Ambitious and ambivalent: a
biographical approach to adolescents’ transition into higher education
Christodoulou Michael
PhD University of Patras
Abstract
In this article we try to shed light on the subjective
side of how adolescents make their decisions to follow university studies. We
argue that in analyzing decisions related to university transitions one has to
take into account not only cultural and structural factors but also how these
factors are inscribed in adolescents’ life-world
experience and are biographically organized in the narratives they forge for
construing themselves and for crystallizing their ambitions. By focusing on the
“transition narratives” of 70
adolescents attending General (academically oriented) and elite high schools in
a de-industrialized town of Southern Greece, three types of biographical identity
formation seemed to emerge related to an ambivalently shaped narrative pathway according
to which adolescents plot their transition to higher education. We conclude
that biographical identity construction is a
powerful concept for understanding exclusions and inclusions that operate in
the contemporary higher education market.
Keywords
Adolescence, Higher Education, Biographical Identity,
Transition Narratives.
Introduction
There
are two general trends in the sociological literature on how adolescents
conceive and construct their transition to higher education. The first one
revolves around what has been called Rational Action Theory (RAT) and the
second stems from Bourdieu’s theory on cultural capital.
For
RAT theorists, adolescents' class differences in their higher
education outcomes have to be accounted for in relation to primary and
secondary effects triggered by their family
background and their schooling experiences. By emphasizing secondary effects,
RAT theorists argue that adolescents ground their decisions according to how they
evaluate the possibilities of maximizing profit and minimizing cost as they opt for the different routes the educational
system offers them. The primary motive of this decision-making process is
conditioned by the adolescents' attempts to
preserve their family's socio-professional
status. Hence, the levels of their aspirations should be examined in relation
to their class point of departure (Boudon
1974, 1998).
Having
said that, working-class adolescents aspire to achieve those educational
qualifications, which will protect them from social downgrading (that is
unskilled labor or unemployment) while at the same time they seem unwilling to
invest in social mobility through education due to the economic and
psychological cost it entails. That is why they choose to attend vocational
training schemes after high school. Similarly, middle class adolescents are obliged to obtain university
diplomas of higher exchange value than those of their parents should they want
to preserve the class status of their family. That is why their achievement
levels remain high and why their parents have access to whatever kind of
information is needed for higher education departments, by providing social and
financial assistance in order for their kids to realize their goals. As a result of the above
reasoning Goldthorpe and his colleagues maintain that, however mass access to tertiary education has become, the profits from
higher educational qualifications are not the same across the social classes and that, instead, while for
middle-class families these qualifications function as a means for retaining
their class power, a possible failure of working-class families to invest in higher education will be fatal due to the
source scarcity in counterbalancing this failure (e.g. Erikson and Goldthorpe
1992; Goldthorpe 1987, 1996,
2007; Breen and Goldthorpe 1997; Gambetta 1987).
Since
its reception, RAT has been the target of criticism on various grounds. Apart
from its methodological individualism and
voluntarism, most of this criticism focuses on RAT's limited conception in defining social class. In
particular, by emphasizing income rates and employment relations in the job
market, RAT theorists do not take into account intergenerationally inherited
assets or property obtained outside the job market. Additionally, by
downplaying cultural factors, RAT cannot account for various aspirational
levels embedded in the schooling experiences of
adolescents with a similar background. (Brown1995;
Crompton1993; Crompton et all 2000; Devine1998; Friedman 2014).
It
is the cultural grounding of the transition to higher
education that the second strand of thought highlights. In particular, in high cultural capital families adolescent development is
conceived of in terms of educational advancement
and of cultivating cognitive and social skills, by implementing a language code
similar to the school code. Furthermore, these parents are more likely to be involved
with their kids’ homework than working-class
parents and are more enabling in making their kids experience the school
context as a place for self-esteem construction. The moral education they put
forward is based on persuasion and on inhibition of satisfaction by viewing
their kids’ growth as something fragile in need of limits. As a result of this
moral development, adolescents raised in these contexts are more likely to have
made occupational decisions early in their life than their working-class
peers.
