Search results for "vocational teacher"

Negotiating professional identity: Vocational teachers’ personal strategies in a reform context

2008

Recent studies of learning through work have included how professional identities are formed through participation in work. However, we need a more elaborated understanding of how professional identities are negotiated at times of rapid change in working practices. This chapter examines the personal strategies that vocational teachers adopt, and the professional identity negotiations that occur, in response to requirements to change professional practices. We report on a study in which open-ended narrative interviews were conducted with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. From the teachers’ accounts, we identified distinct personal strategies that were adopted to engage with change. The st…

Between school and working life: Vocational teachers agency in boundary-crossing settings

2009

This paper investigates agency among vocational teachers with reference to boundary-crossing between school and working life. Our study utilised interviews with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we found that the teachers had a variety of forms of exercising agency in terms of decisions deliberately taken, and the discourse and actions following these decisions. These forms were: (i) restricted agency, (ii) extensive agency, (iii) multifaceted balancing agency, (iv) situationally diverse agency, and (v) relationally emergent agency. The exercising of agency was intertwined with the main resources and constraints emerging from the teachers’ sense of…

Vocational teachers in the face of major educational reform: Individual ways of negotiating professional identities.

2009

This paper examines how vocational teachers negotiate their professional identity in the context of a major externally imposed curriculum reform. The focus is on the teachers' orientations towards the reform in its initial stage. Sixteen Finnish vocational teachers were interviewed using open-ended narrative interviews. The data were analysed in accordance with data-driven qualitative analysis methods. From the teachers' accounts, three main orientations towards the reform were identified: a resistant orientation, an inconsistent orientation and an approving orientation, each based on the teachers' individual self-positioning towards the reform. Each orientation is illustrated using two nar…

Samarbeid og lærerprofesjonalitet

2021

This article is about the importance of collaboration in the development of teacher professionalism, and we have asked the research question: How can group collaboration between vocational education and training (VET) students contribute to the development of their teacher professionalism? The data basis is interviews with ten VET students in practical pedagogical education for vocational teachers that we conducted in the winter of 2020. In addition, we studied all internship documents that the ten students produced during the internship period. The students are in practical training at their own school with their own students and collaborate with each other to strengthen their own teacher …

Professional identity in relation to vocational teachers’ work : an identity-centred approach to professional development

2018

This paper reports a study on teachers’ professional identity and work in vocational education. The findings showed that vocational teachers’ work included vocational teaching within the school, developmental work, technology-enhanced work, professional duties outside the school, and educational duties within the school. Furthermore, the study revealed the harmonious and tensioned relationships between these elements of the work and teachers’ identities. Recognition of the nuanced nature of these relationships provides a perspective for promoting teachers’ professional development. From a practical perspective, there is a need to support vocational teachers’ identity work and the adoption o…

Vocational teachers' professional agency in the stream of change

2013

Learning across contexts: How can vocational teachers facilitate boundary learning for students in work-based placements?

2022

A well-known challenge in vocational education and training (VET) programmes is the lack of coherence between school-based and workplace learning. The Norwegian VET model consists of two years of upper secondary education followed by two years of apprenticeship at work. This small-scale study of vocational teacher’s vocational didactics aims to investigate boundary learning at the VET Programme for Sales and Service at the Norwegian upper secondary level. The research question explored is: How can vocational teachers improve boundary learning for students in work-based placements in the subject vocational in-depth study (YFF)? The methodological approach is qualitative interviews with vocat…