The recent advancement in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has sparked extensive discussions about its implications for both the labor market and education. At the intersection of these domains are vocational teachers, positioned to address, cope with, and relate to the changes linked with this development. However, the role of digitalization in vocational education remains scarcely researched. This study examines how vocational pre- and in-service teachers envision teacher knowledge in the era of GenAI, with a focus on technological, pedagogical, and content perspectives. Drawing on individual and collaborative reflections, the findings shed light on how GenAI is perceived within vocational education, stressing its potential, challenges, and consequences. The results highlight nuanced perspectives, characterized by a blend of optimism and awareness of risks, emphasizing the complexity of operating within a landscape in flux. Contributions involve unpacking vocational teachers’ knowledge in relation to GenAI.

A complex, vocational school-based teaching practice with dual roles and contexts places demands on vocational teaching and the teaching materials involved. One of the challenges for vocational teachers is to teach with responsiveness to changes in working life. This study explores how vocational teachers enact and reflect on their sociomaterial teaching practice to enhance aspects of their student’s sense of coherence (SOC). Data includes observations and interviews with three vocational teachers, representing three different vocational programs in Sweden.

In the analysis three themes are highlighted: i) Materials, ii) Connections to working life, and iii) Human relations and interaction. Findings show how applying SOC is understood as a way to navigate a sociomaterial complexity, here and now, in the vocational teaching practice. The paper contributes to a discussion on how vocational teachers constitute teaching materials from a wide range of materials. Contributions include increased knowledge about teaching materials in the vocational teaching practice.

While social media in an educational context has interested researchers for a long time, its use in vocational education constitutes a sparsely explored field of research. In this study, we explore how three vocational teachers in Sweden make sense of Instagram in their teaching practice through interviews and analyses of their Instagram accounts over time. Technological frames are used as a theoretical lens to explore how teachers perceive the nature, the strategy, and the use of Instagram at an individual level.

Results show that initiatives, motivations, and approaches clearly differ among the teachers and that questions about accountability and expectations on the teacher and the accounts remain vague. Contributions include demonstrating how vocational teachers make sense of Instagram and how it can be linked to different levels of engagement that are rooted in diverse perceptions of how their role and their practice can be supported. 

Vocational teachers in Swedish vocational education have the complex task of teaching young people in a changing school for a changing working life. Working life is undergoing rapid technological development, which sometimes necessitates the introduction of new working methods and materials. Schools are also changing in different ways. Among other things, the last few years have meant that schools have been digitalised in various ways. The school's governing documents are being adjusted to handle the digital development in schools and society. The fact that both school and working life are in flux impacts vocational teachers' conditions for teaching. This thesis explores teaching materials in vocational teaching practices and highlights how vocational teachers enact vocational teaching in and for a digitalised working life. Specifically, it addresses the challenges and opportunities that arise when digitalized vocational and teaching practices are developed, as well as how these are handled and enacted.

Since the focus is on teaching materials within teaching practices, sociomateriality serves as the overarching perspective in the thesis. The perspective makes visible humans and materials as dependent on and integrated into each other. Across the five different articles of the thesis, additional analytical tools are employed to shed light on how vocational teachers use, understand and reflect on teaching materials in their teaching.

The dissertation provides insight into Swedish vocational education based on vocational teachers' approach to teaching materials. Previous research related to the thesis comes from both research on work-integrated learning (WIL) and vocational didactics. Previous research presented in the thesis explores vocational education with certain types of digital technologies, on specific programmes or collaboration between school and working life. The thesis explores how school-based sociomaterial vocational teaching practices are enacted in a time when they contain a variety of different, digital and analogue, both vocationally relevant and general pedagogical teaching materials. The exploration has mainly been conducted with an ethnographically inspired approach. By observing and participating in daily practices, understanding of contexts and people and their behaviors and how they reason about cultural phenomena is enabled. In this case, vocational teachers have been followed through interviews and observations in different schools and vocational programmes with the aim of developing an understanding of the cultural phenomenon of vocational teaching practices in a changing time.

