A social inequality of motivation? The relationship between beliefs about academic success and young people's educational attainment

Meritocratic ideals, which emphasise individual responsibility and self‐motivation, have featured prominently in discourses about Australia's international competitiveness in academic achievement. Young people are often encouraged to attribute academic success and failure to individual factors such as hard work and talent, and to downplay extrinsic factors such as luck, task difficulty, or broader structural advantages and disadvantages. Using longitudinal data on a large, single‐age cohort (n=2,145) of young Australians participating in the Social Futures and Life Pathways (‘Our Lives’) project, we analyse the relationship between attributions for academic success across their final years of secondary schooling and how they related to educational attainment at the end of school. The belief that hard work would lead to academic success was widespread within the sample and positively associated with subsequent educational performance. Most students also emphasised the importance of having a supportive family, despite this being negatively associated with performance. Consistent with claims about a ‘social inequality of motivation’, the findings suggest that emphasising meritocracy may compound the disadvantages of young people from less educated or vocational backgrounds, and those living in rural and regional Australia, whilst impacting unevenly on males' and females' academic performance.     

A beautiful myth? The gendering of being/doing ‘good at maths’

This paper draws on a research study into why more boys than girls choose to study mathematics. My starting point is that only four of the 43 young participants, and all of them male, self‐identified as ‘good at maths’. By reading these interviews as narratives of self, I explore the ‘identity work’ accomplished within their talk and within the talk of those who produced themselves/are produced as ‘not good at maths’. I argue that central to this are the ways that young people locate themselves in a series of inter‐related gendered binary oppositions including: fast/slow, competitive/collaborative, independent/dependent, active/passive, naturally able/hardworking, real understanding/rote learning and reason/calculation. I then explore the socio‐cultural context that makes such imaginings a central feature of young people’s relationships with mathematics, discussing the role of the gendered discourses of rationality evident in western enlightenment thinking and in popular culture’s stereotypes of mathematical ‘nerds’ and ‘geniuses’.     

The prevalence of ‘life planning’: evidence from UK graduates

At a time when ‘personal development planning’ is being rolled out across the UK higher education sector, this paper explores young adults’ inclinations to plan for the future in relation to work, relationships and other aspects of life. Although Giddens has emphasised the prevalence of strategic life planning (or the ‘colonisation of the future’) in all strata of contemporary society, du Bois Reymond has argued that there are important differences by social class, with young people from more privileged backgrounds more likely than their peers to engage in such life‐planning activities. This paper draws on interviews with 90 young adults (in their mid‐20s) to question some of these assumptions about relationships between social location and propensity to plan for the future. It shows how, within this sample at least, there was a strong association between having had a privileged ‘learning career’ (such as attending a high‐status university and identifying as an ‘academic high flier’) and a disinclination to form detailed plans for the future. In part, this appeared to be related to a strong sense of ontological security and the confidence to resist what Giddens terms ‘an increasingly dominant temporal outlook’.     

New rules of the game: youth training in Brazil and Finland as examples of the new global network governance

Young people labelled ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘at risk of social exclusion’ are increasingly directed into publicly funded or NGO-based, partly privately financed projects in order to secure their desired integration into society through work or further education. In this article, we carry out a comparative analysis of youth training programmes in Brazil and Finland based on empirical fieldwork undertaken in two separate research projects. The research data consist of qualitative interviews of the projects’ participants and management. The focus of the analysis is on youth employment projects as discursive practices, that is, on the ways that knowledge on employment and employment-related responsibilities is produced in the discourses and practices of the projects. Despite the different contexts, the analysis shows that the youth training projects share a number of commonalities with regards to the shaping of the self as entrepreneurial and self-regulated. This is linked to the global dominance of a new form of governance, which relies on and actively promotes the individualisation of responsibility and obscures the structural and societal forces that lie behind youth unemployment and exclusion. We suggest that engaging young people in critical discourses about the sources of inequality would be the key to more equitable forms of development.     

