In my contribution I will reconstruct processes of Bildung - or how it is prevented - in narrative interviews with male adolescents between 15 and 26 years of age, who live under conditions of social disadvantage. The theoretical framework is based on theories of adolescence, Bildung, recognition, and social disadvantage. Bildung is defined as a process of in which the relations of the subject – in this case the adolescent male individual – to both world and self undergo significant transformations (Kokemohr 2007, Koller 1999). When we consider the decrease of biographies which are stable and predictable with respect to both formal education and psychosocial development, it seems that especially today, processes of Bildung are a crucial component of adolescent development. Former research has shown that in Germany the most strongly marginalized young people are males with an experience of migration themselves or within their families (Geißler 2005). They show the lowest level of formal education and have the smallest chances of being economically successful. The question is how youngsters are able to cope with these increased demands how this influences their development and potential processes of Bildung, in terms of formal education. Adolescence is a demanding phase for youngsters. They have to separate and gain distance from his or her own childhood, and hence to look for a new position within already existing and newly developing relationships. These demands can become increasingly difficult when the individual and social resources are restricted. According to King (King 2004), adolescence depends on intergenerational relations which determine the quality of the psychosocial moratorium (Erikson 1980) or the “psychosocial space of options” (King 2004). The adolescent subject is not only looking for a new position but also for recognition and acceptance of it. On the other hand the adolescent needs a “vacuum of recognition” (King 2004) within the intergenerational relations to allow for the separation and therefore the development of an independent identity. Honneth (1995) has shown that recognition (Anerkennung) and the struggle for it can be understood as the source of motivation of human action and sociality. Even though during adolescence the absence of recognition is essential, a “successful” development of the adolescent phase depends on the individual’s achieving recognition – which can here be understood, according to Honneth, as “love”, “law”, and “acceptance” (Honneth 1995). It seems likely that an enduring or repeted absence of recognition could have a negative effect on all processes of Bildung within adolescence. However, the experience of disregard as a motivation to struggle for recognition may also result in motivation to the struggle of recognition and thus reinforce the efforts of the subject to find new coping- or actingstrategies.

In the reconstruction of processes of Bildung it is obligatory to utilize qualitative and reconstructive methods. In this case I chose to do narrative interviews (Schütze 1976), in order to avoid forcing a pre-determined structure on the interviewee’s report and to allow the adolescence to organize their stories for themselves. In the analysis of the interviews a triangulation of two reconstructive methods has been used: the structural narration (Rosenthal 1993) analysis and the inference analysis (Kokemohr/Prawda 1989). The first method is used to reconstruct the biography and develop a case-structure-hypothesis whereas the second method allows to focus on processes of Bildung and to reconstruct them within the interviews.

The current research of this study lends support to the supposition that even in such cases it is sometimes possible to reconstruct processes which show at least aspects of Bildung but do not necessarily satisfy the demands of the educational system.