Session Information
05 SES 05, Children's Perspectives on Safety, Failure/Success and Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Comprehensive school is an institution that expects young people to fit in with its rules and expectations. While there is some flexibility in the institution a number of pupils are always defined from the school’s point of view as ‘problematic’, incapable of adapting to the school rules and ethos. Instead of examining what is wrong with the “misfits” this paper aims to listen to the young people in the margins of schooling on their understanding of the relationship between them and the educational system. Drawing from a sociological research focusing on biographies and future hopes of young participants attending an alternative school (My Own Career – programme, part of flexible basic education) in Helsinki this paper discusses the various ways young people made sense of their sometimes turbulent biographies and narrated feasible futures for them. The paper aims to analyze how young people perceived and told themselves within and in relation to educational arenas; and which in their opinion were the alternatives offered by the alternative education. The analysis draws on Skeggs (2004), Sennett (1998) and McLeod (e.g. 2009) in order to develop understanding of the available methods of telling oneself, the regulatory aspect of the methods as well as their potential in generating a sense of competence in conducting one’s life.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Sennett, Richard (1998) The Corrosion of Character. W.W.Norton Company, New York, London. Skeggs, Beverley (2004) Class, Self, Culture. Routledge, London.
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