In the dissertation, we follow the teaching practices of Peter, Rebecka and Anna alongside interviews with nine other vocational teachers. The focus of observations and interviews is the vocational teachers' use, understanding of, and reflections on teaching materials in school-based vocational education. The results indicate that digitalised vocational and teaching practices constitute a sociomaterial complexity, presenting both challenges and opportunities that vocational teachers must navigate. The challenges can be understood as disruptions in relation to changing working life, changing educational institutions and changing student needs. The opportunities, on the other hand, lie in the potential of supporting teaching material in relation to a working life and the different needs of students. The thesis demonstrates that vocational teachers try to integrate vocational-specific teaching materials with general pedagogical and mundane teaching materials to offer a sense of coherence for the students. Sometimes, mundane technologies such as mobile phones and social media also act as a bridge to working life. In their choice of teaching materials, vocational teachers navigate between the prerequisites and requirements of school-based teaching and those of working life. In navigation, teaching materials serve as props, but human resources are just as important, as the vocational teachers emphasise human interaction and care about the relationship with the students. In the thesis an entangled and salutogenic perspective is proposed to describe how vocational teachers navigate vocational teaching practices.

Yrkeslärare i svensk yrkesutbildning har den komplexa uppgiften att undervisa ungdomar i en föränderlig skola för ett arbetsliv i förändring. Arbetslivet genomgår snabb teknologisk utveckling vilket ibland betyder att nya arbetsmetoder och material introduceras. Också skolan förändras på olika sätt. Bland annat har de senaste åren inneburit att skolan digitaliserats. Skolans styrdokument anpassas för att hantera den digitala utvecklingen i skola och samhälle. Att skola och arbetsliv står inför förändring påverkar yrkeslärares förutsättningar i undervisningen. Avhandlingen utforskar därför undervisningsmaterial i yrkesundervisningspraktiker samt belyser hur yrkeslärare iscensätter yrkesundervisningen i och för ett digitaliserat arbetsliv. Specifikt handlar avhandlingen om utmaningar och möjligheter när digitaliserade yrkes- och undervisningspraktiker utvecklas och hur dessa hanteras och iscensätts av yrkeslärare.

Eftersom undervisningsmaterial i yrkesundervisningspraktiker är i fokus används sociomaterialitet som övergripande perspektiv i avhandlingen. Socimaterialitet synliggör perspektiv på människa och material som beroende av och integrerade i varandra. I avhandlingens fem olika artiklar används dessutom andra praktiska analysverktyg för att belysa hur yrkeslärare använder, förstår och reflekterar kring undervisningsmaterial i sin undervisning.

Avhandlingen ger en inblick i yrkesutbildning i Sverige utifrån yrkeslärares förhållningssätt till undervisningsmaterial. Tidigare forskning relaterad till avhandlingen kommer från både forskning om arbetsintegrerat lärande (AIL) och yrkesdidaktik. Tidigare forskning som presenteras i avhandlingen utforskar yrkesundervisning med vissa typer av digital teknik, på specifika program eller samverkan mellan skola och arbetsliv. I avhandlingen utforskas hur skolbaserade sociomateriella yrkesundervisningspraktiker iscensätts i en tid då de rymmer en mängd olika, digitala och analoga, såväl yrkesrelevanta som generellt pedagogiska undervisningsmaterial. Utforskandet har huvudsakligen bedrivits med en etnografiskt inspirerad ansats. Genom att observera och delta i människors vardagliga praktiker möjliggörs förståelse för kontexter och människor och deras beteenden och hur de resonerar kring kulturella fenomen. I det här fallet har yrkeslärare följts via intervjuer och observationer på olika skolor och yrkesprogram med syftet att utveckla förståelse för det kulturella fenomenet yrkesundervisningspraktiker i en föränderlig tid.

