Abstract
Despite the fact that vocational adolescents are in a disadvantaged position regarding their post-secondary high school routes, research has highlighted the resistant and innovative ways they set in motion so as to grapple with their estranging schooling experiences. Our article aims to contribute to this research area by focusing on how adolescents’ narration of their schooling frames their life planning. In particular, we explore a major finding of our research—namely, their defending of vocational training—by means of the notion of ambivalent biographical identity. We argue (a) that today’s adolescents do not openly reject vocational training, and they try to transform the unofficial skills and knowledge obtained in their cultures into official cultural capital capable of making them enter the job market and (b) that their life planning is tied up with a biographical identity formation through which they try to coherently reconcile their embodied cultures with the vocational qualifications they aspire to acquire.
Highlights
Aims and Scope of the ResearchSubcultural accounts of working-class youth have shown that school underachievement was not a problem for their identity construction
While previous years research on vocational adolescent identity formation posits that the core element of its evolvement revolves around adolescent disavowal for vocational school qualifications, our findings highlight that adolescents of our days do not seem to reject the profits these qualifications could assure them
Today’s adolescents seem to make sense of themselves in forging biographical identities by which they try to reconcile two contrasting lifeworld experiences: on one hand, they ground their self-positionings in reversing official school culture classifications by promoting the embodied skills they acquire in their out-ofschool interactions and by valorizing “street knowledge,” and on the other hand, they have to construct life plans based on the qualifications the vocational school provides
Summary
Subcultural accounts of working-class youth have shown that school underachievement was not a problem for their identity construction. They could cultivate anti-school values and create oppositional cultures within which they could accrue social capital and forge a respectable adolescent identity because opportunity structures in the old days could assure them a safe and stable passage into workingclass jobs (Hagan, 1997; Jackson, 2002; Kelly, 2009; Martino, 1994; Sullivan, 1989; Wexler, 1992; Willis, 1977). SAGE Open analyzed should one wish to understand when and to what extent agency or structure prevails in his or her life transitions, and second, how they narrate their turning points and construct their biographical identities seems to be a crucial factor regarding the framing of their life decisions
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