Suchergebnisse

This account describes my research experiences as a doctoral student in education, seeking to understand what transition to Higher Education was like for undergraduate students. I was supported throughout the process by my colleague and supervisor Dr Jane Tobbell. I conducted ethnographic research and the case study provides an account of the methods used in both data collection and analysis. It also considers the challenges of subjectivity, especially in relation to educational research. The pros and cons of researching in your own community are discussed.

AbstractDespite long‐standing knowledge about child welfare clients' educational disadvantage, we know less about the individuals' progress through the educational system. Based on Norwegian data, this study examined educational transitions following compulsory school and the first 3 years of upper secondary school, which correspond approximately to the transition following middle school/junior high school to the first years of high school in the USA. It is argued that in examining educational success in the child welfare population it is necessary to analyse whether child welfare clients follow the academic or vocational track. In addition, the degree to which educational transitions are related to gender, school performance and parental education was examined. Child welfare clients' educational transitions were compared with those of a comparison sample from the general population. The analyses show that after completing compulsory school, child welfare clients most often begin in the vocational track and that they often drop out of school. This tendency is largely related to low school performance and low parental education. In addition, child welfare clients' successful transitions are somewhat lower in the vocational than in the academic track and decrease during upper secondary school.

Transitions to upper secondary education are of crucial importance to understanding educational inequalities. They are also vital to explaining the contemporary dynamics of Early School Leaving (ESL). Global hegemonic discourses around educational transitions and ESL shape student pathways in terms of rational and linear choices, assuming equal opportunities for lifelong learning. Simultaneously, the European Strategy attributes key roles to Vocational Education and Training (VET) and to guidance in order to smooth educational transitions, reduce ESL and meet the needs of the knowledge-based economy. The aim of the article is to problematise the linear relationship between ESL, VET and guidance policies representing the dominant contemporary rhetoric concerned with ensuring smooth transitions and opening long-term educational pathways for young people. The paper provides an indepth analysis of the political construction of the transition from lower to upper secondary education in Catalonia, identifying how it is conceptualised, at a discursive level, by policy actors and also how it is implemented at the institutional level. The results aim to be regarded as useful analytical resource to inform critical policy analyses of educational transitions and their implications in terms of social inequalities.

In this article, we examine the case history of a young multi-ethnic Norwegian girl, whom we call Anna, from the age of 15 to 17 to show how her self-understanding of positionings within her educational transitions illustrates how gendered expectations in a Norwegian context influence girls' future trajectories. We use the concepts of social positional identities in figured worlds and performativity to explore self-understanding. Anna's case history illustrates how gender performativity comes about out of a complex web of family, school, and societal expectations. We discuss the tensions Anna experienced in her educational trajectory and the changes in her performative positioning when she entered upper secondary school. We consider the ways in which this had implications for her future life trajectory and offer suggestions to educators on how to understand and support the different learning trajectories of multi-ethnic students.

AbstractAnalysing young people's temporal experiences can help understand their varied transition pathways in individualised societies. This study explores the diversity of Chinese youths' orientations towards time by addressing how they practise agency, situated within the temporal, familial and gender matrices. We surveyed and interviewed young people at a county‐seat lower secondary school in North China and identified three temporal orientations: 'long‐term planners', 'seizers of the day' and 'compromisers'. The findings challenge the conventional understanding of Chinese youth temporal orientations as homogeneous by identifying the differentiations and complexities when navigating their transition to upper secondary education.

Singapore's education system is globally recognized for its high academic standards. In this paper, I explore how Singaporean parents navigate sentiments of uncertainty and risk in relation to their children's education. While academic achievements are still considered crucial to foster a competitive population, there has been a shift of attention in education policy towards social-emotional skills and holistic education. This reconceptualization of learning is partly grounded in a concern about children's psychological well-being, but it is also construed as essential to thrive in the 21st century. The findings show that parents' sentiments of uncertainty and risk management are complicated, and indeed heightened, by the paradoxical expectations with regard to children's education. Sentiments of fear of regret and guilt were particularly conspicuous in the parents' narratives and heightened during specific educational transitions, such as the Primary School Leaving Examination.

