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It is argued that the use of high-fidelity simulators is educationally effective, since students are able to work more independently and can better control their learning. Therefore, simulations can be used as a teaching method to facilitate and ease teachers' work situations. This raises questions as to whether teachers' professional bodies are a bounded physicality, or whether we can understand teachers' professional bodies in practice in terms of enactments? This article analyses and discusses the enactment of VET teachers' professional bodies in the context of vocational and simulation-based training. The empirical material is based on ethnographic observations in three classes in two different vocational education programmes at two upper secondary schools in Sweden. Three different cases are presented and analysed as examples of how VET teachers' professional bodies are enacted. Guided by a practice theory perspective (Schatzki, T. R. Social practices: a Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social (1996), Schatzki, T. R. The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change (2002), Schatzki, T. R. and Natter, W. Sociocultural bodies, bodies sociopolitical. In T. R.Schatzki and W. Natter (Eds.), The social and political body (1996), the study shows that VET teachers' professional bodies are enacted in multiples, distributed, and delegated in an interplay between the teachers, the students, the simulator, and its material set-up. In these enactments of professional bodies, VET teachers embody both a teacher identity and a previous vocational identity, which they perform simultaneously depending on the educational situation.

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Vocational education needs to keep up with the latest technology and machinery currently used within work practice in order to educate employable students. High-fidelity simulators are proposed as one solution to this problem. This paper aims to investigate how the introduction and use of high-fidelity simulators impact teaching practices in VET at upper secondary schools from a teacher perspective. This paper is based on interviews and informal conversations with ten VET teachers from two schools as well as several hours of observations of their teaching practice. Drawing upon a sociomaterial perspective on learning and practice (Schatzki, 2002), the findings show that the simulation training was very loosely connected to the teaching practice when it was introduced. However, due to the development of the simulator, as well as teachers' increased knowledge of what can be simulated and how to enact their pedagogical intentions with simulation training, the teaching practice changed. The emerging practice required a rearrangement of teachers' work, doings, sayings and new relatings.

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This article aims to review the pedagogical research on simulation training in vocational education and training (VET) and to discuss the emerging teaching practice from a socio-material perspective on learning and practice. Literature reviews on research into simulation training with pedagogical interests show that there are three main themes: (1) the effect of technology-enhanced simulation training; (2) the fidelity and authenticity of simulation and learning; and (3) pedagogical consideration and under-pinnings. The article draws on a sociomaterial perspective on learning and practice to problematise and discuss the findings of previous research. This theoretical perspective makes it possible to discuss how technology, educational practice and social relations are intertwined and precondition each other.

Through the lens of sociomaterial theory, the article discusses how the introduction of the new technologies brings about changes and expectations of what can be learned, how the teaching practices are enacted and how this affects the relationship between teachers and students.

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Initiatives in the recognition of prior learning (RPL) have been taken in Sweden in recent years, mainly focusing on prior vocational learning among immigrants. The government started different projects to find methods for recognising a person’s prior learning in the field of vocational competence. This article presents a study of how these projects were organised and their starting points. Differences are identified concerning whether they were integrated with, or parallel to, the school system, and whether the starting point was a few vocations or a number of different vocations (depending on the background of the participants). The article then looks at some problems that arise when trying to recognise prior learning. We find that knowledge of the Swedish language is essential in this process, but that the demands are flexible and the criteria informal. The article also discusses the relationship between RPL and the educational system, where most of the projects had problems in not being too influenced by the school tradition where the main documentation of competence is grades. Finally, the article discusses conditions for the development of trust in RPL.

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