In this paper we analyse the studying of Finnish literacy in vocational education and training, focusing on a gender and class perspective. The analysis draws from ethnographic fieldwork in male dominated field of technology upper secondary vocational institution, conducted during academic years 2018-2019 in the metropolitan area of Helsinki Finland. A national policy reform concerning vocational education was implemented the same year. The policy prefers personalised studies via recognition of prior learning, informal learning, and on-the-job training, instead of more traditional studying in the VET institutions. In general, simultaneous cuts in governmental funding lead to cuts in the number of teacher-led, group-based lessons. Despite these preferences, students often study in-school with fellow students, and teachers. However, lack of resources with policy pressures put teachers in difficult positions where simple tasks and easily measured performance are embraced. From teaching and studying literacy in this context, we analyse three overlapping phenomena in our ethnography: lowering standards, work as prominent motivation for literacy tasks, and students’ interest understood as ’natural’. We show how these compound in reproducing gendered and classed stereotypes regarding taste, ways of life and aims of VET technology students, thus interpreted as requiring ’acts of appeal’ in the educational context. The analysis illustrates how neoliberal mentalities (Connell 2013) intertwine with discourses concerning ’low achieving’ boys’ schooling (e.g. Lahelma 2014, Carrington and McPhee 2008, Niemi and Rosvall 2013). We discuss how education focusing on interest is in the heart of ’reproduction’ in VET. However, we aim to point out that adopting a critical perspective to interest would be able to serve in ’emancipation’ for the VET students. Our methodological and theoretical perspectives are inspired by feminist ethnography (e.g.Skeggs 2001) in which political commitment to social justice and reflections of the researcher to the researched are considered.

Carrington, B., and McPhee, A. (2008). Boys' 'underachievement' and the feminization of teaching. Journal of Education for Teaching, 34(2), 109-120. doi:10.1080/02607470801979558 Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences, Critical Studies in Education, 54:2, 99-112, DOI:10.1080/17508487.2013.776990. Lahelma, E. (2014). Troubling discourses on gender and education. Educational Research 56 (2), 171–183. Niemi, A.-M. & Rosvall P.-Å. (2013). Framing and classifying the theoretical and practical divide: how young men's positions in vocational education are produced and reproduced. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 65:4, s. 445-460. Skeggs, Beverley (2001) Feminist Ethnography. Teoksessa Sarah Delamont, P. Atkinson & A. Coffey (toim.) Handbook of Ethnography.? London: Sage, 426-443.