I avhandlingen får vi följa undervisningen hos Peter, Rebecka och Anna och vi får möta nio andra yrkeslärare som deltar i intervjustudier. I fokus för observationer och intervjuer står yrkeslärarnas användning och förståelse av samt reflektioner kring undervisningsmaterial i en skolbaserad yrkesundervisning. Resultaten visar att digitaliserade yrkes- och undervisningspraktiker utgör en sociomateriell komplexitet vilket skapar både utmaningar och möjligheter och kräver hantering av yrkeslärare. Utmaningarna kan förstås som störningar i relation till föränderligt arbetsliv, föränderlig utbildningsinstitution och föränderliga elevbehov. Möjligheterna kan förstås som stödjande undervisningsmaterial i relation till ett arbetsliv men också till elevers olika behov. Avhandlingen visar att yrkeslärare försöker integrera yrkesspecifika undervisningsmaterial med generella pedagogiska och vardagliga undervisningsmaterial för att erbjuda känsla av sammanhang för eleverna. Ibland fungerar dessutom vardaglig teknik som mobiltelefonen och sociala medier som brygga till arbetslivet. I sina val av undervisningsmaterial navigerar yrkeslärare mellan den skolbaserade undervisningens förutsättningar och krav och arbetslivets förutsättningar och krav. I navigeringen fungerar undervisningsmaterial som rekvisita men lika viktiga är de mänskliga resurserna eftersom yrkeslärarna betonar mänsklig interaktion och månar om relationen med eleven. I avhandlingen föreslås ett sammanvävt och salutogent perspektiv för att beskriva hur yrkeslärare navigerar yrkesundervisningspraktiker.

Purpose – The digitalization of schools has intensified in recent years. It is reflected in policy documents as well as in extensive investments in digital technology and professional development initiatives to promote digitalization. At the same time, attempts are being made to “tame” the same digitization sometimes by regulations banning smartphones in class. This study aims to examine how smartphones are interpreted by vocational teachers in Sweden using the theoretical lens of technological frames.

Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of ten semi-structured interviews with vocational teachers, representing eight vocational programs in Sweden.

Findings – The results show breadth in how teachers understand, interpret and relate to the smartphone in vocational education. The authors show how the smartphone often forms an integral part of professional work and is thus difficult to separate from vocational teaching and nurturing vocational competencies.

Originality/value – The authors’ contributions include using technological frames to explore how smartphones are interpreted and understood by vocational teachers by demonstrating how they relate to the nature of the smartphone, the strategy for the smartphone and the smartphone in use. The theoretical framework is used to interpret restrictions on technology use, in this case a smartphone, in education. The results could be of interest to researchers as well as to teachers, school leaders and policymakers.

As working life changes, it places new demands on vocational competence and the use of different digital technologies. It affects vocational teaching, yet digitalization within vocational education constitutes a scarcely researched area. In this study, we explore how vocational teachers relate to teaching in a digitalized society from a socio-material perspective and explore the possibilities as well as the discursive manifestations of contradictions it gives rise to. Data includes semi-structured interviews with ten vocational teachers, representing eight vocational programs in Sweden. Findings show how vocational teachers benefit from digital technology to realize pedagogical strategies and facilitate students’ vocational competence. At the same time, digitalization entails challenges of keeping up with changes in working life and providing students with relevant vocational digital technologies. Contributions include increased knowledge about digitalization in vocational education, and how it entails navigating different contradictions.

Vocational education is crucial for providing the labor market with professional vocational competence in a time of societal change, especially considering a technological change (Belaya, 2018). One of the challenges that vocational teachers face is to find, select and sometimes create appropriate teaching material for the pupils' learning (Persson 2020). Although vocational teaching constitutes an under-researched field of study, there is a stream of research that has explored a variety of e-learning tools such as blogs, video-based instructions, e-portfolios, workplace simulations, and hyper-videos (e.g., Belaya, 2018; Hamid et al., 2020; Jossberger et al., 2015;) and identify several possibilities. Thus, it is of interest to explore how vocational in-service teachers select teaching material and if they design their own teaching material. This study aims to explore the use of various teaching materials in vocational teaching in a Swedish context. A qualitative survey was conducted with a total of 22 teachers connected to a vocational teacher education in Sweden. Work-place pedagogy is used as a theoretical concept that can be understood as; “Guidance by others, situations, and artifacts are central to learning through work because the knowledge to be learned is historically, culturally, and situationally constituted” (Billett, 2002, p. 27). Early findings indicate that, what vocational teachers conceptualize as learning material, are varying and are both consisting of analog and digital tools. Vocational teachers also tend to create their own teaching material because of the need for scaffolding for their pupils as well as the need for mimicking the authentic working life. Contributions include identifying what teachers design and what aspects they consider in the design process.

