Keeping worlds apart to put them back together: VET teachers’ instructional patterns in simulation-based training

Abstract This study investigates how vocational education and training prepares students for future professions characterized by technological advancements and demands for sustainability and innovation. Specifically, it examines simulator-based learning in the Natural Resource Program at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. Using a sociomaterial perspective, the study aims to investigate the strategies used by the participants (both students and teachers) in a simulated activity to make sense of the task at hand when dealing with different kinds of situations and activities therein, and in what ways these may be conducive to the development of vocational knowledge. An ethnographic approach is used, employing various methodological tools to create rich datasets, including observations, video recordings, and fieldnotes. The focus is on teachers’ feedback, students’ questions, and task handling during simulation-based training. The analysis explores the relationships between these environments and how feedback and assessment practices affect students’ task performance. When dealing with simulation-based learning in the context of this study, the instructional processes seem to involve, rather than handling specific high-stakes and risky situations, the design of activities that aim at volume training. These activities are entangled with the training sessions included in the simulators but also with other practices and environments. We argue that the instructional work of the vocational teacher deals with making sense of how such entanglements work and are conducive to learning on the one hand, but also to making choices that imply unravelling such entanglements and keeping the worlds apart to put them back together again.