In vocational education, the learning content is often considered as concrete and specific, and the vocational learning involves physical work and interactions between participants and artefacts. Furthermore, one teacher has the overall responsibility for several students during classes in the vocational workshop at school, which means that the teacher has limited time for every single student and that the few minutes they meet become very important. However, the documented knowledge about how vocational learning is constituted in the vocational classroom and what learning content is focused on in the interaction between teachers and students is very sparse. In this study, we focus on how the enacted object of learning and its critical aspects are made relevant, when a student and teacher in a plumbing workshop session negotiate the conducting of a task in Swedish vocational education. This will be done by using CAVTA (Conversation Analysis and Variation Theory Approach) to make a close and detailed analysis of video recordings of the interaction between the student and teacher when a task is introduced in the workshop session. The results show a complex process, where the teacher alternates between parts and wholeness, using several semiotic resources at hand when highlighting the learning content.
Context: This article focus on teaching and learning processes in a vocational classroom in Swedish vocational education. There are few studies within the field of vocational education that have a focus on how vocational learning is done in interaction in the vocational classroom/workshop, and what vocational learning content is displayed in the interaction between teacher and student, and thus made possible to learn. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring the future-oriented movements that take shape when a vocational teacher and vocational students negotiate how a practical task could, and should, be handled and solved in vocational teaching situations in vocational plumbing school workshop settings. An increased understanding of these processes can help to improve the actual teaching of a specific subject content to support students in their vocational learning, aiming for learning a professional trade.Methods: The data consists of video recorded lessons from the Sanitary, Heating and Property Maintenance Programme in Swedish upper secondary school. Through concrete empirical examples from video recorded lessons the article explores the interaction between teachers and students in vocational school workshop settings using CAVTA. CAVTA is based on Conversation Analysis (CA) and Variation Theory (VT) and is a theoretical and methodological framework that can be used together and integrated to reach understanding of both how- and what-aspects of the learning process in practice, when analysing teaching and interaction.Findings: Findings shows how aspects concerning a specific vocational learning content that revolves around a vocational practical doing compete for the space with a vocational learning content of a more general nature. These general objects of learning are also related to work-specific vocational learning and knowledge in relation to the future profession, but on a more general level than the task specific vocational knowledge. Altogether, this illuminates how different layers of work-specific vocational learning are made visible in the interaction, and how they mutually contextualise each other in the here and now.Conclusion: This article illustrates that the specific and the general vocational learning content can complement each other and open up for a more in-depth vocational learning. In conclusion, this article emphasises the importance for vocational teachers to develop teaching strategies to navigate between helping the students in their problem solving here and now, and contextualising the specific vocational learning content and making vocational learning relevant for future vocational occupation and working life.
The focus of this study is on two vocational teachers´ stories of grade assessment. The teachers are Leif and Johnny, who teach in the industrial technology programme in two different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The research method we use in the study is life stories. From the vocational teachers' stories emerge different categories of assessment criteria that show different considerations, as compared to the national knowledge requirements, when grading students with one of the five pass grades. The categories for passing grades are: the grade awarded as a prize rating, the grade awarded as being an okayguy, the grade awarded in advance, and the grade awarded as a last chance. The categories show that the vocational teachers Leif and Johnny, in their assessment documents, do not always comply with the requirements that the syllabus and steering documents put on the knowledge assessment. Leif and Johnny use different forms of knowledge measurements when grading their students with passing grades. The forms are based on their social relations with their students.
This article presents the stories of four teachers teaching newly arrived refugee youths at a vocational upper secondary school. The youths came to Sweden in 2015 and later, and they live in a so-called vulnerable area. This is a period when many unaccompanied children and adolescent refugees arrived in Sweden. The study aims to contribute to knowledge about teaching newly arrived refugee youths and the way these youths can influence teaching in a vocational school. The methodological and theoretical starting point for the study is based on a narrative perspective. The stories are analysed thematically and show that these students have great solidarity with each other, are ambitious, and create a good mood in the classroom. In addition, there is always “someone” who does not believe in democratic values, although most of the students value the Swedish democracy and equality between men and women. The expulsion decision that some students receive affects the teachers’ teaching as well, since it means that they also have to deal with teaching situations where their students’ lives and deaths are involved in the sense that they are refugees threatened by expulsion.
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