On the contrary, parents with limited cultural and
social capital, that is working-class families, view the development of their
offspring as a “natural” growth and are unable to be involved in their kids' homework since the language code of their everyday
life is incongruent with school values. Additionally, they conceive of
education as an issue that must be dealt with by school authorities and their
kids see school tasks as a site not for self-esteem construction but as a place
for survival. In their attempt to cope with the
above exclusion, working-class parents value the work ethic by stressing that
their kids “are not in trouble”, that they work hard and that they are good and
decent people. In addition, they are more prone
to feeling that they are not competent to guide
their kids’ life planning because they are not “experts” so they cannot handle education-related questions. Thus, they ground
their sense of happiness in a “here-and-now” conception placing the burden of educational choice on their kids’ shoulders. As a consequence, these
adolescents tend to see university in vocational terms, that is as a means of
avoiding job insecurity and seem to present a vague view regarding their
university aspirations. (e.g. Hutchison 2011; Lareau 2000; Reay 2000, 2005; Reay et al 2005; Irwin and Elley 2011; Vincent & Ball
2007)
In the present article we will try to deal with the
weak points of the above approaches, namely the fact that the adolescents’ schooling experiences are left unexamined in RAT
reasoning and that cultural capital tends to be used in deterministic terms in
Bourdieu’s theory. (King 2000; Jenkins 2002:90-100). Thus, our aim is to shed
light on whether and when structure or agency sets the stage in order for adolescents to decide
on their university studies. In particular, our focus is on what we call
“transition narratives”, meaning the ways adolescents reconstruct their
biographical knowledge so as to make plans for
their transition to university and to process their decision making on what
university department to attend. By
examining the subjective and objective contexts of this decision-making process
and how it is inscribed in their moral and psychic landscape, one can tap the
potential variations in the expected pathways adolescents with the same structural and cultural conditionings follow.
Methodology
Our
data was collected in the context of
life-history research we carried out aimed at comparing narratives of
adolescents attending General (academically oriented) and Peiramatika (elite)
schools. We selected three schools from a de-industrialized town in Southern Greece by using criteria related not only to
the social-class origin of the adolescents but
also to the area the schools are located in. In particular, the social
composition of the adolescents we addressed differs as follows: i) one school
is located in a typical working-class neighborhood peopled by families whose
members are manual workers in a large clothing factory, most of the them live
in public housing projects and they share community-based feelings due to the
spatial closeness of their homes which articulate their
identity in local terms, ii) one mixed-class urban school located in the center
of the town, composed of
adolescents whose parents are salaried workers in the lower levels of
the public sector, shopkeepers and some manual
workers and iii) one school (Peiramatiko) in which adolescents’ parents are
university teachers, doctors, architects and secondary school teachers.
Data
was collected by means of the Biographical-Narrative-Interview-Method (BNIM)
proposed by Wengraf (2001). The reason why we used this kind of interview
concerns the fact it can tap the three levels of identity construction, that is
structure, culture and biography, in relation to which adolescents make their
transition decisions. In particular, by stressing the ways adolescents narrate their
biographical life events in order to cohere past, present and future selves,
one can examine how life-narratives are embedded in the social worlds they pass
through. Self-narrations are neither created ex nihilo nor do they owe their
strength to their creators but constitute a
discursive mechanism for dealing with life-world experiences and for
meaningfully cohering critical moments in the actors’ biographies. By means of
this self-narration production, one can make up a story for telling her/himself
and others how he/she came to be what he/she is and how he/she wants to become
(or not become). Going one step further, through this biographical
reconstruction one makes claims about the kind of identity he/she aspires to
construct and about the kind of person he/she wants others to view him/her as,
by way of the vocabularies of motives he/she draws upon in formulating these
claims (Mills 1940; Riessman 2008:ch3;
Bamberg 2011).
In
analyzing interview data we followed the logic of the Glaserian version of
Grounded Theory (Glaser 1992, 1998, 2002) taking into account some of the
principles of narrative analysis (e.g. Riessman 2002; Rosenthal 1993; Spector-Mersel 2011). In particular, after we had sketched the portraits
for each of the informants, placing emphasis on the sequential order of their life experiences,
through a process of abductive comparison between cases, we focused on each
axis of discussion coding in vivo informants’ accounts, until we refined the
core categories which summed up the codes of each thematic field (e.g. Seidman 1998;
Rosenthal 2004; Timmermans and Tavory 2012). Next, we tried to bring to the fore possible
connections between the categories in order to tap their main concern, as
Glaser has called it (1998:127). Finally, in a last refining that was more
conceptual, we aimed to inquire how this main
concern is interrelated with the informants’ transition narratives as they are
articulated by means of the strong evaluations which permeate their life
histories. We carried out 70 narrative interviews with 18-year-old adolescents
in their final year of secondary school. The
gender distribution was equal for both males and females. All the names of the
adolescents we use in the next sections are fictional.