Non-formal education,personhood and the corrosive power of neoliberalism

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which non-formal education is being corroded by neoliberal values. Given non-formal education is frequently used to develop young people’s notions of citizenship, and that non-formal education providers are increasingly forced to operate within the free-market paradigm, it is significant to consider what forms of personhood are being championed. Qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and observations with coaches and young people from a youth sports charity in the UK. Focusing on a core aspect of non-formal education – caring relationships (as understood by Nel Noddings and Carl Rogers) – the findings suggest that the quality of coaches’ care for young people was conditioned by the extent to which adolescents re-shaped their personhood to align with neoliberal values of individual responsibility and discipline. Thus, the meanings of ‘care’ and ‘good citizenship’ were corroded by a neoliberal rationality.     

The timing of a time out: the gap year in life course context

Based on biographical interviews from a three-generation study in Norway, this article examines the place of the contemporary ‘gap year’ within life course transition trajectories and intergenerational relations embedded in wider patterns of social inequality. Under the heading of taking a gap year, young people on academic transition trajectories are often granted a time out after upper secondary, during which they can recuperate from competitive school experiences and resolve uncertainties about which type of higher education to pursue. For those following vocational transition trajectories, in contrast, a gap year appears irrelevant and out of the question. The timing of their educational decisions in the life course does not coincide with arrangements for a legitimate break. Whereas a gap year before university may be seen as understandable and even beneficial, a person taking a break before or during vocational education is more likely to be described as a ‘dropout’ or an ‘early school leaver’. Based on empirical analysis, the article discusses similarities and differences between contemporary gap years in Norway and what Erik Erikson described as the institutional moratorium. Young people’s access to the moratorium of a gap year appears to be a privilege unequally distributed in the population.     

Disrupting deficit: the power of ‘the pause’ in resisting the dominance of deficit knowledges in education

Deficit ways of speaking about educationally displaced young people are a dominant feature in the language educators draw on to make sense of particular young people. This language can have debilitating effects on the lives of those young people it is applied to. Despite well over 20 years of critique, deficit truths have remained dominant. However, in one Australian organisation, this dominance is being resisted. The resistance makes its appearance through an active silence I have termed ‘the pause’. The notion of ‘the pause’ came from teacher interviews in an ethnographic study of four alternative schools in one Australian organisation working with young people experiencing the extremes of disadvantage. I use the Foucaultian notion of silence to explore the suggestion that ‘the pause’ is one tactic deployed by this organisation, working to both resist and disrupt the dominance of deficit knowledges. I argue that these educators’ deployment of ‘the pause’ demonstrates their formation of a space where new language about these young people is engaged.     

Mathematical stories: why do more boys than girls choose to study mathematics at AS‐level in England?

In this paper I address the question: How is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? I draw on the findings of a qualitative research study involving interviews with 43 young people all studying mathematics in post‐compulsory education in England. Working within a post‐structuralist framework, I argue that gender is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. Through a detailed reading of Toni and Claudia’s stories I explore the tensions for young women who are engaging in mathematics, something that is discursively inscribed as masculine, while (understandably) being invested in producing themselves as female. I conclude by arguing that seeing ‘doing mathematics’ as ‘doing masculinity’ is a productive way of understanding why mathematics is so male dominated and by looking at the implications of this understanding for gender and mathematics reform work.     

Children's Concepts of the Shape and Size of the Earth,Sun and Moon

Children's understandings of the shape and relative sizes of the Earth, Sun and Moon have been extensively researched and in a variety of ways. Much is known about the confusions which arise as young people try to grasp ideas about the world and our neighbouring celestial bodies. Despite this, there remain uncertainties about the conceptual models which young people use and how they theorise in the process of acquiring more scientific conceptions. In this article, the relevant published research is reviewed critically and in-depth in order to frame a series of investigations using semi-structured interviews carried out with 248 participants aged 3–18 years from China and New Zealand. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data concerning the reasoning of these subjects (involving cognitive categorisations and their rank ordering) confirmed that (a) concepts of Earth shape and size are embedded in a ‘super-concept’ or ‘Earth notion’ embracing ideas of physical shape, ‘ground’ and ‘sky’, habitation of and identity with Earth; (b) conceptual development is similar in cultures where teachers hold a scientific world view and (c) children's concepts of shape and size of the Earth, Sun and Moon can be usefully explored within an ethnological approach using multi-media interviews combined with observational astronomy. For these young people, concepts of the shape and size of the Moon and Sun were closely correlated with their Earth notion concepts and there were few differences between the cultures despite their contrasts. Analysis of the statistical data used Kolmogorov–Smirnov Two-Sample Tests with hypotheses confirmed at K–S alpha level 0.05; r_s : p?<?0.01.     

