on vocational curriculum for service occupations.