Biographical identities and higher-education
aspirations: a typology
In
analyzing the interview data our focus was on examining the decision-making
process involved in the adolescents' transition to university,
in conjunction with how they craft their biographical identities. We argue that
in analyzing decisions related to university transitions one has to take into
account not only cultural and structural factors, as RAT and cultural theorists
do, but also how these factors are inscribed in the life-world experience of
adolescents and are biographically organized in the narratives they forge for
construing themselves and their school trajectories, something that RAT and
cultural theorists downplay. In the conception of identity construction we
propose, when adolescents narrate their biographical life events producing what
Alheit calls “biographical self-presentation” (2003:14-17), they both
internalize life-world experiences during their socializing routes and set in
motion discursive and narrative schemes for classifying their biographical
critical moments, such as what academic path to pursue in high school or what
university department to attend. Thus, identity is not to be conceived in
static terms, that is as an answer to the questions “who am I?” or “where do I
belong?” but as a process related to how what adolescents were is tied up with
what they are now and with what they want to
become (or not) in the future. For adolescents, this biographical work
functions as the existential ground in order for them to make decisions and to
deal with possible contradictory experiences they face in the home, in the
school or in their peer group.
Three types of biographical identity
formation related to a specific narrative pathway according to which
adolescents plot their transition to higher education,
seemed to emerge. These narrative
reconstructions should not be seen as particular cases disconnected from their
school trajectory, but as a typical formation indicative of the collective
history which framed them, or to put it in Lahire’s terms (2003:349) “to account for the singular nature of a particular
case, we must understand the general processes of which this case is a complex
product”. Each of these types presents
distinctive features related to different biographical self-presentations and
university aspirations and to different routes in the decision-making
process. Furthermore, a specific ambivalence related to the ways adolescents’
biographical identities have been forged corresponds to each of these types,
influencing how they view the transition to university.
Type 1: “I do not know what to do, but I hope for
something better”. An ambivalent vocationalism
The
first narrative pattern that defines type 1 biographical-identity
decision-making process (henceforth BIDMP) is made up of two thematic fields.
Firstly, type 1 BIDMP concerns adolescents that somehow survived the selection
mechanisms of junior high school and chose to attend General senior high school
despite the fact that they had had a hard time in the
school exams, receiving low grades in the tests.
Most of them are of working-class origin, their parents are unable to
contribute to their offspring's university planning and they themselves seemed
unclear and undecided regarding the university department that suits their future self more. Additionally, they seemed to
retain an estranging or vocationalistic relation to schooling, as the pattern
of “necessary evil” attests:
I
never liked reading, but it is what is called a necessary evil if one
wants to do something better or do well in his life.
(Argiris,
his father is an officer, his mother a secretary, both of them are high-school graduates).
I
never liked school, I was never interested in it, it was boring, high school
was easier for me, of course I did some private lessons
just in order not to fail the year, my grades
are relatively high
(Nontas,
his father is a car mechanic and a high-school graduate
and his mother is a nurse and a vocational-school graduate),
Μ: What was your experience of school
all these years?
Β: school for me was
a kind of escape from family, it was a way to find friends, I have never been
involved in reading and in stuff like that, I started reading this year
Μ: what
about your parents? What are their dreams for you?
Β: my father says “do
whatever you want”, my mother is a little bit reserved and wary regarding our
economic situation and she says I should study in my town, they do not want to
impose their dreams upon me, my father told me “come to work with me if you do not want to do something else”
Μ:haven’t
you ever thought of going to work with your
father?
Β: for me it is a second
option, I would like first to obtain a bachelors degree, just so I can say I have something in my hands, after that I may go
with him
(Bill,
his father is a manual worker and his mother a housekeeper, both of them are
elementary-school graduates)
Μ: Dimitris
what is your specialty in high school and what are you
thinking of doing after your graduation;
D: I did not know
what to do, I did not like all those theoretical lessons, so I chose a technological
specialty in order to go to the technological
university in my town, I am a soccer player, I am not interested in school, I
am not saying that I do not want to study, I am not a lazy guy who spends his
parents’ money or asks for money all the time, because I can not live with the 500 euro I
receive from the team
Μ: what are your parents’ dreams for you? What do they want you to do after school?