‘Heroes’ and ‘villains’ in the lives of children and young people

This paper explores the responses of nearly 1200 children and young people in Wales who were asked to identify which three famous people they most admired and which three they most disliked. Analysis of these young people's responses reveals a number of sociological and educational issues. Their selections confirm other research which has highlighted the importance of celebrities in the lives of young people. Their ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ are drawn mostly from the worlds of popular music and sport. Their choices are also highly gendered and ‘raced’. Of particular interest is the finding that someone's ‘villain’ is more than likely to be someone else's ‘hero’. Our young people's selection of heroes and villains reflects the broader landscape of celebrity culture, where female fame is as much about appearance as talent and Black and minority ethnic celebrities are to be found largely in the fields of sport or popular music. The paper concludes by discussing the chasm between our young people's ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ and those which are ‘officially sanctioned’ within the school curriculum and considers what schools and teachers might do about it.     

‘Due to all this fear,we’re getting less freedom’: young people’s understandings of gender and sexual violence in New Delhi,India

This paper explores young people’s understandings of gender and sexual violence in New Delhi, India, based on multi-method research conducted with young people (aged 15–17) in three co-educational secondary schools. Fieldwork took place shortly after the 2012 Delhi gang rape that sparked widespread debates about violence against women in India, and so sexual violence became an important frame for students’ discussions around gender and sexuality. Young people’s understandings are considered within gender narratives – of ‘can-do’ and ‘vulnerable’ girlhood, and of ‘hero’ and ‘good boy’ masculinities – which already shaped their day-to-day experiences of schooling. Findings suggest that tensions arising from these often contradictory narratives led to frustrations among girls, while the dominance of conversations about sexual violence led to confusions in both girls’ and boys’ understandings of sexuality. Reflections are offered on ways schools can better support young people as they learn about gender and sexuality from diverse and contradictory sources.     

Changing families,changing childhoods: changing schools?

This paper reports key findings from a study of young people’s engagement in ‘atypical’ activities in their families. The project focused on young caring and language brokering as two roles that are not assumed to be ‘normal’ activities for children and young people. The findings presented are from a survey of 1002 young people and from one‐to‐one interviews with a sample selected from the survey sample. The voices of young people in the interview study are used in the paper to illustrate the diverse range of childhood experiences. The paper discusses some of the ways in which pastoral systems in schools can take account of diverse childhoods and family needs more effectively than they have done in the past.     

Visualizing the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS

We are concerned with the ways in which social constructions of age can contribute to reducing or exacerbating the vulnerability of young people, and for this reason we refer to the issue as one of ‘the politics of innocence’. The focus of this paper is on gender, youth and HIV prevention/AIDS awareness in the context of South Africa and investigates the uses (and abuses) of images of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the age of AIDS. Notwithstanding the particular case of South Africa where the incidence of new cases of HIV infection amongst young people is at crisis proportions, the impetus for our work on the visual representations of youth, gender and AIDS comes out of a recognition of the increasing risk of youth to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, and within that the particular vulnerability, worldwide, of young women.     

Therapeutic responses to ‘at risk’ disengaged early school leavers in a rural alternative education programme

The identification of disengaged early school leavers as young people ‘at risk’ can lead to a deficit-based framing of how educational institutions respond to them. A rural secondary school in Victoria, Australia established an alternative education programme to cater for local disengaged young people. A critical ethnographic study was conducted over 12 months, comprising observation of the programme, and involving interviews with 12 key personnel. Findings revealed the ways in which young people were positioned within the secondary school, alternative programme and community contributed to a response within the alternative programme which was based upon a therapeutic ethos, focusing on perceived social and emotional deficits. In the light of findings, it is argued that there is a need to construct alternative spaces that work to not only re-engage them with learning, but also to counter the stigma many of these young people face in their schooling and in the local community.     

