Making technology education legitimate: teachers’ strategies of capital conversion in compulsory schools

Abstract This paper explores how technology teachers in compulsory schools actively legitimise technology education within settings characterised by unequal resources and shifting policy expectations. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the study examines how teachers utilise and transform different forms of capital to sustain meaningful and recognisable technology education. Two research questions guide the analysis: how teachers manage competing demands on the subject, and what strategies they employ to preserve professional agency and legitimacy. The research is based on ten semi-structured interviews with certified technology teachers and employs directed content analysis informed by the concepts of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. The findings reveal that teachers continually legitimise their practice by converting material resources into authenticity, external networks into curriculum-aligned knowledge, credentials and didactic artefacts into professional recognition, student voices into symbolic authority, and organisational time into a teachable culture. These processes help teachers stabilise subject practices, enhance pedagogical ambitions, and make technology education visible and meaningful to students, colleagues, and school leaders. Policy implications and proposals for further scholarly work are also discussed.