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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 in vocational teaching practice?

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.

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.

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 on vocational competence, the authors enhance the understanding of the importance of a shared socio-material environment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate vocational teaching behaviours in facilitating pedagogical practice concerning students' classroom engagement.

A mixed-method approach with quantitative classroom observations and qualitative field notes was conducted at two higher vocational institutions in Guangdong province, south of China. Sixty lesson observations were rated combining with supplementary field notes from 20 teacher participants analysed through a comparative coding process.

Means of dimensions of teaching behaviours and student engagement were calculated based on taking the averages of the means of items theoretically associated with each dimension. Through thematic analysis of observational notes, vocational instructions and students' engagement in vocational learning environment were more diversified in terms of vocational teaching practice, which manifested that vocational teaching behaviours focused more on adjusting students' practical learning.

The limitation is shown that the quantitative sample is small, yet affords greater depth of data for further discussion.

This study develops its setting and orientation by applying the classroom observation instrument into the Chinese high vocational context and offers more in-depth insights and exploration of the characteristics of teaching practice in vocational classrooms.

This study explores the role of previous occupational identity in the formation of the (new) teacher identity of vocational teachers. The focus is on how vocational teachers discover their teaching identity, how they describe the connection between their previous occupation and teacher identity and how they describe a competent member of the teaching community.

The theoretical approach is inspired by Communities of Practice (CoP) theory. More specifically, the realignment between socially demanded competence in the profession and personal experience as well as identification with the teaching community are discussed. The research material comes from 14 interviews with vocational teachers in different disciplines.

Findings indicate first that the process of professional identity (trans)formation was initiated by finding one's teaching self when the individuals became aware of their interest in teaching by discovering that they had already achieved some sort of teaching-related competence. Second, individuals had been connecting their professional identities – finding common competence between their previous occupation and the teaching role. Third, vocational teachers experienced legitimising their competence and their new identity with reference to what their new CoP instructed as important competence (regime of competence).

While teachers' vocational competence is not scrutinised, their teaching competence needs to be constantly proved. This imbalance often leads to teachers returning to an aspect of their identity that is well established – their vocational competence. Looking back to their occupational competences constitutes a realignment backwards, when teachers attempt to serve their new professional goal by drawing on old competence.

Vietnam’s 11th National Party Congress prioritised integration, modernisation and industrialisation as the new key orientations for Vietnam. It outlined Vietnam’s integration with the world, not only economically, but also in terms of the social, cultural, educational, scientific and technological areas that can support social and economic development and sustainability. Vocational education has been recognised as pivotal to the nation’s sustainable workforce development and transformational changes. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how foreign approaches and practices have been filtered and appropriated to bring about sustainable development and transformational changes for Vietnamese vocational education.

The paper is derived from a study that involves documentary analysis, observation and semi-structured interviews with vocational learners and staff across three different vocational education and training (VET) sites in Vietnam. The overall study includes three vocational education providers and 22 participants altogether, but this paper involves observation and semi-structured interviews with eight participants, including one leader, two teachers and five students. It focusses on a Germany-funded vocational college in the northern central area of Vietnam that came under the management of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, and the local province where the college located.

The findings of the study show a critical need to develop a new “Vietnamese VET pedagogy” that filters international influences and flexibly and creatively combines them with the existing local pedagogy. To meet the local and global demands and bring transnational changes for Vietnamese vocational education, new VET pedagogies need to align with both Vietnamese historical and political situations, especially the emergent demands of the open market socialist economy and to capitalise on international influences – Confucian, French, Soviet and Western. Such a balance will ensure Vietnam makes use of both international forces and local strengths for sustainable development and transformational changes rather than passive dependence on foreign practices.

The research provides valuable insights into the appropriation of foreign practices and principles in Vietnamese vocational education. However, it focusses only on three vocational education sites in central Vietnam. Further studies with larger scale of participants and across a variety of vocational education settings including public and private institutions, community centres and family workshops will offer broader findings related to this important topic.

The study suggests practical implications for institutions to deal with the challenges associated with the adaptation of international forces into the vocational education context in Vietnam. It outlines the transformational changes in pedagogical practices related to the increased requirement to move from the traditional didactic teaching to more self-directed learning, to meet the requirements of a modern vocational education system.

This study provides unique insights into the practices and challenges of filtering foreign VET practices and principles to bring about transformational changes in Vietnamese vocational education. It, therefore, responds to the paucity of literature in this area. In addition, it examines internationalisation in Vietnamese VET, an under-researched area in the field of internationalisation of education as most of the literature in this field concentrates on the higher education sector.

The research aims to discuss technical and vocational students' long-term and complete evaluation of learning effectiveness under school-wide thematic teaching design.

This study adopted a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to measure the learning effectiveness of thematic teaching in technical vocational schools using the Kirkpatrick model. Qualitative research conducted in-depth interviews with 32 interviewees, including students, parents, teachers, graduate alumni and the supervisors of off-campus internship units. Quantitative research conducted a questionnaire survey on vocational students. A total of 221 valid questionnaires were collected. In addition, this research conducts another quantitative survey on cooperative enterprises to compare the actual effect of the implementation of the school-wide thematic teaching students with the others, and a total of 35 valid questionnaires were collected.

The results of the research found that the effectiveness of thematic teaching method can achieve the expected goals of each level of Kirkpatrick model. The students taking thematic teaching are significantly better and fitting in the industry expects. Therefore, this research suggests the comprehensive introduction of school-wide thematic teaching to other school operators.