D: I never remember
my mother or my father saying, “do this or that, be a doctor”, they were never
telling me something, my father never told me “I would like you to become this
or that”
(Dimitris,
his father is a manual worker in train services
and a high-school graduate and his mother is a kiosk employee and
elementary-school graduate)
What type 1 adolescents want to obtain from their
schooling are credentials and qualifications, which will protect them from
unemployment; by enriching in that way the cultural capital they did not
inherit from their parents. That is why adolescents of type 1 BIDMP formation choose to attend university
departments such as Philology, Philosophy, Primary Education or Theatrical
studies, which are all more strongly connected to unemployment, work insecurity
and low wages. It is also worth
noting that some of the male adolescents invest in sports in an attempt to
manage the abovementioned indecision and work insecurity (Christodoulou 2014).
Secondly, by morally distancing themselves from
vocational adolescents and from the life-style that sustains their
associations, type 1 adolescents come to form biographical identities that are based
on the following contradiction: on the one hand they choose to attend General
senior high school so as not to become whatever they afraid of and, on the
other hand, they are ignorant about the careers the university qualifications
may offer them, as the pattern “I just want to have a bachelors degree, it can
offer me something” denotes.
It is this contradiction that feeds an ambivalence in
the way they construct their narratives since, even though they do not want to
be identified with vocational adolescents, they seem to produce narrative
renderings grounded on traditional gender values and worldviews, apparent in the value boys attribute to work ethic and body
strength and by the importance girls attribute to the fact that they “are
women”, that they are responsible and decent (for a similar pattern see Stuber
2011:150-63). That is why boys’ relation to reading is structured with reference to the fact that they are not “lazy” and
why girls read not in order to achieve the transition to university but to express
their decency to their parents.
However, as far as girls are concerned, they are more
prone to invest in school values and qualifications so as to break from the
gender order that dictated their upbringing, to deal with the struggles
stemming from such ruptures, to plot self-narratives by means of vocabularies
of motives completely incongruent compared with those of their family
socialization and to follow those university studies which are in direct
contrast with what their parents aspire to. Christine’s life-story is typical
of this possible rupture. Although she always liked “theatre, dance and
philological lessons”, her father (he works as a building worker) proposes that
she follow vocational training in order for her
to take over her family's vineyards. However, Christine does not seem willing to accept
this career planning since she is trying to craft a different social route by
basing her decision to follow university studies related to her gendered
ambitions and job preferences:
Μ: would you ever propose to your kids to follow vocational
training?
C: No, no, no, I would
never exercise on my kids the pressure my parents exercised on me, my mother
was always telling me “you are a good student, what is the point of following
vocational studies? You should complete university studies so that you can do
something better in your life”, on the contrary my father keeps telling me “you
should go to vocational school in order to obtain a wine-making diploma”, but
both of them can not accept the fact that I want to study Theatre, they tell me
“what? Theater actor? Forget it”
Μ:how did you handle all this situation?
Χ: I never gave them
a chance to be imposing and finally I told them “this is who I am, you became a
building worker because you wanted to, you did not study because your parents
were not supportive, now it is me who is going to take my life-decisions,
independently of what may happen in the end”, after that they seem to have
accepted my choices
On
the other hand, boys, even if it is possible for them to invest in school
values and search for university departments for which their parents are not
able to provide information, tend not to make a break like Christine’s or to
conceive of university studies as an “escape” route, because they have not
experienced “hegemonic masculinity” as something against which they have to
struggle.
Type 2: “The
thought of succeeding in just any university kills me”. The price of being socially mobile
In
type 2 BIDMP, adolescents seem to develop a
vocationalistic stance against school knowledge, like type 1 adolescents, but,
while vocational school had crossed the mind of type 1 BIDMP adolescents but
they did not enroll in it due to the spoiled identity attached to its members,
in contrast, type 2 adolescents had not even considered
vocational school as a post-16 choice. Type 2 adolescents choose the General high school in order to be socially mobile
while type 1 adolescents choose it in order to avoid unemployment by means of
the qualifications they wish to obtain. In other words, for type 2 adolescents, school investment
is inscribed in their biographical identities in terms of realizing their
ambition for upward mobility, which entails a peculiar kind of ascetic
morality.
In
particular, the upward mobility ambition, which is articulated as a family
strategy to the extent that parents motivate them in realizing this class
passage, is put into action in their everyday life proceedings within which
their habitus is shaped in different narrative terms compared to those of their
family values. These adolescents are trying to forge biographical identities
through narratives structured by a double distancing: they distance themselves
both from the unclear ambition of their parents that is encapsulated in the
“whatever university you succeed in is ok” pattern and from their fellow
adolescents who “do not have goals”.
