“Now It's Not School, It's For Real!”: Negotiated Participation in Media Vocational Training

Abstract

By taking up the strand in Lave and Wenger's writing on situated learning that directs attention to social dynamics and issues of power and positioning, the present article argues for the fruitfulness of including the concept of negotiated participation in approaches to teaching and learning. Based on a fieldwork in vocational media production projects, this study demonstrates the tensions and contradictions that came out of the hybrid nature of these vocational practices in high school. Establishing the professionally relevant modes of participation in the projects was fraught with struggles in which the project members had to bracket institutionalized school routines as well as handle and negotiate particular work life conditions (including cooperation with old timers in the target professions). It is argued that the way institutional contradictions are manifested and negotiated in everyday teaching and interaction can inform our understanding of the premises for multifunctional educational praxis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Financial support from the Swedish Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

We thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments. Thanks are also due to Asta Cekaite, Maria Gustavsson and Åsa Mäkitalo for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.