This presentation reports from two studies on vocational education and training (VET) for students with immigrant background. In the political arena in Sweden, vocational education and training has become regarded as a rapid path for immigrants and refugees to employment and integration. Swedish VET teachers face significant challenges in order to organize the learning possibilities for and increasing number of young students and adults with immigrant backgrounds. The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis, et al., 2014) provided a framework to identify and compare conditions in the different VET settings. The results showed how material-economic arrangements provided quite different learning opportunities regarding the amount of teaching time that was allocated, the number of students in class, and the physical space where learning and interaction was taking place. This was also entangled with local cultural-discursive arrangements, such as diverging expressed views on the students by school management and the needs for the staff to be supported through continuing professional development. Social-political arrangements varied in regards to how VET teachers and teachers in Swedish as a second language were able to collaborate. (such as if their offices were in different buildings). Together, these different practice architectures implied critical differences regarding relatings and interactions between the students and their teachers. In order to “zoom in” (Nicolini, 2009) on learning situations and dialogues between the teachers and the students and between students, field work methods inspired by Czarniawska (2007) were used. Apart from observations in classrooms and in practical learning activities, shadowing of teachers was undertaken. In order to gather data from teacher-student interactions the teacher also carried a digital voice recorder. In this presentation, excerpts will be brought forth to show examples of teacher-student dialogues. Concepts from microethnographic studies focusing on literacy events (Bloome 2005) and content and language learning theories (Cummins 2003; Gibbons 2006) will be used for the analysis of how student learning and participation is supported and scaffolded. The examples in this presentation demonstrate the need for combining practice theories of different traditions in order to capture how praxis and learning is enabled and/or constrained in different educational settings.

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