Professionally relevant and meaningful education during the first year of Norwegian VET
Examples from the Building and Construction, and Design, Arts and Crafts programmes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/sjvd.3070Abstract
The National guidelines for Norwegian VET emphasize that democracy, student involvement, career relevance, and curriculum coherence should be central elements of all VET- programmes.
However, recent research suggests that, in practice, much of VET is too general and lacks focus on the students’ individual needs, work interests and career plans. Several studies have found that students experience VET as lacking career relevance (Dahlback, Hansen, Haaland, & Sylte, 2011; Hiim, 2013; Hovland, 2015).
As these studies show, there is a need to examine how VET programmes may be further developed and to identify teaching practices that support students’ individual work interests and career plans.
This article addresses four action-research projects which attempted to develop such teaching practices.
Two of the projects were conducted in the Building and Construction programme and two were carried out in the Design, Arts and Crafts programme. In the projects, the teachers and students collaborated in developing teaching and learning practices that were tailored to the students specific learning needs.
The teachers planned, and assessed their own teaching based on feedback from student surveys conducted in their own classes.
The findings from the four projects show that students' involvement in the development of education and training is crucial to ensure that the education is experienced as relevant and meaningful to the individual students’ interests and career plans.
Keywords: relevance, meaningful, occupation, democracy and students’ involvement
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