Degree

It is worth considering where this degree “fits”.

• This is a vocational degree in that it develops transferable skills which employers value; people are explicitly prepared for jobs, just not a narrow range of predetermined jobs. Indeed, the graduates might be working in a world with a very different concept of employment.
• It is a capability degree that focuses on the learners developing and understanding their own competencies and capabilities.
• It can also be seen as a professional practice degree, where the graduate has identified and articulated their professional framework of practice as is the case for the Independent Learning Pathway developed by Otago Polytechnic.

This qualification is not intended to be a substitute for qualifications that lead to recognition in regulated professions such as accountancy and nursing.

Where does the BLfC fit in the Professional Suite?

The Bachelor of Leadership for Change can be considered in terms of the temporal placement of experience and in terms of the relationship with a recognised subject area. In this regard, the Bachelor of Leadership for Change can be considered a hybrid between the Capable NZ focus on reflection on experience in work-practice, and the designed learning experiences of a traditional taught programme. In the Bachelor of Leadership for Change’s case, the learners do not have the professional experience to look back on, but neither can we pre-prescribe subject-based courses leading to a specific discipline - we instead curate a set of experiences for the individual learner/s.

shows the learning focus of the Capable NZ professional practice suite (with RPL and traditional taught degree for comparison). At the bottom of the diagram, the traditional taught vocational degree can be characterised as having a largely predetermined set of experiences designed to teach students the required skills for a particular predetermined (and usually narrow) discipline. There is little or no incorporation of previous knowledge or experience.

The Recognition of Prior Learning qualification, as used by the precursors to Capable NZ to meet specific industry needs (such as the changed requirements for nursing registration) is, by contrast, largely the opposite of the taught degree. The process is one of validation of existing knowledge with credentialing against a specific graduate profile. While it can be a reflective process, there is little or no attempt at incorporating new learning, except as a result of this process, to undertake further learning or courses to address identified gaps.

The Independent Learning Pathway is Capable NZ’s current primary approach to learning. Currently about 250 people graduate each year through this process, mainly in the Bachelor of Applied Management, and the Bachelor of Social Services. This pathway is for practitioners who wish to use experiential knowledge as the basis for a new learning journey that results in the development of a framework of practice that aligns with the graduate profile of their chosen degree (often with the endorsement of an identified major). It is important to note that the ILP approach is not an assessment process, but a learning process, one which brings about new knowledge and understandings for the learner. It is not just a process of gathering evidence to prove that learning has already taken place. This intensely reflective process helps learners identify the experiences that shaped their practice and continues to shape practice, extract the learnings from those experiences and make sense of those learnings through the development of a framework of practice that aligns with the graduate profile for that discipline. Learners are supported by a facilitator.

The Independent Learning Pathway, and the other professional practice pathways, are drawn here with dashed boundaries. This is to represent the increasingly blurred boundary between the worlds of work and education that these learning journeys traverse.

Skipping ahead to the top of the figure, the Capable NZ professional practice post-graduate qualifications for experienced practitioners are the Master of Professional Practice, and the Doctor of Professional Practice, These can also be considered individualised learning journeys. For both, the goal is the advanced professional framework of practice. This is articulated in a “practitioner thesis” where the defensible argument is that professional framework of practice. The process starts with a review of learning that leads to stating the learner’s aspirational framework of practice (eg: “to become a thought leader in values driven software development”). This is paired with an organisational practice goal (eg: to create a culture of values driven software development). The main work then becomes the professional development thread, interwoven through reflective practice to the work-based professional practice change (usually formally described as “autoethnographic action research”. Learners are supported by academic and professional mentors. The graduate profiles for both the MPP and DPP are written in terms of higher levels of thinking in a post-disciplinary sense, rather than for specific disciplines.

The Graduate Diploma in Professional Practice is similar (at least at this level of abstraction) to the MPP. It is an undergraduate qualification for experienced people who do already have an undergraduate degree (or equivalent experience) which enables the articulation and development of their practice.

Lastly on the figure (third from top), is the Bachelor of Leadership for Change. Like the other Capable NZ programmes, it is an individualised learning journey – if it were duplicated for each learner, there would be different collections of little blocks making up the graduate profile for each learner to represent different individualised learning journeys (so too are the GDPP, MPP & DPP but they are research/enquiry based, the relevant comparison here is with the prescribed blocks of the traditional taught programme). The Bachelor of Leadership for Change is not described in detail here, just how it relates to the structures used in this diagram in comparison with the other pathways. The Bachelor of Leadership for Change assumes no prior experience. There are some elements of looking back, primarily in the development of understanding of personal values and identity. The graduate profile is closer in style (not level) to that of the post-graduate programmes, but the learner is supported to use an Emergent Professional Framework (operationalised throughout the degree as the “exit strategy”) that helps them define and explore their own career framework of practice. Unlike the traditionally taught degree where the learning experiences are pre-bundled and arranged by subject area, the Bachelor of Leadership for Change is arranged by a progression of capabilities. While some capability development is likely to be ‘pre-packaged’ eg development of enquiry capabilities, the bulk of the learning will be through curated experiences and group and individually negotiated projects are framed by the individual's developing capability framework.