Marjatta Vanhalakka-Ruoho

Guidance Center as Sites for Construction of Agency Among Young People on the Educational Margins

This study aims to analyze the role of a Finnish guidance center in developing agency among young people who are both outside the education system and unemployed. The main focus of the research is to examine the ways young people construct themselves as agents in their personal career stories, using a narrative approach and positioning analysis. The context of this study is a local youth guidance and support project in Eastern Finland, the Guidance Center, and its group-based vocational training program, Open Vocational College. The data consist of 17 initial interviews and 12 follow-up interviews of young people who participated in the project. The study points out that the participants were able to position themselves as agentive in relation to their peers and counselors in the Guidance Center. Agency was often narrated as co-action with others. The young people constructed their career paths through individualistic discourses and primarily in relation to the “dominant institutional model” of youth as a linear transition to adulthood. However, the interactions at the guidance center also offered counter-narratives to these dominant models.

Educational pathways of ninth grade adolescents: Transition practices in vocational and academic families

The study analyses how the educational pathways of ninth graders are constructed by practices of adolescents and their parents in families with different educational statuses. The importance of contextualising the educational transition as it occurs in daily life and socially structured family cultures is emphasised. The research question is: How is the choice of educational route of ninth graders constructed by the practices of the adolescents and the parents in vocational and academic families? What does characterise different pathways and what kinds of distinctions, differences and contrasts of transition practices do exist between them? The interview sample consisted of 16 Finnish families. The interviews were carried out in three forms: a family discussion interview, a thematic interview of the adolescents, and a life-history interview of the parents. The results introduce the main characteristics and distinctions of transition practices of the vocational and academic families.