Drawing on data generated from interviews and focus groups with South African TVET college learners, this paper explores the way(s) in which learners’ aspirations for their working lives are shaped by their experience(s) within their community and – vice versa – how these aspirations are then reshaped or confirmed by their experience(s) at college. The focus is on the situatedness of learners and how this affects their aspirations for their working lives, and the situatedness of TVET colleges and how this serves to either reinforce or reshape learners aspirations for their working lives.
The paper draws on our existing work on TVET and human development, as presented at the 2011 and 2013 UKFIET conferences, but also particularly on the work of Appadurai, Hart, and DeJaeghere and Baxter. We draw initial inspiration from Appadurai's work on aspirations, following him in seeing this as interactive and socially-constructed as well a deeply personal. From Hart, we draw the notion of aspirations more explicitly into the capability approach. This is done through her notion of aspirations as "forerunners" of capabilities. In DeJaeghere and Baxter's terms, aspirations thus act as "endowments" in that they are a necessary precursor to freedoms and, yet, themselves affected by the array of capabilities possible to individuals. We tie these understandings to our own argument that human developmet must be seen as inextricably linked with sustainable development, and that skills for sustainable development must incorporate a broad conception of decent work for all.
Together, these theoretical resources permit a richer conceptualisation of the interplay between structure and agency in thinking about developing capabilities for sustainable livelihoods that is of relevance to theory, policy and practice on TVET's place in sustainable development.
