Vocational education and training (VET), predominantly associated with intermediate skill formation in colleges, is receiving a lot of attention internationally. Policy makers are looking to VET as a strategy for dealing with high levels of unemployment particularly amongst the youth and dealing with skills shortages. In many countries VET teachers have had little or no formal educational training. In contexts where the system is rapidly expanding, new teachers are needed and cannot simply be recruited from workplaces. The training of these new teachers poses interesting challenges for the field of teacher education. Are there distinct pedagogies associated with vocational education? How do we prepare teachers that ‘face-both-ways’ (Barnett, 2006), to the classroom and the workplace? What can be learned from the diverse traditions in vocational education across contexts when exploring vocational pedagogy (Claxton, Lucas, & Webster, 2010; Rauner, 2007)? And what knowledge of education and work do the teachers need? This presentation reflects on the example of developing new teacher education qualifications for VET teachers in South Africa and how the concept of vocational pedagogy has been explored to inform the curriculum development, and the tensions in recontextualising Anglophone, Germanic and other pedagogic research into specific socio-cultural and policy contexts.

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