Pastoral care intrinsic to TAFE
As a teacher who has worked across TAFE, schools and universities, I am well aware of the importance of my duty of care. Students need to be physically safe; they need to know their wellbeing is supported; they need to know they will be treated with kindness and respect. My deepest appreciation of another kind of care was most evident and meaningful in my TAFE role – and that was pastoral care.
Pastoral care is part and parcel of the role of TAFE teachers, whether they teach in floristry, health services or trades. Students often have difficult backgrounds: they may come from low socio-economic families, disrupted families, or families in which they have caring responsibilities for other adults and children. They are often young and vulnerable, dealing with neurodivergence, mental health issues, or interrupted educational histories. They need their teachers to teach, but they also rely on them to be role models, parental figures and, yes, friends.
Students might be pursuing a career in plumbing or gaining pathway qualifications for further study, but the majority of them are young people learning to be adults: good adults with a future before them and a need for trust and confidence in their capacity to succeed. Teachers find themselves teaching more than is captured in curriculum documents or units of competency – negotiating Centrelink, seeking mental health support, or even directions to the Victoria Market to buy cheap vegies for a healthy pot of soup.
You will see the term ‘pastoral care’ in the 2018 TAFE Teaching Agreement under the definition of ‘teaching’, but its importance is often underplayed by TAFE managers. Pastoral care is about positive teacher–student connections and can be the difference between a student staying the course or dropping out.
Positive models of men who can be masculine, ethical, and caring towards others are as essential as ever, writes EDWINA PRESTON.
Ryan James, trades teacher at a metro TAFE, says of his co-workers: “These guys look tough – they are tradies who have come from industry into teaching – but they really, really care.” For their students, mainly young men, they become “quasi-father figures, role models of what it is to be a good man”.
The importance of modelling that in the age of Andrew Tate and internet-disseminated misogyny can’t be understated. Positive models of men who can be masculine, ethical, and caring towards others are as essential as ever.
James describes another ‘tough guy’ colleague whose effect on his young male students has been transformative: “He’s got tatts, he’s young and hipster, and he also teaches some of the most disenfranchised school-drop-out kids in the state. He wants to get them through their VCE and steer them onto vocational pathways or further study. The students can relate to him – not just because of the way he looks but because he has real-life experience of their worlds.”
TAFE classrooms are often become ‘safe spaces’ where young people feel understood and guided not by authority figures but by teachers who are equals and treat their students as individuals. This concern for individual student needs is one of the under-sung virtues of TAFE education.
When TAFE members’ commenced work bans in April, some apprentices reported being told by management that the ban on teachers recording attendance in class meant students would “lose a day’s pay” – a prospect that understandably left them feeling upset.
When reassured by teachers that this was not the case, and they would contact apprentices’ employers if necessary to ensure this did not happen, students became interested in the reasons underlying the bans. Productive conversations ensued – and teachers felt their support for students’ circumstances reciprocated. Some students actively supported their teachers by refusing to give names to staff brought in to record attendance. Solidarity! These may be the union activists of the next generation.
Pastoral care cannot be measured or quantified, or evaluated on a rubric of teacher performance, but it is one of the things that makes TAFE a unique and special environment in which to learn.
