79.29
Challenges for Teachers and Pupils on a Vocational Program
This paper aims to analyze teachers' views on how a good mechanic should be, and how the teachers are mobilizing students to become mechanics through instruction and practice.
In another social landscape - before marketization, post-industrial transformation and neo-liberal forms of governance has become a part of the public educational system – a common practice were that students established a kind of counter-culture in schools; Why should I study while I am going to be an auto mechanic? Today, teachers in the vehicle and transport program partly facing a new school logic where they have to deal with pupils that have another approach to education. - Why should I study, I'll still do not want to be an auto mechanic? Previously the students were to a high extent culturally self-motivated, but nowadays the educational processes to become a car mechanic seem to have changed.
My PhD project is linked to a larger research project that deals with issues of multicultural incorporation and school achievement. My contribution to the project concerns an ethnographic study in a vocational high school on a vehicle program, where there are mainly boys with immigrant backgrounds from heavily segregated areas, present in the classroom.
The paper contains an analysis of the symbolic boundaries that structure the auto mechanic profession and how these boundaries are expressed by teachers and industry representatives. It also describes how teachers in the vehicle and transport program mobilize students to the mechanic profession both by their teaching/pedagogy and use of social networks within the car industry.