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Motivation: This thesis is motivated by a wish to strengthen coherence in vocational education by exploring how school and workplace-based learning can be understood and connected in more meaningful ways for students. Although these arenas offer complementary opportunities for students’ vocational development, they are often insufficiently connected, making it difficult for students to navigate across contexts and construct coherent understandings. In the Norwegian sales, service, and tourism programme, loosely structured work placements and limited pedagogical frameworks intensify this challenge. As vocational teachers play an important role in supporting students’ learning across contexts, there is a need for “tools” that can promote continuity, structure reflection, support documentation of learning, and facilitate meaning-making. In the project under study, teachers have introduced thematic assignments as potential boundary objects that support students in linking school-based learning with workplace experiences.
Aim: The overall aim of this thesis was to examine how thematic assignments functioned as boundary objects that mediated students’ learning across school-based and workplace contexts, and how they supported students in navigating boundaries between these contexts. The thesis aimed to investigate how students, teachers, and workplace supervisors used these assignments to make vocational concepts visible, structure reflection, navigate differing expectations and practices, and create continuity between learning contexts. Furthermore, the thesis sought to identify the pedagogical conditions that enabled thematic assignments to support students’ meaning-making, motivation, and development of vocational identity. Based on these analyses, a model was developed to illustrate how school-based learning and workplace experience can be interwoven across contexts through reflection, dialogue, and adaptive guidance.
Methodological approaches: A qualitative, explorative design was employed across three complementary studies:
• Study 1: Explored how thematic assignments were used in the classroom before and after work placement. Data included 20 classroom observations and 25 student diaries. The study applied reflexive thematic analysis to examine how assignments supported student reflection and students’ conceptual development.
• Study 2: Investigated the use of thematic assignments during work placement through 27 workplace observations and conversational interviews with vocational teachers and supervisors. Analysis also used reflexive thematic analysis, focusing on how assignments mediated learning and collaboration across contexts.
• Study 3: Examined students’ perceptions of thematic assignments through 19 individual interviews and one focus group with vocational teachers. The study applied directed qualitative content analysis to explore how assignments contributed to meaning-making and vocational identity formation.
All three studies were informed by a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, enabling the interpretation of lived experiences and pedagogical practices across school and workplace settings.
Contributions: This thesis conceptualises thematic assignments as boundary objects that support students’ navigation of discontinuities between school and the workplace. However, the findings demonstrate that they do not function as boundary objects without intentional pedagogical enactment; their mediating capacity emerges only when teachers and supervisors actively facilitate their use through dialogue, adaptive guidance, and structured reflection. Drawing on empirical data from three qualitative studies, the thesis shows that coherence cannot be achieved through structural arrangements alone but requires pedagogical strategies that interweave experiences into coherent learning trajectories. The conceptual model developed in the thesis illustrates how vocational understanding deepens through reflection-for-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action, supported by teachers’ and supervisors’ adaptive guidance and brokering practices.
The thesis further extends boundary-crossing theory by integrating Biesta’s (2013, 2015b) domains of educational purpose and by introducing interweaving as an analytical lens that captures how experiences, concepts, and reflections are woven together across learning contexts.
Conclusion: Based on findings from three qualitative studies, the thesis argues that vocational learning emerges when students’ experiences, concepts, and understandings from both school and the workplace are interwoven into meaningful, coherent learning processes. Rather than attempting to reduce the differences between contexts, these differences can be rendered pedagogically productive when supported through reflective dialogue, adaptive guidance, and brokerage. To this end, thematic assignments function as artefacts that help structure these dialogues and create continuity, supporting the development of students’ vocational understanding and the formation of vocational identity across learning contexts.
This thesis demonstrates that coherence in VET is not a product of structural arrangements alone, but of the pedagogical enactment of boundary objects, supported through adaptive guidance and the ongoing interweaving of school-based and workplace-based learning.
