Abstract:

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.

References:
[1] Belaya, V. (2018). The Use of e-Learning in Vocational Education and Training (VET): Systematization of Existing Theoretical Approaches. Journal of Education and Learning, 7(5), 92-101.
[2] Billett, S. (2002). Toward a Workplace Pedagogy: Guidance, Participation, and Engagement. Adult Education Quarterly, 53(1), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/074171302237202
[3] Hamid, M. A., Yuliawati, L., & Aribowo, D. (2020). Feasibility of Electromechanical Basic Work E-Module as a New Learning Media for Vocational Students. Journal of Education and Learning (EduLearn), 14(2), 199-211. https://bit.ly/3NC7xB1
[4] Jossberger, H., Brand-Gruwel, S., van de Wiel, M. W., & Boshuizen, H. P. (2015). Teachers' Perceptions of Teaching in Workplace Simulations in Vocational Education. Vocations and learning, 8(3), 287-318. https://bit.ly/3nu1V0P

Keywords:

Vocational teaching, teaching material, work-place pedagogy.