Umeå University's logo

This paper addresses the concept Vocational didactics and argues that the use of this concept is quite valuable when issues related to vocational education and training is discussed. It is obvious that both the VET and VET-TT research and practitioner arenas are in need of concepts acknowledge by all. Often when researchers and practitioners from different countries listen to each other in conferences or reading papers written by foreign authors about vocational education it leaves the listener or reader confused due to the lack of such concepts. The fact that VET and VET-TT in itself are complex activities increases this demand. This is the reasons why vocational didactic are argued for here. We certainly need concepts acknowledged by all in order to better understand each other.

In teacher education in Germany and Scandinavia the concept didactics is frequently used. In those countries, didactics has a broad and wide meaning. It comprices curriculum studies, sociological questions and more specific questions related to assessment and grade setting. In the Anglo-Saxon part of the world, the word didactics has a more narrow meaning similar to methodology in specific learning situations. It is with the broader definition vocational didactics is used here.

Vocational didactics has shown to be particularly useful in VET-TT seminars when discussing similarities and differences between subject-oriented and vocational education. Especially when trying to understand why subject- and vocational teachers face huge problem to reach a common understanding when discussing didactic issues in their respective teaching profession. This study indicates that the teachers, in many cases, often unknown even to themselves, have different points of departure regarding the origin of their teaching area. Mostly the similarities between subject-oriented and vocational education are taken for granted and the differences thereby hidden and invisible although it strongly affects their view of the best way to learn.

It is clear that at the same time the concept vocational didactics is introduced a boundary emerges between subject-oriented education and vocational education. It has to be noted that this boundary is blurred but nevertheless the two fields develops when the concept is introduced. The area, or sphere of subject-oriented education has a knowledge area as its origin with a cognitive learning theory. This knowledge area steaming from the academic disciplines slowly trickle into the school curriculum. The other sphere is formed by vocational education with an activity area and a guided by constructivist learning theory derived from a field of activity and competencies needed to survive in a profession. Furthermore, this activity arena is always interdisciplinary and problem oriented to its nature strongly affecting the way that the training is carried out. As mentioned, the boundary is blurred between the two fields.

The aim of this historical study was to investigate and describe the Swedish vocational educational school system from 1918 till the 1940's. The dissertation focuses upon vocational education related to industry and craft work. Questions include; who were the actors; and who's interests did they represent; how did the quantitative development of that school system look like; and which content, according to officiai authorities, should the education have. The work has a theoretical frame that comes closest to reproduction theories and educational sociology. The empirical material comprises the official documents, periodical journals and official statistics.

The results showed that there was a wide gap between official rhetoric and what took place in reality. The development of the vocational training system did not follow expectations, neither in the quantitative nor the organisational sense. The national board of education also paid little attention to the vocational school system, once it was launched. Only a handfull of men persued the question and thereby at the same time made it their careers. The vocational educational school system branched out rather quickly and became incoherent. Futhermore there were difficulties in finding pupils who wanted to join the new school-form that vocational schools represented. The benefits from joining the many branches of the vocational educational system were few. The professional staff of teachers was diffuse, they were mostly recruited from "higher" school systems while the status of working as vocational educational teacher was low. In fact, the dissertation shows, that the vocational educational system that was introduced during the first half of the 20th century, had a very low status. The educational content looked very much like the content in the compulsory school, among other things, due to the ways of recruiting teachers. Overall results show that vocational training did not become a powerful means to carry into effect the rhetoric that underpinned it, but the period had significance at a symbolic level because it linked school and the labour market more firmly in popular consciousness.