Abstract
ABSTRACT 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.
Highlights
Students in vocational education may experience situations during on-the -job training in which power relations are strongly manifested, with con siderable potential for learning about democracy that have been far from fully explored
The students’ descriptions of their workplace learning periods in terms of power relations varied – some did not comment on them at all, or only briefly reflected on them, while others reflected on power relations of various kinds and problematised what they had experienced in the interviews
The four identified sub-themes related to experiences of power relations at individual level were Power relations narrated in terms of: social inclusion-exclusion, having/not having a say, having to do real work or ‘shitty jobs’, and gender and/or ethnicity
Summary
Students in vocational education may experience situations during on-the -job training in which power relations are strongly manifested, with con siderable potential for learning about democracy that have been far from fully explored. The acquisition of insights into power relations and hierarchies in society and workplaces, together with the competence to analyse and problematise them, including one’s own position, is a key element of learning citizenship Another is development of the ability to exercise democratic rights – to enact civic power, influence and active (vocational) citizenship. In ‘expansive’ settings both schools and workplaces are used as sites for learning and apprentices are regularly shifted between different positions within a company, each of which provides opportunities for learning specific kinds of knowledge and promotes reflection on relations associated with the other positions, while Wheelahan (2018) uses the concepts of insularity and hybridity for similar discussions, arguing that insularity occurs more often in school-based settings. When students are provided with a curriculum based on the principle of insularity, they are provided with the means to recognise boundaries between different forms of knowledge, and within forms of knowledge, to use concepts and as their education progresses, to:
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