The purpose of this paper is to discuss how different ways of organising and teaching in VET can be understood in the tension between ‘social reproduction’ and ‘emancipation’ with regards to classical sociological issues such as class, gender and ethnicity. The paper is based on, and will present a synthesis of, key results from a recently finished four-year research project. The main aim of the project was to investigate the extent and nature of learning processes that can be characterized as civic education in vocational subjects, including work-place learning, in different VET-programmes. Drawing on both curriculum and ethnographic data, this paper discusses how VET can play a role of mainly social reproduction by distributing different types of knowledge with different powers to students depending on class (Nylund et al, 2017), gender (Ledman, et al, 2018) and ethnicity (Rosvall et al, 2019), preparing students for different roles in the labour market and as citizens. However, the paper also discusses the many variations in the VET-contexts studied (cf. Nylund et al, 2019; Rönnlund et al, 2019). Examples of inter alia when and how students got access to (different forms of) ’ctitical thinking’ though different ways of organizing teaching will be discussed. We will also discuss how different ways of teaching prevented or promoted different types of questions, and conveyed different socialising ‘messages’ on how to behave, with implications for the kind of citizenship preparation the students were offered. These analysis, including the great variations between how teaching was organised in the different programmes, we argue, give possible hints as to how VET and teaching in VET could be organised to play a more emancipating role. We will also discuss the usefulness of ‘Bernsteinian’ theoretical concepts such as ‘pedagogic code’, ‘pedagogic rights’ and ‘discursive gaps’ when investigating VET in the tension between reproduction and emancipation.

Ledman, K., Rosvall, P-Å. & Nylund, M. (2018). Gendered distribution of ‘knowledge required for empowerment’ in Swedish vocational education curricula? Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 70(1), 85-106. DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2017.1394358 Nylund, M., Rosvall, P-Å. & Ledman, K. (2017). The vocational–academic divide in neoliberal upper secondary curricula: the Swedish case. Journal of Education Policy. 32(6), 788-808. DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2017.1318455 Nylund, M., Ledman, K., Rosvall, P.Å. & Rönnlund, M. (2019). Socialisation and citizenship preparation in vocational education: Pedagogic codes and democratic rights in VET-subjects. British journal of Sociology of Education. E-pub ahead of print. Rosvall, P.Å, Ledman, K., Nylund, M. & Rönnlund, M. (2018). Construction of ethnicity, immigration and associated concepts in Swedish vocational education and training. Journal of Education and Work, 31(7-8), 645-659, DOI: 10.1080/13639080.2019.1569212 Rönnlund, M., Ledman, K., Nylund, M. & Rosvall, P-Å. (2019). Life skills for ‘real life’: How critical thinking is contextualised across vocational programmes. Educational Research, 61(3), 302-318. DOI: 10.1080/00131881.2019.1633942