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This paper discusses how Bernsteinian concepts (‘pedagogic rights’, ‘discursive gaps’ and ‘pedagogic code’) from the field of sociology of education can be used as didactic tools to illuminate how different ways of organising teaching in VET has implications for citizenship preparation. The paper is based on results from a five-year research project investigating the extent and nature of learning processes that can be characterised as civic education in Swedish VET. Results from the project show how VET often contributes to social reproduction through provision of class-, gender-, and ethnicity-based access to knowledge with different powers to students. However, we also identified many variations in the VET-contexts studied. In the paper at hand, examples of when and how students got access to different types of knowledge through different ways of organising teaching, and how different ways of teaching prevented or promoted different types of questions with implications for the kind of citizenship preparation the students were offered, is discussed. Our hope is that these discussions contribute to a conversation on how to make a language accessible to VET-teachers that is helpful to problematise and plan their teaching to offer greater access to an active citizenship for students in vocational programmes.

This article reports results of an ethnographic study of how girls are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to gender regimes in three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary education: Restaurant Management & Food, Health & Social Care, and Vehicle & Transport. The comparison shows that there are different possible feminine positions where the girls resist and comply to varying degrees both within and between the programmes, with expectations interrelated with discourses of consumption, caring and production. However, generally the position of emphasised femininity is most prominent and becoming a female worker in the programmes’ settings involves complying with feminine ideals of a caring discourse, regardless of whether the VET is oriented towards education for masculine production work, or feminine consumption work.

Students in vocational education may experience situations during on-the-job training in which power relations are strongly manifested, with considerable potential for learning about democracy that have been far from fully explored. Thus, here we analyse how Swedish vocational education and training (VET) students perceived and experienced power relations during their workplace learning periods in upper secondary education, and discuss their experiences in the context of learning democratic rights. Interviewed students perceived power relations at workplaces in various ways. Most of them did not perceive the power relations as problematic, but a substantial proportion did, and expressed a need to talk about perceived power structures. This need concerned both how they personally felt positioned in power structures, and their perceived position of the profession they aimed to enter. The findings are discussed in relation to earlier arguments that VET often focuses much more strongly on learning skills than on learning democratic rights. A conclusion we draw is that schools could advantageously use students’ experiences of power relations as foundations for democratic learning.

Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is likely a significant part of the citizenship preparation that occurs in vocational programmes. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein and ethnographic data, this study presents an analysis of socialisation processes in vocational elements of three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis addresses the formation of pedagogic codes in various vocational programmes and subjects, and how these codes condition students’ practice of citizenship at individual, social and political levels. The results show how different pedagogic codes have different implications for the students’ practice of citizenship, and thus raise questions about factors and processes that may either constrain or strengthen, this aspect in vocational subject classes.