For
instance, for Chris, whose father is butcher and whose mother is a housekeeper,
school investment is not a “necessary evil”, as it is for type 1, but a presupposition
of upward mobility indicative of his social recognition and of his
unwillingness to be compromised with “a low-status university”. Furthermore, it
is in this ambition that he projects both his claim to become autonomous and
the moral value of the “uncompromised” identity through which he crafts his
views on university transition and on his future work:
Μ: Have you ever been afraid of your job destination?;
C: yes, I have, all
the time, I mean I am not a guy to compromise, I want to do something really
good, I am telling my father that I want to study abroad and become a doctor or
a university physics teacher, I want something good as a job, my mother tells
me “whatever university you succeed in is ok” and I reply to her “what you are
saying kills me, I do not like whatever university, I can not even hear this, I
want something good”
Μ: something
good in what sense? In order to find a job for example?
C: No, something I
like, a scientific subject, not something simple
such as boring office work
Μ:what does your father say?;
C: he is telling me to
do whatever it takes so as not to follow his job, in the butcher's shop, he tells me to read and stuff like that, he
tells me to become a football player, he tells me to do whatever I can, the
sure thing is I do not want to be compromised
One
should not see as a paradox the fact that for type 2 adolescents the upward mobility
ambition is tied up with an instrumental or vocationalistic relation to school
investment. It is our contention that this vocationalism should be examined in
conjunction with the fact that they draw identity boundaries in moral terms.
This is obvious in the vocabulary of motives Loukas sets in motion when asked
to describe differences between pupils at his school:
Μ: Are there any differences between pupils?
L: of course there
are, what I observe is that most of the students are indifferent about their
future, there are no ambitions for their future life, I see my friends bored
and indifferent, an indifference about what they are going to do after school,
about their future job, all they do is hang out or have fun all the time, I do
not get into such groups of pupils but I see this kind of indifference, I
separate them from those who are more mature and care about their future
Loukas’
ambition is plotted in his narrative in such a way so as to construct himself
as morally superior to those who are “indifferent, immature and who have no
goals”. Regarding his university plans, he has decided to attend the Physics
department, he devotes 17 hours per week to private tuition, he searches for
Physics conferences and he has planned to pursue postgraduate studies in this
field. Hence, the psycho-socially stressful investment in educational success
and its bearing on his biographical self-presentation are the reasons why Loukas
experiences his present life in terms of burn-out:
Μ: That
is, your priority now is university success?
L: yes, of course, I
want to study physics, but I just want all that to be finished, I am too tired
from all this effort, it started in September and it is a long period, if
someone said to me “get ready, your exams are tomorrow”, I would reply “thank
God, tell me the time and I will be there because I want to get rid of this
burden, I can stand it no more, I experience a fatigue in my body and my soul
has been destroyed”, I spend all my time reading both in school and at home, it
is an overwhelming situation, I feel exhausted
The
distinctive feature of type 2 adolescents has to do with their strong motive to
succeed in prestigious university departments such as medicine, Maths, biology,
finance and secondary school teaching, despite the fact that their parents are
not culturally able to support their offspring's desire to succeed in
them. What is more, the time-consuming
and laborious effort required to realize this goal concerns not only the hours
they spend studying but also their attempt to reshape their habitus. Thus,
boys’ biographical identities are full of narratives through which they appear
to distance themselves from the “hegemonic masculinity” values and girls’
narratives are structured in contradistinction to the flamboyant version of
femininity construction.
This
is the reason why, firstly, the way these adolescents draw identity boundaries
has moral grounds and, secondly, a peculiar ambivalence exists in the way they
relate to school knowledge, which is crucial regarding how their identity
evolves. The pivotal character of this ambivalence lies in the fact that these
adolescents are called on to handle a contradictory family-educational plan
according to which parents push their kids to attain something they are both
afraid of and approve of (for a similar pattern see Goodwin 2006:57-74).
Parents want their kids to become upwardly mobile through educational paths and
to attain occupations higher than what they practice now and at the same time
they are afraid of seeing their offspring evolve into a kind of person who will
be culturally and psychologically different. In the family plans of the type 2
decision-making process an ambivalence between the history of past
socialization and the identity construction the class mobility entails is
encapsulated.
