Publisher's Synopsis
It is our great pleasure to present the Proceedings of the 4th Crossing Boundaries Conference in Vocational Education and Training, which took place online from 8 to 9 April 2021 in Muttenz and Bern, Switzerland. The current proceedings continue the tradition that started in Bremen 2015, followed by Rostock 2017 and Valencia 2019, and joins the collection of the VETNET ECER publications that Nägele and Stalder initiated in 2018. VETNET publications are truly open access publications. We believe it is essential to facilitate discussion and cooperation among the VET research community members, both in terms of research objects, theoretical foundations, methodological strategies, and significant findings of the diverse research projects.The Crossing Boundary is a free-of-charge, specialist group conference. It connects re-searchers worldwide and supports mutual learning, which becomes even more critical when physical mobility is limited. When we launched the conference call, we invited contributors to focus on vocational education and training pathways and lifelong learning. Individuals must handle a multitude of challenges during their career. We believe it's important to constantly re-flect on how VET systems and actors contribute to sustainable and meaningful careers of indi-viduals and how they link up with societal and economic developments. The proceedings in-clude more than 60 papers written by more than 130 scholars. They give evidence on vivid re-search in vocational education and training addressing attractive initial VET, developing VET systems, internationalisation of VET, teachers and trainers, inclusion, innovation, skills devel-opment, and boundary-crossing. It was impressive to follow the intense and focused discussion during the conference.Participants were selected based on submitting a proposal for the conference, which went through a double-blind review process. If accepted, a short full paper had to be handed in before the conference to be published in the book of proceedings. Our philosophy: No participation and presentation without a paper! The editors read all contributions to correct for severe errors and the layout. However, the responsibility for the papers resides with the authors, as well as the copyright.We want to thank our VETNET colleagues for their support in the review process, without which the proceedings would not have been ready before the conference. Of course, authors and co-authors are the most important contributors to this volume and, therefore, be thanked for their effort.
