New TEL Environments for Vocational Education – Teacher’s Instructional Perspective

Abstract

Modern vocational education is increasingly taking place in new technology-enhanced learning (TEL) settings. On the one hand, vocational education can benefit from the opportunities of technological development. On the other hand, such technologies may create new challenges for teachers. Therefore, there is a particular need to pay more attention to the dialogic pedagogical approaches in which teaching should be seen as a dialogical practice involving teacher-student interactions that create contextual opportunities for teachers to trigger students’ learning in new TEL settings. This article reports on an exploratory study about the different ways in which teachers’ instructional activities (via teacher-student interactions) are manifested in different emerging TEL contexts. Three case studies were selected for analysis in three different TEL settings. The results of this qualitative study indicate that ‘teacher-led’ approaches were applied in a technology-enhanced classroom context, ‘teacher-student shared collaboration activities’ were actively used in a virtual 3D-game setting and ‘teacher-student(s)-supervisor(s) joint learning activities’ were used to empower mobile-supported workbased learning. Based on the findings raised from these three empirical studies, future prospects for teachers’ activities that facilitate vocational learning can be developed. Additionally, our findings may be helpful in developing professional tools for teachers to better enable learning in new TEL settings.