Amanda Benjamin

Performing desires: the dilemma of aspirations and educational attainment

The authors critique the mechanistic notion of aspirations running through much research and policy-making on educational and vocational outcomes. They present a performative model, with individuals drawing on limited social resources to express aspirations within constrained contexts. This argument is illustrated by discussion of the findings of large-scale empirical investigation of the aspirations of 490 young people in three UK schools. Five themes from this analysis are presented and it is argued that these need to be explored in order to enrich and expand our understanding of young peoples expression of aspirations.

The road to employability through personal development: a critical analysis of the silences and ambiguities of the British Columbia (Canada) Life Skills Curriculum

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of a life skills career education curriculum for schools in British Columbia, Canada. This curriculum calls for the development of a set of life skills that are positioned as central to students’ employability. At the heart of the curriculum is a focus on personal development, in particular, the need for students to develop self understanding and learn from role models how to face and conquer adversity. This paper builds on existing criticisms of how notions of employability and life skills have displaced policy orientations and interventions that might address structural problems of unemployment, with a personal development orientation that places the burden of change and adaptation entirely on individual workers. The goal of this inquiry was to illuminate the assumptions and the underlying ideological terrain giving shape to this curriculum. Informed by the critical frameworks of Nancy Fraser and Ulrich Beck, as well as critical curriculum scholars, this inquiry found a number of disturbing silences and ambiguities in the personal development orientation. On the one hand, the lessons acknowledged the significance of emotions in students’ lives and the possibilities for students to learn from family, community and the wider society. On the other hand, the emphasis on individual responsibility and a heroic orientation to transcending adversity reflects the dominant neo‐liberal ideology wherein future employment depends on having the ‘right’ attitude and making the right choices – contextual and systemic factors fall away. Life skills curricula, like the one examined in this project, are important sites of investigation for they reveal the major shifts that have occurred in the political economy of career and worker education.

A Re-Imagination of the Transition to Adulthood

The study of transitions to adulthood requires us to think through the complexities and assumptions around the belief that there is a categorical difference between what it means to be an adolescent and what it means to be an adult.