Being an educator in vocational and professional education: Knowledge, identity and values

There is an increasing focus on vocational and professional education in the contemporary policy reforms in Denmark. The position as educator is crucial to address the aims from these reforms of a raised awareness on coherence and transitions (practice and theory) during education - supporting education of a competent workforce for the future also in the light of the social and environmental sustainability discourse. The aim of the research is to discuss the professional knowledge among vocational and/or professional educators, and how they make sense of this role and reflects on their professional identity. Theoretically, there is reference to a broad understanding of professional knowledge referring to Markausskaite and Goodyear’s (2014) emphasis on different kinds of epistemic entities such as knowledge, beliefs, values and moral judgments, and to Jarvis (2002) conceptualization of practical knowledge as a synthesis of content knowledge, process knowledge & skills, beliefs & values and tacit knowledge. The theoretical approach to educators’ professional identity is a dialogic understanding conceiving professional identity as dynamically evolving, intrinsically related to others, and as consisting of multiple identities (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011). This raises the awareness on the social processes forming the professional identity at respectively educator and student level.

Methods or methodology
The research design is sequential with a comparative approach inspired by Rich (2019) who has been examining competence frameworks comparing various educations. The empirical material is from three rounds of repeated interviews with eleven professional educators from various fields, e.g. nursing, social worker, teacher and engineering education. Additional qualitative data is from dialogues when sharing models developed to represent educators’ professional knowledge and professional identity also with stakeholders from vocational education. Data is analyzed by thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2018).

Results or expected outcomes
The interviewees reflect in various ways on supporting a sense of coherence among the students with arguments referring to students’ needs, but perspectives on educating a future workforce are also (implicitly) present. The findings are condensed in a model (a ‘thinking technology’) illustrating that the professional identity of the educators beside own educational background is developed referring to the ‘content’ of the respective educations. This content is across educations seen as a ‘synthesis expertise’. The professional educator can, e.g. support the students’ development of professional knowledge and identity by referring to and modelling practices from the practice of the field.

References
Akkerman, S. F. & Meijer, P. C. (2011). A dialogical approach to conceptualizing teacher identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27, 308-319.
Braun, V., Clarke, V., Hayfield, N., & Terry, G. (2018). Thematic analysis. In P. Liamputtong, P. (eds), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences (page 1-18). Springer.