In spite of long-term political and policy attention, vocational education and training (VET) continues to face major challenges, among them premature terminations of contract, as seen also in European contexts (Böhn and Deutscher 2022; Vila et al. 2025; Billett 2022), including the Danish context in focus of this paper (EVA 2023; Nielsen 2016; Aarkrog 2020). With the aim to be in conversation with the joint European Union funded research project VET-PREP, ”VET Participation, Retention, and Educational Policies in the Wake of COVID-19: A Cross-Country Exploration” (VET-PREP 2025) , the research project “NarratiVET: Bridging Structures and Voices,” funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF 2024), aims to explore whyapplication rates are still declining and attrition rates high, despite sustained political efforts to support Danish VET education (Ministry-of-Children-and-Education 2023; Danmarks-Statistik 2022).

The working hypothesis of the NarratiVET research project is, 1) that contextual and individual factors behind attrition and dropout rates are addressed separately; and 2) that efforts have addressed educational structures while paying little mind to narrative constructions, including ‘low status’ narratives pertaining to VET education (Höhns 2024; Ljunggren and Orupabo 2020; Schmid, Jørstad, and Stokke Nordlie 2021); and 3) that efforts have generally not included VET student input or voice to a very high degree.

We are guided by the following research questions:

1.How do VET students narratively construct themselves at the intersection of personhood and studenthood? 

2. How are master narratives about VET internalized, reworked or resisted through counter-narratives, and how do such storylines develop over time? 

3. Under which relational and institutional conditions do these narratives enable or constrain agency, belonging and persistence?

Theoretically we are applying a lens informed by “belonging” (Lähdesmäki et al. 2016; Yuval-Davis, Kannabiran, and Vieten 2006), and “imaginative horizons” (Crapanzano 2010), as well as “liminality” in temporal transitions (Turner 1982, 1967). Among other approaches, NarratiVET employs ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with students, and creative collaborative methods, seeking to elucidate reasons for attrition and dropout in VET educational trajectories – as seen from a student perspective. In this paper, we also focus on creative methods employed to further student voices in relation to perceptions of their educational choices and trajectories.
The framework is deliberately designed to be portable across European VET contexts for three main reasons. First, it engages with pan-European concerns surrounding the social legitimacy of vocational knowledge and the permeability of educational pathways, both of which remain unevenly developed across countries. VET systems vary substantially in their structure, prestige and outcomes, ranging from well-established dual systems with strong labour-market integration to more fragmented models characterised by high attrition. This heterogeneity underscores the value of comparative perspectives for understanding how narratives influence participation under different institutional conditions. Second, the framework aligns closely with ECER 2026’s focus on the production and use of education research in ‘poly-crisis’ contexts, where labour-market volatility, demographic change and contested forms of expertise intersect at a global level while playing out in locally specific ways.

Drawing on insights and methodologies of the ongoing NarratiVET research project which gauges attrition in education through student narratives, we present ethnographic findings from narrative interviews with students, as well as ”hackathons” (Jordan 2017; Rosner and Fox 2016), a methodological concept that furthers co-creative critical engagement with themes rising out of educational settings, as seen from both student, teacher, and researcher perspectives. The hackathons introduce textual and visual prompts, as well as arts-based modalities (Leavy 2015) that make room for embodied responses from participants, using for example personal and collaborative storyboarding (Law 2017) to gauge key incidents in relation to educational choices. The three hackathons facilitated in the project were group events in physical spaces, in which students, teachers and researchers engaged with master and counter narratives (Bamberg et al. 2004) to both map out existing narratives that may have structural implications, and to identify counternarratives manifesting in the local educational ecology, while troubling what was found. The hackathons also served as social spaces in which teacher/student-hierarchies could be productively challenged, giving opportunity to tell one’s story of educational choice and trajectory, as both seen from students’ and teachers’ perspectives, making it possible to take inspiration from and learn from each other. In this paper we explore examples of student and teacher produced articulations of dominant master and counter narratives, while discussing the use of researcher facilitated collaborative events in ethnographic fieldwork, such as hackathons.

In relation to educational choices, certain presumptions have been challenged in the course of our study, such as students primarily navigating their choices in relation to parents or close family. A more diverse picture emerged which includes also hybrid informational and social spaces (from word-of-mouth to social media). In relation to student experiences of having their voices heard and feeling a sense of belonging, group work and inclusive collaborative communities came up recurringly as spaces in which feelings of loneliness or isolation could be mitigated. This may indicate that a stronger focus on peer involvement, through institutional facilitation of spaces in which students can find and build community within and around core educational settings and activities, could mitigate attrition and help to preempt some terminations of contract. Generally, in the VET educations studied here, students were able to sift out negative “hear say” about VET education in general society, for example that vocational training and careers would be perceived as low status. Such opinions were generally dismissed as uninformed, and students would give counter narratives for example by pointing to the agency gained through vocational knowledge and by acquiring a useful craft, whereas students in many other educational settings would receive training with no clear outcome or trajectory. As our study is ongoing, we would look forward to discussing these and other findings with the scholarly community at ECER 2026. Hopefully, beginning to unpack also recommendations for countering negative master narratives around VET education and careers at a structural and societal level.

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