Public health and life skills in schools can have multiple focuses. On one hand, public health and life skills may involve what students should learn about topics related to public health and life skills within academic subjects. On the other hand, it refers to the school's role in promoting students' health and their ability to navigate their own lives through inclusion, tailored education, conducive learning environments, and student-teacher relationships, among other factors (Uthus, M. 2020). This article addresses life skills from a broad perspective, where students have oriented their development projects towards academic subjects, personal plans, and the mastery of both school life and personal lives.

The article investigates the experiences students have with the theme of life skills in schools and how Vocational Education Development Work has contributed to changing practices in their own teaching. The overarching goal was to follow students in their projects with a focus on life skills in vocational education. In this context, the students are 17 teachers at a secondary school in Viken, instructing in three different program areas: health and social care, electrical and data technology, and technology and industrial studies.

The research question is: How do teachers implement the theme of life skills in vocational education through Vocational Pedagogical Development Work?

This is a subproject within the action research project; LUSY (LUSY: Teacher training schools and teacher education enterprises in Vocational Teacher Education). The theoretical foundation of LUSY adopts a pragmatic and critical perspective on learning, education, and research, as reflected in this article, supplemented with perspectives related to life skills. As authors, we conducted research with teachers on how teachers, as students in the Vocational Pedagogical Development Work program, have implemented the theme of life skills in their projects. The purpose of this project is to develop their own practices within the theme of life skills.

Action research is about a critical and self-critical process that can lead to changes individually and collectively within an organization. This involves a change in what we do,     in how we think, how we express ourselves, and a change in how we relate to others and the circumstances around us (Kemmis, 2009).

The action research process consisted of various cycles with the goal of implementing life skills in education to develop individual practices. These cycles included gatherings at the teachers' own school. We conducted dialogue-based teaching and guidance tailored to the participants' needs with their various development projects. We implemented surveys to assess, two assignments were presented collectively in the group; contributing to shared reflections. As researchers, we kept logs of each session with our reflections on the process. Finally, there was a written and oral examination.

In all phases of planning, implementing, and reflecting on the development projects, action group participants have been involved through collaboration and dialogue (Kemmis, 2009).

Developing within a professional community involves collectively generating new thoughts and actualizing and experimenting with ideas in collaboration with others. This theory is referred to as the socio-cultural learning theory, where learning and development are seen as a dialectical process (Säljö, 2021, p.111).

In organizational learning, the theory of Peter M. Senge (1990) is often highlighted. This is a appreciative theory with a focus on how organizations can evolve over time. The attention to this theme and the practical challenges within organizational learning have earned this theory recognition in research in the field (Eikeland, 2022, p. 133).

In this study, we have chosen a qualitative design with a phenomenological approach to illuminate teachers' experiences with and understanding of the interdisciplinary theme of Life Skills in schools and with Vocational Pedagogical Development Work (Johannessen et al., 2016, p.82). The empirical basis is grounded in various qualitative methods aimed at providing a better and deeper understanding of the issue (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2015). This includes plans for the Vocational Pedagogical Development Work (YPU) study, researchers' meeting notes and logs, analysis of teachers' exam responses as students, as well as guidance and group discussions followed by a survey. We have employed method triangulation, combining different data collection methods to enhance the validity and reliability of our findings, and to provide a more nuanced perspective. In this context, we initiated the process with reflection groups involving teachers. Through open discussions and sharing of experiences, we gathered qualitative insights into their perspectives and experiences. These reflection groups were supplemented with a qualitative survey. To further understand the context and validate our findings, the analysis of teachers' exam responses has been a crucial component of our analytical work. The survey-data were analyzed using qualitative methods. We employed qualitative content analysis to identify thematic patterns and interpretations of participants' responses to open-ended questions (Tjora, 2021, p.217). The analysis was conducted by carefully reviewing the exam responses. Initially, we utilized thematic analysis by coding and categorizing the content of the texts in connection with our research question. We also analyzed our own logs from the gatherings related to the Vocational Pedagogical Development Work (YPU) study. Through analyzing the exam texts, our goal was to gain deeper insights into teachers' experiences with the theme of Life Skills and how they had conceptualized the term Life Skills, implementation, and their approach to incorporating the theme into their own teaching. Tjora (2021) suggests that a discourse analysis of texts is appropriate when one "particularly seeks to identify text/practice as reality-constructing." Given that we actively participated in the gatherings, which limited our opportunity for real-time observation, we wrote logs after each session. The logs served as a summary of our discussions with the teachers and observations made during the sessions. We analyzed these logs to comprehend and contextualize our role, perspective, and any potential influence on data collection and interpretation (Tjora, 2021, p. 204).

Preliminary findings from the qualitative survey conducted before the submission of exam responses indicate that YPU in their own workplace has allowed teachers to focus more on the theme of life skills, bringing it to the forefront and integrating it into their daily routines. Throughout the process, students have worked independently on their projects, and the workplace has served as a meeting place for sharing experiences and competence development. The teamwork among the teaching staff and insights from others' projects are highlighted as valuable and contribute to professional enrichment. Guidance and research collaboration between us as researchers from OsloMet and the teachers as students provide motivation for YPU projects. Furthermore, we will highlight how the students' YPU reports demonstrate their implementation of life skills into their own teaching. In conclusion, we discuss how the students plan to integrate their work from YPU into their ongoing practices. The exam responses underscore the complexity of the life skills concept, and teachers' work through Vocational Pedagogical Development (YPU) has resulted in projects with variation in themes. We ended up with two main categories: 1. Content, what teachers associate with the theme of Life Skills 2. Methodical / didactic – how the theme of Life Skills is implemented Through working with these main categories, we also discovered that some teachers focused more on an individual level, while others had a focus on the school level. However, we also found that work at an individual level can influence the class or school level, and that projects with a main focus on the school level also had implications at the individual level.

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