One Step Forward: Advancing Knowledge on Italian VET-Laboratory Instructional Practices

The instructional practices implemented by the teacher in the Italian initial Vocational Education and Training (VET) system has rarely been the subject of empirical studies. Indeed, an exploratory literature review showed no results. Often, this kind of instructional practices risks being confined in the VET-laboratory framework, leaving unexploited their potential that could be able to cross boundaries between the classroom and the workplace. In order to provide transferable and reusable information on instructional practices of both VET teachers and the teachers of general school, ethnography and the Grounded Theory approaches were combined. Despite the data analysis is not yet finished and the model still to be elaborate, the principal findings of the present contribution represent a set of suggestions for VET teachers (both those who teach practical subjects and those who teach cultural subjects) and the teachers of the general school. Further analysis will aim to design a model which represent a middle-range theory of VET-lab teachers’ instructional practices and a set of instruments that could be useful for VET teachers’ (and for school teachers too) training and teaching practices.