Introduction

When digital technology is introduced into work practice, it means that vocational practice develops and changes (Castells, 2011). New methods, tools, and processes in working life require vocational teachers to develop fundamental vocational competencies and preparedness for this change for their pupil's employability (Persson, 2020). The concept of vocational competencies is understood in different ways (Billett, 2001) yet is often described as tacit and situated (Gåfvels and Paul, 2019). Vocational competence can be described as a symmetric relationship between knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Hiim, 2020, Baartman and De Bruijn, 2011). As working life changes, it places new demands on vocational competence and the use of different technologies. Various attempts have been made to elaborate on the competence needed for teaching in a digitalized society and a digitalized school (Ferrari, 2012, Hatlevik and Christophersen, 2013, Howell, 2012, Kivunja, 2013, Krumsvik, 2008). Vocational practices are intimately associated with physical materials such as objects, bodies, technologies, and these settings permit some actions and prevent others (Carlsson et al., 2022; Fenwick, 2015). In this study, we explore vocational teachers' perspectives on preparing students for future working life and how they relate to teaching in a digitalized society.

Theoretical perspective

The TPACK framework, expressing Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge, has arisen as a theoretical framework that specifies what knowledge is required for teaching with technology. It emphasizes that teaching involves developing an understanding of the complex relationship between technology, pedagogy, and content and using this understanding to develop suitable context-specific strategies and representations (Mishra and Koehler, 2006; Willermark, 2018; Willermark and Pareto). In this study, we use TPACK as an analytical lens to explore vocational teachers' perspectives on preparing students for future working life and how they relate to teaching in a digitalized society.

Method

The data consists of 10 interviews with vocational teachers from 8 different vocational programs in Swedish upper secondary vocational education. The participants were recruited from a previous survey carried out by the authors (Carlsson & Willermark, 2022) that explored vocational teachers' experiences in using and developing teaching material. A qualitative content analysis was carried out.

Findings and contributions

Findings show how teachers benefit from digital technology to support pedagogical strategies as well as facilitate students' content knowledge. Still, digitalization entails challenges of keeping up with changes in professional life and providing students with appropriate vocational digital technologies. It is clear how intimately connected and intertwined digitalization is with pedagogy and the subject content of vocational education (Koehler and Mishra, 2009). Contributions include increased knowledge about digitalization in vocational education, and how it entails navigating tensions between a) teaching practice and vocational practice, b) between different curricula and c) supportive and disruptive digital technologies.

Purpose 

Due to the global outbreak of Covid-19, Swedish teachers in upper secondary education were forced to conduct emergency remote teaching. As of today, there is a stream of research that addresses digitalization in education in light of the pandemic. Previous studies show that the challenges with the sudden intensification of digitalization have been particularly challenging in practical and aesthetic subjects. The research question is as follows: What challenges did vocational teachers experience during the emergency remote teaching caused by Covid-19 and what emergent tactics can be identified invocational teaching practice?

Design/methodology/approach 

The empirical data consists of (1) interviews with two vocational teachers and, (2) workshops with 25 teacher students from different vocational programmes that addressed vocational teaching during the Covid-19 crisis.

Findings 

Emergency remote teaching meant challenges due to the changed socio-material environment that cannot easily be transformed to a vocational teaching setting. The challenges were related to authentic situations and material, problem solving and dexterity. Tactics that emerged as a response to the challenges were mainly connected to attempts to mimic vocational practices.

Originality/value 

Contributions include explaining specific challenges and possibilities in developing vocational competence when teaching is digitalised. Furthermore, it increases the understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in vocational education. By adopting a socio-material perspective onvocational competence, the authors enhance the understanding of the importance of a shared socio-material environment