Constructing vocational educators’ practices: a narrative and ethnographic study

This study explores how practice-based knowledge, shaped through social and vocational experience, underpins the pedagogical work of vocational educators in Building and Construction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and narrative interviews, the study shows how teachers’ implicit understanding of craft learning, rooted in embodied engagement, material sensitivity, and tacit knowledge shapes workshop instruction and informs a broader sense of responsibility towards students. Learning for teaching roles emerges through relationships between educators and students. While students are guided to engage with materials, tools, and processes, they are also introduced to workplace expectations and adult responsibility, including punctuality, responsibility, collaboration, and social interaction in informal settings. Educators draw on prior work experiences as important resource in their teaching, while their professional understandings take form through ongoing interactions with students and colleagues. The study highlights learning as a relational process in which meaning making arises through the interplay between experience, practice and the teacher role. It contributes insights into how vocational pedagogy is embodied, relational, and co-constructed in everyday educational practice, revealing how educators and learners reinterpret what they know, do, and value.