Type 3
“Reading
makes you different from others”. The cultural production of gratification
delay
In
type 3 BIDMP, the adolescents’ social origin concerns families with high
educational and economic capital that is a fraction of the middle class, who
seem to socialize their kids early in school investment. By having become
familiarized with school values in their childhood years, these adolescents
develop biographical identities based on narrative vocabularies that put
priority on achieving autonomy in school tasks and on such cultural stakes as
practicing musical instruments in their leisure time. In addition, their
life-narratives are grounded in a language code which articulates their
self-understandings in terms of disinterested observer that is they narrate
their life-world experiences through a grammar that draws on science,
philosophy or art, claiming thus relevant identities. That is why they have
made educational and occupational decisions early in their school trajectory:
Μ: where do
you aspire to be next year Andreas?
Α : I want to succeed
in the physics department. I
like this subject
Μ : are you
thinking of becoming a school teacher?
Α : No, no, I want to
follow a university career, I like it very much, I devote 10 hours per week, 2
hours every day
Μ :Do you think it will be easy to make it?
Α I really want it because I like it very much
(Andreas, his
father is a university teacher and his mother is a secondary school music
teacher)
Μ:Katherine what is your high-school specialty
and what do you think about your university studies?
Κ: I am in theoretical
specialty and I want to be a judge, I decided on it when I was in junior high
school
Μ: what were the
criteria for such a decision?;
Κ: because I like
distributive justice, I've always liked it
(Katerina, her
father is a computer engineer and her mother is a doctor)
Μ: Charis what is your high-school specialty and what
do you think about your after-school life?
C: I am in technological specialty and I want to be an army pilot, I've wanted
to do this since I was a kid, it was my dream
(Charis, his father
is a bank counselor in finance and his mother is a lawyer)
Μ: Fotini what is your high-school specialty and what
do you think about your after-school life?.
Φ: I have chosen
theoretical lessons ever since my childhood, I've been devoted to them, my aim
is to study in Law School
(Fotini,
her parents are Philologists in secondary school)
By
claiming not to be identified with those who are “conformists” or who are “not
cultivated”, type 3 adolescents draw identity boundaries in cultural terms
since they are not willing to break with the habitus of their family culture.
While they claim an identity that prioritizes tolerance for “otherness” (mostly
homosexuals, immigrants, people of different color, race, religion etc.), at
the same time the “others” they want to distance themselves from are
working-class adolescents. In other words, they choose to tolerate what school
culture promotes as worthy of tolerance and at the same time they can not but
be dis-identified with what school culture excludes:
Μ: are there any differences between pupils of your
school and vocational adolescents?
Μ: there are, sure,
vocational adolescents may have some kind of aspirations but in the Peiramitiko
school we want to study medicine, Polytechnic Schools or Law, on the contrary,
a vocational student is somehow compromised into following technical
universities, it means that he does not fit into General high schools
Μ: would
you ever think of having a relationship with a vocational student?
D: my first reaction
is absolutely no, but when I think of it I say “why not?”, usually vocational
adolescents are kids who have been withdrawn from reading or school tasks, when
I was in junior high-school I knew pupils who would follow vocational training
and their whole life-style fitted in with that type of schooling, it was not
that they were not good at school, it was that they were what we call
“underground” kids, the lads, those who don't behave in the classroom, who are suspended and stuff like
that, so I think that these kids are not mature in forging relationships, maybe
I could create some kind of friendship with them but as far as the relationship
issue is concerned I would like a relationship with someone I admire
(Dimitra,
her father is a university researcher in biology and her mother is a PhD school
counselor)
Μ: Is there any difference between pupils of your school and other types of schools?
F: of course there are
differences, here in Peiramatiko students are what is called “high-achievers”,
I think that we are the nerds, when we enter junior high school we devote
ourselves to studing and to getting high grades, there is too much competition,
regarding who will participate more in the
classroom, who will take part in projects etc. Generally speaking here students
are interested in school lessons and this is extremely important in the
cultivation of our personality, I mean when you devote yourself to reading it
is something that makes you different from others, you are more cultivated,
instead, in other types of schools there are students who do not even know what
exactly a book is, I mean they are not interested
(Fey,
her father is a secondary-school teacher and her mother is a civil
servant)
As
far as elite schools' adolescents are concerned (students attending the
'Peiramatiko' school), their narratives are articulated through a peculiar
individualism, which, so long as it is tied up with the organizational habitus
of the school that conditions its members’ school trajectories, frames the
vocabularies they use for their self-understanding (on the role of
organizational habitus in higher-education transition see Smyth and Banks
2012). Given that for these adolescents the sense of autonomy and difference
stems from their claim to choose and not to be chosen, they tend to define
themselves as those who “really care about their future”, to distinguish
themselves from those who “can not stand school pressure” and to position
themselves in the imaginary community of adolescents with “special abilities”
(what in Greece is called “aristeia”).
