This paper introduces and offers an analytical framework for systematic research reviews and analyses of curriculum in policy and practice, applied on Swedish research on vocational education and training (VET) over the last 20 years. VET is a sprawling, interdisciplinary and eclectic research field. Following the debates on the ‘curricular turn’ towards what is referred to as 21^st century skills curricula (Priestley & Sinnema, 2014), VET has been a recurring theme in discussions within the field of curriculum studies over the last decades (Bathmaker, 2013; Boutseleng-Allais & Shalem, 2018; Hordern, 2014; Kemmis & Green, 2013; Muller & Young, 2019; Wheelahan, 2015).

In recent years, scholars of curriculum – myself included – have explored constructive ways of grappling with questions regarding curriculum in policy and practice by viewing curriculum as multi-layered social practices. From that point of view teachers are considered as makers—and not deliverers—of curriculum together with other actors in their contexts (Doyle, 1992; Priestley et al. 2021). The analytical framework for the research review in this paper draws from an understanding of curriculum making across intertwined ‘sites of activity’, which seeks to expand beyond institutional models and conceptions of curriculum (Priestley et al, 2021): 

• On the supra site of activity, curriculum making occurs through transnational curricular discourse generation, policy borrowing and lending, policy learning mediated through actors like the OECD, World Bank, UNESCO and the EU.
• National governments and curriculum agencies develop curriculum policy frameworks and legislation to establish agencies and infrastructure on the macro site of activity. These processes of interpretation and formulation of curriculum might be influenced by, for example, actors on the supra site or the micro site.
• Depending on the character of the education system, national governments and curriculum agencies might act on the meso site of activity. However, on this site we commonly find actors such as district authorities, textbook publishers, curriculum brokers, subject-area counsellors, and expert teachers. Common activities comprise production of guidance, leadership of and support for curriculum making and production of resources.
• Official curriculum documents are products of interpretation and translation. When adapted to local contexts in schools on the micro site of activity, they are again transformed and recontextualised in cycles of interpretation through school level curriculum making, programme design and lesson-planning by principals, senior leaders, middle leaders and teachers.
• In classrooms – the nano site of activity – teachers and students negotiate and produce curriculum events via daily pedagogic transactions. 

The metaphor of curriculum making as what actors do is helpful in many ways. Firstly, it embraces perspectives and conceptual distinctions between the Anglo-American curriculum tradition and the northern and continental European tradition of Bildung-centred didactics (Hopmann, 2007; Klette, 2007). Secondly, it allows for seeing beyond institutional levels and instead focusing on the specific texture and granularity of processes and actors on sites of social activity across education systems (Alvunger et al., 2021). Thirdly, with the focus on practices associated with the curriculum, it provides an analytical tool for studying the complexity of VET. Against this backdrop, I will use curriculum making as social practice as developed by Priestley et al (2021) to explore and discuss potential gaps in Swedish VET curriculum research.Three sets of questions are asked: Which dominating sites of activity, actors and processes emerge in Swedish research on VET curriculum making? What are main themes and emphases in the research? What potential gaps can be identified and how may these inform future research?

The methodological approach is a qualitative systematic research review with an integrative and interpretative purpose and research design (Gough et al, 2017). The process followed four steps, starting with a broad sample of empirical data regarding Swedish VET curriculum research through searches for relevant publications in national and international research data bases SwePub, JStor and Google scholar using for example the search words (both in Swedish and English) ‘vocational education and training’ (yrkesutbildning/yrkesundervisning), ‘vocational didactics’ (yrkesdidaktik), ‘VET curriculum’, ‘vocational learning’, ‘vocational students’, and ‘vocational teachers’. The first open search resulted in over 1800 posts. Besides the search words, relevance criteria were set up to limit the number of publications. This implied that publications focusing on socio-economic factors and conditions, labour market and financial matters, class, gender and ethnicity without any connection to education policy, teaching, learning and assessment were ruled out. Publications before the year of 2000 were removed (these were few) and this narrowed down the sample to 405 publications. In the second step, relevant publications were selected based on a review of title, abstract and a limitation to Sweden as context. In this phase, comparative publications and where one or more countries other than Sweden were mentioned were included. This rendered a total of 73 publications. The third step in the process consisted by further readings of publication abstracts to sort the publications based on their focus on sites of activity. The final step was a close reading and content analysis (Bryman, 2018) of the publications, consisting of a clustering of themes. By applying the framework of sites of activity, the literature on VET curriculum making in Swedish research over the past 20 years was mapped and categorised. In this phase, I employed the research questions for this paper, searching for dominating sites of activity, actors and processes, significant relationships between sites of activity, main themes and emphases in the research and the potential gaps that could be identified.

The sites of activity emerging as the most common in Swedish research on VET curriculum making over the entire period are the macro and micro sites of activity. It is possible to see that considerable attention has been placed on the nano site of activity, not least during the last five to seven years. An important observation is that the sites of activity and their associated processes, actors and ideas in no way exclusively are limited but rather merge and relate to one another. This shows the sometimes fluent and porous boundaries between the sites and the multi-layered social practices through which education is structured, enacted and evaluated, regardless of we are talking about policymaking arenas and national agencies or schools and teachers. Frequent connections are between the macro and micro sites, exploring themes such as work-based learning in policy and practice, apprenticeship, a strong actor-focus on VET teachers and their meaning-making of the national curriculum, employability, and school – work transitions, policy implications for social stratification and access to knowledge. The relationships between the macro and supra sites of activity are generally focused on comparative studies and institutional and policy/content-related issues rather than actor-oriented perspectives. At the micro site of activity, VET teachers’ beliefs, practices, and school and workplace learning are highlighted. The nano site comprises of classroom and ethnographic studies, student (vocational) identity and ‘becoming’, norms on gender, strategies for learning, experiences of teaching and assessment, and subject-integrated teaching. It becomes evident that ideas, actors, and processes on the meso site of activity only comprise a very small part of the research. In this respect, there is a potential gap to be explored, not least regarding how local curricula is made concerning the influence of representatives from companies, trade organisations and other associations.

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