Critical aspects of welding : Negotiating an object of learning in vocational school

The learning process in programme-specific subjects in technical vocational education often involves treating the object of learning in student-teacher interaction. Teaching also often includes handling different tools and materials manually. In this paper, we discuss the process of learning a specific object, namely learning to weld as it emerges in interaction between a teacher and a student in a teaching situation in a technical vocational classroom. The focus is on both the what-aspect and the how-aspect of learning, where variation theory is the analytical framework for the what-aspect of learning, and conversation analysis (CA) is the analytical framework for the how-aspect. By intertwining the two methods/frameworks we can get a deeper understanding of the learning process concerning a specific object of learning.