"Re-Placing" Student Aspirations in the Postindustrial North of England

• In Event: "Re-Placing" Aspirations in a Postindustrial Context

Abstract

This paper takes two hypotheses as its starting point. The first is that discourses of ‘raising aspirations’ among young people are problematic (Appadurai, 2004) because they are founded on a fundamentally negative view of their capabilities. The second is that approaches to aspirations need to take much greater cognisance of the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which young people are located and educated. It does this through statistical and interpretative analysis of data from two research projects in England. The first explored notions of resilience and wellbeing among teenagers in schools in a small city in the West Midlands. The second focused on teachers’ and school leaders’ attempts to realise young people’s aspirations in a coastal town in the North East. Both contexts are heavily post-industrial, characterised by high levels of disadvantage and low levels of skills and opportunities for employment. The paper uses a theoretical framework drawn from capability theory (Sen,1993 ; Burchardt & Hick, 2017), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) and local approaches to place (Kerr, Dyson & Raffo, 2014; Thomson & Hall, 2017) to examine data collected from a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews with young people and adults in 12 high schools in the two locations. The paper suggests that the focus needs to shift towards both enabling young people to realise and re-place their aspirations, through allowing them to interrogate and reconstruct their sense of locality.

References
Appadurai, A. (2004) The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition, in Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds.) Culture and Public Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.
Kerr, K., Dyson, A. and Raffo, C. (2014) Education, Disadvantage and Place: Making the local matter. Bristol: Policy Press.
Sen, A. (1993), ‘Capability and well-being’, in Nussbaum, M.C. and Sen, A. (eds), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomson, P. and Hall, C. (2017) Place-based Methods for Researching Schools. London: Bloomsbury.

Author

• Michael Jopling, University of Wolverhampton