Helen Stokes

Constructing identities and making careers: young people’s perspectives on work and learning

This article argues that ‘transition’ offers a limited and outmoded conceptual frame for understanding young people’s engagement with work and learning. It draws on two studies of young people to provide insights into the study and work experiences of older and school‐aged youth. Our analysis suggests that rather than focussing narrowly on outcomes alone, transition should be seen as a process of identity development. Research on young people’s perspectives reveals the active investment that they make to produce identities and foreshadow the emergence of new meanings of career. Four factors are especially relevant to this process: continuing inequalities; the contexting of choice; flexibility in decision‐making and a readiness to make ongoing changes and choices and achieving a balance between goals of personal development and wellbeing and the continuing demands of further education and employment; and a re‐definition of careers. We draw on our research to show that young people who are in school as well as those who have left school reflect a view of workplaces as sites of learning and identity formation. We conclude that new policy approaches are needed, which recognise the breadth (and depth) of learning that occurs across different sites in young people’s lives, that challenge the dichotomy of ‘adult’ and ‘youth’, and that recognise the blurring of boundaries across formal and informal learning sites.

Teaching with strengths in trauma-affected students: a new approach to healing and growth in the classroom.

T he National Child Traumatic Stress Network in the United States reports that up to 40% of students have experienced, or been witness to, traumatic stressors in their short lifetimes. These include home destabilization, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, death, and other adverse childhood experiences. The effects of trauma on a child severely compound the ability to self-regulate and sustain healthy relationships. In the classroom, the effects of trauma may manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, reactive attachment, disinhibited social engagement, and/or acute stress disorders. In this article, we contend that the classroom can be positioned as a powerful place of intervention for posttraumatic healing both in the context of special education and in mainstream classrooms that contain traumaaffected students. The current landscape of trauma-informed practice for primary and secondary classrooms has focused on teaching practices that seek to repair emotional dysregulation and fix broken attachment. In working for more than a decade with mainstream and specialist schools, we have discovered that positive psychology has a role to play in contributing to trauma-informed learning. We argue that combining traumainformed approaches with positive psychology will empower and enable teachers to promote both healing and growth in their classrooms. This article presents scientific and practice-based evidence to support our claim. We present education interventions aimed to build positive emotions, character strengths, resilient mindsets, and gratitude, and show how these can be embedded in the daily routines of classroom learning to assist struggling students.