Vocational Learning – Empirical Examples From Vocational Education Workshop Sessions

In Sweden, upper secondary vocational education is organised as school-based as well as workplace-based learning, just like in other European countries. However, few studies focus on the programme-specific teaching and learning in the school-based part of the education. In a three-year project, we address this lack of research in different sub-projects. In this paper we present empirical examples from four of those sub-projects concerning teaching and learning in vocational education workshop sessions carried out in four vocational programmes. Video-recorded teaching and learning in workshop sessions have been analysed based on CAVTA (Conversation Analysis and Variation Theory Approach), with a specific focus on the learning processes that take shape when vocational teachers and upper secondary students interact with tools and materials in relation to technical objects of learning. Altogether, these examples show complex and dynamic interactive processes, which become visible in the analysis of the interaction between teacher(s) and student(s) while teaching and learning in vocational workshops