It
is a kind of imaginary community the members of which are not connected by
emotional or social bonds because of the fact that their families live in
distant areas. This does not mean that these families do not create what is
called social capital through their common leisure-time activities, but
instead, that they are not likely to forge collective identities imbued by an
esprit de corps with common behavioral and cultural symbols, as their fellow
vocational adolescents do. In other words, what gives them coherence, as an
imaginary community –that is the possession of academic abilities – is also
what constructs their individuality through the hierarchy these abilities set
up.
However,
one should not see type 3 adolescents as the copied products of their families’
strategies for attaining middle-class jobs through university transition. Their
biographical identities are grounded on an ambivalent process, for they are
conscious of what is at stake in their university success. Thus, while it is
possible that they imagine their future selves in occupations different from
those of their families, many an adolescent of type 3 BIDMP seems to inhibit
their desires and to have them realized after their university studies. For
instance, George, even though he says that he will choose to study medicine if
he succeeds in the national university entrance exams, at the end of the
interview he admits that “medicine is not what I imagine for myself, I want to
become an orchestra conductor, this is what I deeply desire for myself, my
parents want me to be a doctor”, and he concludes:
Μ:I would like you to describe moments wherein you experience your real
self, I mean situations within which
George is his real self. Are there any?
G: oh! That’s a tough
question, mainly when I am with friends and the environment's eyes do not look upon me, I think that the social
environment demands a lot from those who are called good students, although I
do like to describe my self in that way, the more respect I receive from the
environment, the more obliged I feel to be effective in my school tasks, there
are some social demands I have to obey
Μ: and in
what situations do you feel you are not your real self?
G: when I am asked to
do things I do not want to do, like in school, unfortunately here in school I
have to play my part
(George,
both of his parents are doctors)
One
could say that the narrative reconstruction of their biographical time is made
up of a bipolar tension between necessity and freedom in the contexts in which they set up plans for their university
careers. Hence, the ambivalence revolves around how they are going to grapple
with this bipolarity and around the narrative space this bipolarity opens up.
It is in this narrative space that the “yes, but” pattern emerges because of
the fact that their schooling experiences are dictated by the necessity of the
“pressured time” that university and occupational success demands, a necessity
they have to succumb to in order to “not have unrealized dreams”, a necessity
they have not chosen but in which they believe, in order to experience distance
from necessity in the future.
Discussion
The
above analysis suggests, we argue, three theoretical points. First, while the
two research traditions we mentioned agree, through different explanatory
models, on the intergenerational transmission of class disadvantage, what is
not highlighted is how this transmission is deployed and how it is tied up with
their identity construction. To fully grasp adolescents’ university transition
one needs not only to sketch statistical distributions documenting what goes
where but also to implement concepts tapping the process though which objective
measures frame the transition to higher education (see also Taylor 2005). The
theoretical importance of the concept of biographical identity lies in the fact
that it can shed light on the subjective side of this process by enabling us to
examine the way adolescents interact with the objective determinants of their
schooling and how their perception of the offered possibilities motivates and
guides their future-oriented tertiary lines of actions. Thus, the concept of
biographical identity enables us to elucidate the following point: while
according to Goldthorpe’s argument disadvantaged adolescents, through rational
calculation, aspire primarily to avoid downward mobility and secondly to
be upwardly mobile, what our research shows is that most of the
upper-working-class and petit-bourgeois adolescents strive to obtain university
qualifications. The explanation that we propose for this research evidence is
to be found in the different ways these aspirations are articulated in type 1
and type 2 biographical identities.
In
particular, located in upper-working-class fractions, type 1 adolescents invest
in university diplomas because of the prestige they signal for their family
environment and for themselves, given that they undervalue vocational schools
and they want to avoid not so much unemployment but the spoiled identity and
stigma these schools receive (Christodoulou 2014, Foskett and Hesketh 1997). It
is the school-promoted disdain for manual work they have internalized from
their high-school years that makes type 1 adolescents invest in transition to
university. That is why they are undecided during their school years on what
university department to attend and they are more likely to succeed in those
departments that are associated with high rates of unemployment. Devoid of the
cultural and social capital that could provide them with the resources in order
for them to know the higher education market, they rely upon peer information
and teacher advice so as to navigate the pathways that the qualifications they
will acquire lead to.
