Dynamics in the Educational Self of an Adolescent: From the Dominance of Parental Voices to Their Silencing

Abstract

The schooling experience is characterized by changes and challenges throughout the process, and parents are viewed as one of the most important actors in the educational development of children and adolescents. This study aims to understand the mechanisms involved in the dialogical construction of the educational self in the academic trajectories of adolescents, emphasizing the dialogical dynamics established in the child–parent relationships during this process and the positions (I-Positions) that emerge during self-configuration. This study is grounded in the formulations of the semiotically oriented Cultural Psychology of Development, particularly Valsiner’s concept of semiotic mediation; Hermans, Kempen, and van Loon’s concept of the dialogical self; and Iannaccone, Marsico, and Tateo’s concept of the educational self. A qualitative research approach with an idiographic nature that used the narrative interview technique was adopted. Out of three adolescents between 17 and 18 years of age, Elias was chosen to compose this study report derived from the first author’s master’s dissertation. The interviews were analyzed according to (1) the division of the school trajectory into periods marked by moments of rupture-transition; (2) the selection of periods in which situations of dialogical interaction with parents regarding academic life emerged; (3) the selection of excerpts from the participant’s narrative that discussed dialogical situations with parents and significant social others; and (4) the analysis of narrative excerpts based on the concepts of Cultural Psychology. In Elias’s narrative, the parents had a decreased, and sometimes muted, power to act in the dialogical space of the educational self. Nevertheless the I-student-empowered is established in front of the parents as dialogical characters Intervention projects should include the studentes' voices in their processes, considering they need to respond to others in their delicate task to construct who they are in schools e out of them.