Substantial social stratification research conceptualizes education as a series of standard transitions from one stage to the next, such as from high school to college. Yet less research examines mandatory transitions within each educational stage, which we call "intermediate educational transitions." In this article, we examine a crucial intermediate transition in U.S. higher education, shifting from an undeclared to a declared major by major declaration deadlines, to provide a novel perspective on educational transitions. Bridging theoretical approaches from symbolic interactionism, social stratification, structural functionalism, and neo-institutionalism, we argue that successful major declaration transitions depend on students' individual-level alignment between socially structured actions and culturally informed goals and organization-level alignment between organizational intentions and organizational actions. We use longitudinal interview data paired with 4.5 years of administrative records to assess this argument, finding that both individual- and organization-level alignment contribute to whether students experience seamless, stalled and restarted, or persistently stalled major declaration transitions. We further find that access to compensatory college organizational support determines whether stalled students can restart their major declaration trajectories. These findings indicate that colleges and universities can help to mitigate inequality in intermediate transitions by providing timely, high-quality support.

This study examines the transition of a post-secondary correctional education (PSCE) system formerly facilitated by higher education to the current system administered by the State Department of Corrections (SDC). This study used qualitative case study methodology utilizing multiple perspectives from five different stake-holding groups or five socials units: state legislators, county law enforcement personnel, state higher education administrators, SDC personnel, and technical college personnel. A thick, rich description of the transition was obtained by relying on multiple perspectives recorded in interviews of stakeholders in PSCE.The stakeholders' perception of this educational transition that changed PSCE in one state was shaped by personal perspectives on issues surrounding the education of the incarcerated. The rhetoric, political machinations, and reality of this transition define stakeholders' perspectives of the driving forces that initiated the facilitation of PSCE from a Higher Education run system to one run by the SDC.

While it is well established that the structure and organization of the education system affects youth transitions, less attention has been paid to the study of qualitative distinctions at the same level of education over time in the Irish context. Using data from the School Leavers' Survey over the period 1980-2006, this paper considers the hypothesis of effectively maintained inequality in the case of the Republic of Ireland. The data capture young people's transitions during three distinct and remarkable macro-economic fluctuations, and makes a particularly interesting test case for EMI. Over the cohorts under investigation, Ireland had changed from a recessionary economic climate and prolonged economic stagnation for much of the 1980s to a booming economy by the middle of the mid-2000s and one of the most dynamic economies in the world during the "Celtic Tiger" period. The patterns of social-class inequality over a 30-year paper reported in this article suggest that qualitative differences at the same level of inequality represent a persistent barrier to greater equality in the Irish context. Specifically, we find three notable patterns to support the hypothesis of EMI with regard to tracking decisions taken in the transition from lower secondary to upper secondary, subject-level differentiation in the upper secondary mathematics curriculum, and access to university higher education.

This article addresses educational transitions under conditions of multiple insecurities. By analyzing empirical data of two research projects with youths in Afghanistan and refugee students in Austria, we show how young peoplemake sense of the social and educational inequalities they encounter on their educational pathways within different national, socio‐political, and institutional contexts. We present in‐depth analyses of two cases to elaborate how young people in different parts of the world conceive of their futures when basic security needs are not met, and how they make sense of the social and educational inequalities they face during their transition processes. After living through repeatedly fractured perspectives, young people have to make sense of their biographical experiences and continuously (re)design their plans while facing uncertain futures. In the Afghan Youth Project, we reconstructed a collective - and morally charged - biographical orientation of future plans. This orientation can also be understood as a critical response to persistent fragility and inequality and suggests an imagined generational hold and sense of belonging. In the Austrian project Translating Wor(l)ds, we reconstructed continuing experiences of educational exclusion, marginalization, and devaluation in different migration societies throughout refugee routes. Educational transitions, which can be challenging for all young people, take on special relevance under these conditions. Combining biographical and socio‐psychological research perspectives allows us to reconstruct educational processes as cumulative, non‐linear processes and to reveal the ambiguities, contradictions, and ruptures woven into them, as well as the subjects' constructions of sense and agency.