This paper presents findings from the Danish NUE-project, funded by the Independent Research Foundation of Denmark (DFF). NUE examines early-career vocational teachers and the conditions concerning their onboarding, integration, and workplace learning. Early-career teachers in VET face numerous challenges in vocational teaching, often combined with limited pedagogical training and education, which makes their situation especially precarious, often resulting in high turnover in Denmark (Hjarsbech & Riis, 2023). This instability hinders the development of high-quality teaching and diminishes the appeal of VET careers, a pressing issue given VET’s critical role in preparing skilled professionals for various industries (Rohwedder & Le Fevre, 2025; Wheelahan, 2014). The lack of early-career support for VET teachers exacerbates this problem (CEDEFOP, 2016; Smith & Yasukawa, 2017). Unlike their counterparts in conventional educational fields, VET teachers are typically professionals transitioning from industries such as nursing or carpentry into teaching roles, often without formal pedagogical credentials (Rohwedder, 2024; Smith 2020). This project aims to generate essential knowledge about the integration and participation of early-career VET teachers in organizational communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) Guided by the research question, ‘How are the conditions and possibilities for developing the professional competences of early-career teachers constituted in the workplace of VET?’ The project examines four heterogeneous vocational education cases in Denmark (a health-care school, an agricultural school, a technical school, and a prison officer school) to highlight the potential differences and similarities that early-career teachers in VET face in workplace learning and overall integration across these schools. The project focuses on outlining and investigating the communities of practice of the four case schools, drawing upon cultural-historical psychology (Engeström, 2001) and organizational learning theory. We especially focus on communities of practice as a lens for understanding and enunciating the challenges early-career VET teachers face.  Specifically, we are inspired by the concept of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which we attempt to update and actualize in our research design, taking into accounts critiques raised toward the concept as such (Gherardi, 2009). The concept ‘communities of practice’ is here fertilized with perspectives stemming from cultural historical psychology as a whole (Engeström, 2001), especially we are attentive towards the inherent contradictions between the respective agents in the fields, and how other fields influence the cases we investigate, which is also used in other forms of practice theory (Schatzki, 2018, Bourdieu,1990) .  Especially, we wish to inquire whether it is possible to plot trajectories for early-career teachers across the case schools, trajectories that encapsulate the dynamic tension of inertia-acceleration akin to Lave’s legitimate-periphery concept.  

One year into the project, we have identified various tensions across the four cases. Not tensions we necessarily can solve, but rather as analytical points of departure to which we, as researchers, invite VET practitioners to use these tensions to generate insights and learning opportunities (Brandi & Elkjaer, 2022; Persson & Revsbæk, 2024) about the integration and onboarding of early-career teachers.

The NUE-project adopts a pragmatic approach, applying research methods to real-world conditions (Dewey, 1938). The key line of inquiry is a multiple-case study with four VET institutions, each examining the research question in different organizational settings. These four cases) represent a diverse sample of institutional and vocational environments, each with unique conditions for onboarding early-career VET teachers. Each case is examined through a four-step qualitative process: a) dialogue meetings with school leaders to align the research process with the specific institutional context; b) participatory field observations (Kristiansen & Krogstrup, 2015) of activities related to early-career teachers’ daily experiences within the organization; c) individual and group interviews with early-career teachers to explore their integration and participation in the community of practice; d) group interviews with experienced vocational teachers to further investigate the conditions and opportunities for onboarding in their respective organizations and to empower teachers, helping them better understand and navigate their organizational roles and challenges; and e) each empirical case study is condensed into a case profile to illustrate and exemplify the conditions and possibilities regarding inertia–acceleration or related theoretical conceptualizations. A simultaneous trajectory in the research design is the hermeneutic line of inquiry (Dibley et al., 2020). The research team has begun to interpret preconceptions and emergent understandings, tracing how new lines of understanding emerge from the cases, and how these may change and enhance this line of inquiry (Crowther & Thomson, 2020). One year into the project, we have concluded our first round of data collection. Following an abductive line of inquiry (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) we have identified tensions across the four cases, which we have added to our inquiry (our interview guides, observation scaffolding, workshop design), resulting in a more fine-grained line of inquiry, where we examine the validity of these tensions. It is still too early to dismiss or confirm the usefulness of the proposed concept and lens of inertia-acceleration, but the heterogeneous nature of vocational education regarding onboarding and workplace learning is quite clear in our data. Early-career teachers face very different conditions and challenges across our cases, with tensions manifesting in varying degrees in all the case schools, as well as in different forms. In our presentation, we present these findings concerning tensions and conceptualize them from our working concept of communities of practice and outline our next step in our abductive line of inquiry.

Our preliminary findings indicate a line of tensions that influence early-career teachers’ workplace learning in vocational education. Here, we present findings concerning two tensions, conceptualize them from the concept of communities of practice, and outline our next step in our abductive line of inquiry. The tension of ‘institutional lesson plans’ and the tension of ‘colleagues’ is enunciated in our presentation. In all four cases, we found that institutional lesson plans and PowerPoints are available in various formats. Early-career teachers face dilemmas concerning these codified and manifested lesson plans. On the one hand, early-career teachers find them helpful for lesson planning. On the other hand, early-career teachers also point out that some plans seem outdated, inadequate, and out of sync; do early-career teachers then have to be faithful to outdated lesson plans? Moreover, the highly diverse composition of vocational training classrooms similarly challenges the general nature of lesson plans, which typically address issues concerning group work and differences between students in terms of competencies, age, and so forth. The second tension concerns colleagues and unfolds as support and peripheral positioning. Experienced colleagues tend to welcome newcomers with guidance framed through established norms — for example, “this is how we usually do things here.” While intended as supportive, such practices may simultaneously constrain newcomers’ agency and maintain them in a peripheral role. Additionally, we outline how our hermeneutic line of inquiry has fertilized our abductive inquiry, and how our overall pragmatic research design might inspire other VET researchers. The lens of cultural-historical psychology and organizational learning provides a nuanced understanding of the challenges, and we present how this lens could benefit vocational research, especially in a pragmatic approach.

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