The role of the Virtual School in supporting improved educational outcomes for children in care

ABSTRACT

In England, ‘Virtual Schools’ oversee and support the educational progress of children in care. This paper reports on the analysis of 16 interviews with Virtual School headteachers that were part of two mixed methods research projects on the educational progress of children in care. These interviews explored their role; the types of support they offer young people in care; what they see as the key factors about a young person’s individual characteristics and care experiences that influence their educational outcomes; how schools support young people in care; and the influence of the foster carer/residential staff on the educational outcomes of these children. The interviews were analysed using NVivo and emerging themes were identified informed by the literature on the education of children in care. The paper draws out the main findings which explore the status and role of Virtual Schools in England, their functions, strategies, and what they see as their contribution to improving the educational outcomes of children in care.     

The hidden voices of children and young people with a parent in prison: What schools need to know about supporting these vulnerable pupils

This paper reports on a study with children and young people who have a parent in prison and identifies ways in which schools might better support these pupils. The paper is based on research and practice with 23 individuals from ten families. It first ‘sets the scene’ for these pupils’ lives by drawing on interviews with parents and carers. This helps to illuminate the context within which these children and young people are growing up. The paper then presents the views, and selected drawings, of the ten children and young people involved. The paper describes the forms of social isolation that families experience when a parent is sent to prison and the dilemmas and difficulties children and young people face at school. The recommendations focus on how individual teachers and schools might respond to the needs of this group.     

Recognition,inclusion and democracy: learning from action research with young people

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people’s social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what ‘counts’ as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in knowledge democracy in ‘new democratic arenas’. Building upon experiential knowing and creating knowledge and learning through practice, the young people explored their own democratic knowledge production, communication and engagement within a context of shifting discourses of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship. The increasing preference of young people for more informal forms of participation as lived practice reflects a shift to young people constructing their own modes of participation and ‘remaking democracy’ in their own vision and according to their own needs. By working outside of the confines of normative assumptions of democratic practice and participation, young people exercised their own ‘political’ agency in response to their own priorities, interests and concerns and, in doing so, illustrated that new forms, understandings and practices of knowledge democracy can emerge that reflect the promise of inclusive democratic societies more meaningfully.     

‘The one that got away’: how angling as a culture of practice manifests in the teaching and learning relationship within angling-based intervention programmes

In recent years a professional sector has emerged within the UK delivering angling-based intervention programmes targeted at young people ‘disengaged’ with education. These coaches bring with them an angling cultural background, which influences their interactions with young people as ‘novices’, emerging in ‘angler talk’ that accompanies waterside coaching. We argue that young people's exposure to ‘angler talk’ amounts to a cultural apprenticeship, socialising young people into an experience-based learning community. Through angler anecdotes and waterside banter young people are encouraged to be active participants in an egalitarian system of knowledge exchange that is particularly appealing for working with disaffected young people. By identifying how angling as a community of practice manifests in the teaching and learning relationship, we demonstrate the benefit of ethnographic approaches for appreciating the subtle cultural influences at work in skill-based intervention programmes.     

Young lives,diverse choices and imagined futures in an education and training market

In the UK, policy developments in vocational and further education have created a market in post-16 education and training. This paper reports on an Economic and Social Research Council study and one small cohort of young people entering and moving through one such urban market. They enter with very different learning identities, aspirations and motivations, and their ‘educational inheritances’ prepare them differently for participation. Some young people simply want ajob and awage and ‘nomore learning’, others come with alongterm commitment to gaining higher qualifications. The authors both describe and explore a number of ways of conceptualizing these differences. Both despite and because of the changes in the local labour market ‘deep sub-structures of inequality’ re-emerge. The differentiation of routes and ‘spaces’ of opportunity confronting these young people are reproductive of social class divisions.