Secondly,
biographical identity can overcome some of the drawbacks of Bourdieu’s
reasoning, namely his suggestion that working-class adolescents are
characterized by “poverty of aspirations” and that it is their habitus that
leads them to exclude what excludes them (“it is not for us”) (Devine
2004:149). In contrast, by looking carefully at the interactional contexts that
give shape to their habitus, it seems that their vocationalistic stance against
university diplomas is driven by the credentialization of the job market which,
in turn, makes their decision to study in the university not a “taste for the
necessary”, as Bourdieu would put it, but a pragmatist choice obeying a
context-bound subjective rationality, as Lehman (2007), Hodkinson et all (1996)
and Lahire (2011) have proposed. In particular, since working-class adolescents’
motives are shaped in a filtered way through such influences as having
ambitious friends, teachers’ advice, self-perceived abilities or chance
encounters in secondary-school interactions, it is important that one takes
into account how these experiences can transform habitus and how they craft
their biographical identities within and during these transformative
situations.
Despite the fact that their class
habitus makes them more liable to uncritically believe in “society of
knowledge” discourse, to drop out early in their university studies or to be
influenced by how the media represent job careers (e.g. Hutchings and Archer
2001), one should not remain blind to the potentials that university completion
and academic experiences can have on how their identities could be transformed
or dislocated through these educational passages. No matter how embedded their
vocationalism is in their class background and in their parents’ hope that they
will follow university studies, the university experiences of first-generation
students have the potential to enrich their past habitus, to dislocate it, to
create in them dispositions towards knowledge different to what their
heterogeneous socialization dictates, to choose university departments for
reasons other than those of social discomfort and to cultivate in them motives
to follow such educational paths as post-graduate studies that lead to
lower-middle-class occupational destinations (e.g. Lubrano 2004; Granfield R.,
1991; Lee and Kramer, 2013).
Middle-class
adolescents, in addition, are not immune to the complex and plural ways habitus
and biographical identities set the stage for their university transitions and
occupational choices. We assume that there is not a single and unitary habitus
that drives the motives and aspirations behind what university department to
choose. Research evidence has shown that it is possible for adolescents with
high cultural capital to dispute school culture (Eckert 1990:22; Ortner 2002),
to develop instrumental attitudes to university studies (Lehman 2009:11), to change
university department decisions according to how their sense of “high
achiever” is shaped through comparisons with their peers (Brooks 2003:11) and,
as our research has shown, to delay desired occupational aspirations until
after the completion of their studies. All these tendencies are not exceptions
to the (statistical) rule but represent, nowadays, situations, which are more
frequent than we might think.
Be
that as it may, the point, in my view, is that one should not deploy the
habitus concept in the Piagetian way as Bourdieu did because it can make
transferability appear to be a lasting disposition disconnected from the social
worlds the bearer of habitus lives and interacts in. This, in turn, could make
researchers believe that the “new (the present situation) is forcibly
assimilated to the old (the scheme acquired earlier) and [that] the difference
the “new” brings only leads the old scheme by accommodation to a greater degree
of generalization” (Lahire 2011:80). Instead, researchers should carefully
examine the social micro-history of the actors’
biography and the extent to which their dispositions have been adapted,
transformed or toned down (and not take them as a given), exactly because “the
general or partial character of a scheme of action depends directly on the
degree of social and historical generalization of the contexts in which it is
susceptible of being actualized” (Lahire 2011:85). There is no sense in
picturing adolescents’ stances regarding university studies in such polarized
terms as “ascetic”/“bohemian” because most of the adolescents experience an
ascetic way of life during their high-school years and on their passage into
the university they adopt hedonistic life-styles or in explaining students’
success and failures through such oppositional linguistic structures as
“restricted”/“elaborated” codes because a great many adolescents may,
notwithstanding their elaborated middle-class code, set in motion in their
out-of-school interactions linguistic habits completely alien to school language.
The theoretical challenge of our era concerns the need to develop conceptual
tools that can tap all these mixed, ambivalent and non-unitary schemes of
actions that the students seem to process during their university and life
trajectories.
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