An analysis of the discourses about the team teacher in the Danish VET sector

Abstract

F or the Danish vocational education and training sector (VET), the 1990s were characterized by a rejection of traditional views of learning and teaching. This meant that the role of the teacher in vocational education was subject to demands that they reinvented themselves. This requirement for change was mainly expressed as a rejec- tion of what was then termed the ‘private practise vocational teacher’. This approach to teaching was described as irrelevant and outdated. In extension the demand was for it to be replaced by ‘the team teacher’ This paper examines the discourses related to the introduction of the concept of ‘team teacher’ within the context of Danish vocational education. More specifically, I examine to what degree and in which manner the specific discourses drew on more general discourses which had, at that time, attained a hegemonic status. This partly concerns the discourse of modernising the public sector, i.e. a discourse about leader- ship, management, and organisation, in the form of New Public Management (NPM) but also partly a discourse about pedagogy, which shifted the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student, so that the teacher’s role came to be the facilitation of learning opportunities rather than teaching as such. The paper argues that the term ‘team-teacher’ originally came from the formal school sector in the education system where a more individualistic perception of learning had gained a hegemonic status. This was never to the same extend the case in the Danish vocational sector. The concept nevertheless turned out to be effective as a means to undermine traditional under- standings of what characterizes a VET-teacher. But as the paper also argues it was only when the discourse of modernization and the concept of New Public Management was questioned in 2007 that an opportunity was opened for discussions relating to more traditional ways of understanding the rela- tionship between teacher and student.