This research is the first study used the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate the effectiveness of school-wide thematic teaching design in hospitality education and providing a practical case for schools. This research combined qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the effectiveness of the teaching method through multiple perspectives. Through the feedback from supervisors of the hospitality industry, the school-wide thematic teaching design provides a good foundation for technical and vocational graduates.

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.

The data consist of ten semi-structured interviews with vocational teachers, representing eight vocational programs in Sweden.

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.

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.

The purpose of this study is to explore how critical aspects can be defined in a learning study on welding without conducting any pre-tests.

In this study, the authors focus on empirical examples from a learning study on welding conducted in six iterative cycles, with conversation analysis and variation theory approach (CAVTA) as a theoretical basis. The welding lessons have been video-recorded, and in the study, the authors analyze examples where the teachers try to identify critical aspects of a vocational practical object of learning in interaction. CAVTA permeates the complete process, where the analysis has been part of the iterative cycles and further developed when the six cycles were completed.

The results show how critical aspects can be made visible in the interaction between teacher(s) and student(s) in the enacted learning situation. In the process, the authors work with the three concepts expected critical aspects, displayed critical aspects and targeted critical features in relation to a vocational practical object of learning where conducting a pre-test to define critical aspects is not educationally possible.

Teaching vocational practical objects of learning could be seen as something different from teaching other kinds of objects of learning and the use of the traditional pre-tests in learning studies may be problematic. From that follows, that other ways of finding the critical aspects for the students regarding a vocational practical object of learning might be needed. In this study, such a way is presented.

In Germany, various approaches have been taken to tackle the current teacher shortage in technical and vocational education and training (TVET). One attempt to remedy the shortage in Bavaria has been the introduction of an engineering education study programme at universities of applied sciences. Ideal candidates for this programme should have an interest in both engineering and social interaction. For effective recruitment, therefore, it is necessary to know applicants’ characteristics such as their vocational interests. In this study, the vocational interest profiles of students in TVET teacher training programmes were identified and their interest profiles and further characteristics were compared with those of other VET students at universities and universities of applied sciences.

An online questionnaire based on Holland’s interest theory and adapted from the Allgemeiner-Interessen-Struktur-Test-3 (interest structure test) was administered to 85 students in TVET teacher training programmes at universities and universities of applied sciences in Bavaria. Items regarding reasons for choosing a particular study programme, university location and other personal details were added.

The vocational interest profiles of students at universities and universities of applied sciences can be described as similar but weakly differentiated. Insights are provided by the characteristics of students such as the majority being first-time academics in the family. The reasons for choosing the degree programme and university location highlight the fact that a large proportion of students in engineering education would not have chosen a teaching-related degree programme if it had not been offered at the respective university of applied sciences.

Although the sample in this study was small and, therefore, limiting, it represented a high proportion of TVET teacher training students in Bavaria and a substantial proportion of first-year students in TVET teacher training programmes at universities and universities of applied sciences in Bavaria (section 2.2 and 3.1). Thus, the findings provide valuable insights into commonalities in interest profiles between engineering education students at universities of applied sciences and other TVET students at universities. With respect to the domain of the chosen vocational specialisation, differentiated profiles emerged that, for example, showed a stronger artistic orientation among students in construction technology/wood. For further analysis, the previous variable-centred orientation of the analysis can be supplemented by person-centred analyses (e.g. cluster analysis and latent variable mixture modelling, LVMM) (cf. Leon et al., 2021).

The findings in this study reveal the potential for attracting candidates to universities of applied sciences if they prefer to study in rather rural areas close to their hometowns. With the aim to educate prospective teachers for future work not only in metropolitan regions but in rural areas too, offering bachelor degree programmes in rural areas would seem promising. A regional option can boost the recruitment of new students and attract candidates that otherwise would be unable to pursue studies or a career as a teacher in vocational education. The results of this study and those of previous studies suggest that universities of applied sciences can cooperate with universities to help solve the teacher shortage problem.

Overall, it is apparent that the students' interests reached comparatively high values in all interest orientations and thus are only weakly differentiated. If undifferentiated profiles indicate low levels of career readiness, this significantly affects the recruitment of young people for the teaching profession. Assessing career orientation and promoting vocational interests should be prioritised during secondary school education. Vocational orientation measures are essential and should provide insight into typical activities of daily work life in different professions and thus pique and foster interests.

This study provides insight into how to respond to the teacher shortage in VET by identifying important characteristics of engineering education students using vocational interest profiling.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a vocational scientific constructivist concept meant for shaping competence-based and networked teaching and learning in vocational education and training (VET).

VET must enable learners to shape work within the context of conceptions based on the development of society. Refresher trainings cannot realise this. Concepts need a shaping competence-based and networked approach. Teaching and learning networks, learning projects and digital media are the keys to this approach.

The focus of the planned concept lies on shaping competence-based teaching and learning. This can be realised with innovative teaching and learning networks. Digital media can support this. The planned concept will be justified. The systematic planning of an exemplary learning project will be discussed.

This paper lays the ground to evaluate the relevance and range of shaping competence-based and networked teaching and learning.

The concept was (co-)developed by the University of Rostock. It was tested in first learning projects. These experiences are taken into account. The aim is to emphasise that the intended approach is a justified educational strategy in colleges, companies and other places of learning dealing with VET.

Discusses the problem of “creating” a vocational education and training profession in Europe. In approaching the problem, national and cultural differences of vocational education and training must be recognized. Typical ways of comparing and analysing them may, however, be limited for reflecting on the topic of vocational education and training (VET) profession. Suggests that an analysis on the “education functions” of different categories of vocational educators and trainers in different cultures is needed. To promote further discussion, gives an example from Finland. In the Finnish case, vocational teachers have become the proponents of vocational education.