Vocational teachers have a key role in the professional growth of vocational students, making their competence an important factor in the quality of VET. This study explores how principals and vocational teachers identify important and achieved competencies in relation to vocational teachers’ work. The data was collected through an online questionnaire, centred in two types of competence, competence important for teachers (important competence) and competence they consider they have already developed (achieved competence). For each type, a set of 27 competencies was evaluated on a Likert-scale by 370 participants, including both teachers and principals. The statistical analysis was primarily descriptive. The findings indicated that good communication with students, assessment of students’ knowledge, skills and abilities, and creating conditions for learning, are the three most important and achieved competencies in VET teachers’ work. On the contrary, previous teaching experience, working experience with adults and migrants, and the competence related to recruitment of students and marketing of the school, were seen as the least important and achieved ones. Different actors, meaning principals and teachers, reached an agreement on these findings. Future research should look into the reasons behind the selection of specific competence as important and the processes of competence development.      

This final chapter draws on some of the themes addressed in the previous chapters in the book. In particular it seeks to describe challenges that the Department has faced over the past decade, but it also addresses opportunities that arise as the Department celebrates its 10th anniversary. The Department of Education (Institutionen för Pedagogik och Didaktik, in short: IPD) developed through a merger of several departments from the independent Stockholm College for Teacher Education and the Department of Education at Stockholm University. The chapter discusses where we at the Department of Education are heading with regard to the three main university missions we have : teaching, research and collaboration. Finally, we need to actively contribute to expanding the knowledge base in our society with research that has arisen both through collaboration and on the basis of independent research. Here we must see the department as a larger “we”, where we with our different and complementary competences make it possible to continue to succeed in our social missions and to establish ourselves as clear actors in both national and international contexts. We have grown to be one of Stockholm University’s five largest departments over the years and currently have 174 people on our payroll at the time of writing in October 2021, a very large number of competent employees. Here we can see another challenge: to keep a large institution together. 

Since vocational teachers not only mediate theoretical and practical knowledge, but also ideals concerning the professionals’ personalities and actions, the aim of this study is to analyse if and how these ideals influence the highlighted challenges of teaching. The study is drawing on a social constructionist perspective; the method used involves 17 qualitative interviews. The challenges mentioned were as follows: lack of motivation, language and cultural factors, low status of the occupation and plagiarism. Underlying ideals rooted in the health care sector were that students should become a carer because of an inner desire. Moral and ethical values were other ideals that underpinned themes such as dealing with plagiarism and the problems experienced with non-native Swedes. An underlying fact is also the low traditional status of the nursing assistants, a challenge the teachers try to handle without effective tools. In the order to understand the challenges and handle them, the teachers construct categories of differences. This is visible when the categorisation of students is made based on motivation and ethnicity. The findings highlight the importance of courses

Based on the increasing demands for vocational training in upper secondary school to adapt to workplace conditions, the aim of this article is to explore vocational teachers’ conceptions regarding vocational knowledge. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective, this study analysed data from 17 interviews. The study showed how power dynamics, such as gender and class, affect the teachers’ conceptions. The most important expertise, according to the teachers, was related to a feminine caring disposition in which empathy and communication were identified as core abilities. However, these abilities needed to be balanced in order to avoid becoming too emotional. There was a strong link to class, for example, the hierarchical structure was revealed when the teachers spoke of a nursing assistant having to know when to call a nurse rather than a doctor or an ambulance. The findings raise questions concerning what it means for the construction of vocational habitus when a superordinate group trains a subordinate group.