This paper focuses on formation of students´ vocational identity, here seen as an integral aspect of a process whereby the students gradually learn to value and discern vocational knowing as specialized knowing of their future occupation. We thus acknowledge that the students thereby become participants of a workplace curriculum, forming and transforming the space for agency of their experi­enced curriculum (Billett, 2002, 2006) in both school and in a workplace.  Seeing vocational knowing as specialized pertains to discerning its value as knowledge worth knowing and cultivating.

The study concerns vocational education and training (VET) as integrated in the upper secondary school, and specifically, students from the Child and Recreation Programme. The programme trains students for work in child care, the leisure and sports sector as well as assisting the disabled. These occupations are strongly people-oriented and relational, and somewhat fuzzily defined. Therefore it can be sometimes difficult for students to see vocational knowing as separate from everyday knowledge and “school knowledge”.

VET in Sweden is organizationally integrated with the general upper secondary education. According to the latest upper-secondary school reform of 2011 (GY11) the national 3-year vocational programmes in Sweden lead to specific occupations as opposed to (formerly) being generally preparatory for occupations. Workplace-based education is now even more emphasized as a necessary condition for the development of a vocational identity, further enhancing job-readiness and employability.

A point of departure in this paper is that school-based, upper secondary VET in the case of Sweden is still only augmented and enriched by workplace-based education as compared to a more general pattern in Europe whereby VET is constituted and defined by workplace-based education. In countries with strong traditions of apprenticeship such as Germany, formation of vocational identity seems more naturally fused with vocational education comparing with more school-based education in e.g.  Sweden (CEDEFOP, 2015). Comparing with the apprentice way of being enculturated in a community of practice (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991), a vocational identity formation in school-based vocational education is thus somewhat different. Hence, we regard the school and the workplace as two different practices. We can assume that the students are enculturated in the practice of attending school and being a pupil since young age. However, a condition for the development of a vocational identity is that the students gradually become aware of, acknowledge and value the vocational knowing of work practice, expanding their student identity. In this case, the students have very limited experiences of the work practice. Thus, the interest in this paper is directed to what happens when the young VET students, enculturated in the practice of school encountered the practice of working life (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Chan, 2013).

This paper builds on three suppositions. Firstly, vocational knowing originates in both academic disciplines as well as occupational practices (Shay, 2013; Shay & Steyn, 2016). Secondly, vocational knowing is oriented towards as well as knowledge practices and/or social relations (Maton, 2014). Thirdly, vocational knowing is rich in meanings as it is principled by occupational practices as well as academic disciplines (Maton, 2016). Thus the study this paper is based on deals with how the students talked about the tasks they were afforded in school in workplaces.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the students´ vocational identity formation as an integral part of the development of specific vocational knowing. What tasks do the students perceive they are afforded in order to develop vocational knowing? On what grounds do the students discern and acknowledge the vocational knowing they are developing as specialized?

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