DISPOSICIONES GENERALES

The present study builds on a body of literature that seeks to understand students’ experiences of vocational education, especially in relation to their aspirations and choice- making process. This section analyses some of the important studies which have greatly informed this research, such as Hodkinson et al. (1996), Woronov (2015), Ling (2015), and Koo (2016).

Hodkinson and his colleagues investigated the lives and experiences of 10 young people in relation to the Training Credits Scheme in the UK (1996). They presented young people’s career intentions and their experiences of finding placements, as well as their career progression within and beyond training. Their work demonstrated that some young people were forced to change career path or were uncertain about it due to the precarious nature of the placements and their unsatisfactory training outcomes. Finding or losing a placement was not a matter of choice; rather, it was a result of the complex interactions between parents, young people, employers, training providers and career officers (Hodkinson et al., 1996, p. 51).

Based on the perceptions of young people in the Training Credits Scheme, Hodkinson theorises the way young people make career decisions as ‘careership’ (Hodkinson and

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societal stage of post-modernity, but who do wish to acknowledge that there has been a radical intensification of some of the tendencies of modernity. Late modernity theorists focus on the heightening and extension of a range of institutional features (Scott and Marshall, 2015).

Sparkes, 1997; Hodkinson, 2008). The central idea is that career decision-making and progression are bounded by a person’s ‘horizons for action’ (Hodkinson, 2008, p. 4), which means the arena within which actions can be taken and decisions made (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997, p. 34). Horizons for action are constrained by the pervasive influences of social structure (2008, p. 5). They are also influenced by a person’s dispositions, and their ways of viewing and understanding the world (2008, p. 5), i.e. young people and their families’ perceptions and interpretations of what is ‘out there’ or appropriate (Hodkinson et al., 1996, p.150). These two elements are ‘inter-related, for perceptions of what might be available and what might be appropriate influence decisions, and opportunities are simultaneously subjective and objective’ (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997, p. 34). The authors found that all the decisions made by the participants were based on partial information or hot sources —from people whom they felt they could trust, rather than full information from official sources. Hodkinson emphasises the influence on young people’s career decision- making of their position in the field and the resources at their disposal (Hodkinson, 2008, p.7), as well as the impact of the ‘culture’ or ‘habitus’ in which they have lived and are living (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997, p. 33). Hodkinson and Sparkes also observe that decision- making involves ‘turning points’ and ‘routines’ (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997; Hodkinson, 2008). The authors identify different types of turning points and routines in young people’s lived experience (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997), and emphasise the nonlinearity of the career development among their samples (Hodkinson, 2008).

Informed by the theory of careership, Ball and his colleagues (2000) investigated the lives of further education college students in south London. Similar to Hodkinson’s work, the narratives in Ball et al.’s study also illustrate the instabilities which marked the ‘careership’ of many young people in the sample (2000, p. 24). They further note that becoming an adult has become bound up with short-term choices and discontinuities (p. 59).

Atkins (2010) explored the aspirations and learning identities of young people in lower-level vocational programmes in the UK. She found that many young people in her study whose aspirations included jobs such as nursing, teaching and technical careers in IT had no idea of how to achieve their aspirations (p. 260). Moreover, the young people were sold an image of vocational opportunity which was inconsistent with the reality—they were given no inkling of its exchange value in the workplace (p. 260). The sense of there being a lack of support and guidance among vocational students in the UK was also confirmed by Fuller and Macfadyen’s study (2012). The vocational students in the research perceived themselves as academic failures and felt that they were unable to achieve at more traditional and

academic levels of study (Fuller and Macfadyen, 2012, p. 98). Bathmaker (2001) stresses that the relationships with teachers in college appear to be the most significant factor in helping vocational students move from being disaffected learners to starting out on a more successful path to learning.

In South Africa, in contrast to the above-mentioned situation in the UK, Powell (2012) found that the vocational students in her study did not perceive themselves as ‘the boy or girl whose abilities justify a vocational bias’, nor did they regard vocational colleges as ‘mother’s last hope’. Instead, the students talked about the empowerment role played by the college in enabling respect, self-confidence and personal pride. They also reported their experience at the college as culminating in a new sense of who they could be and provided the impetus for them to dream new futures (Powell, 2012, p. 650).

The lived experiences of students on vocational routes in China have been investigated by various researchers (Ling, 2015; Woronov, 2015; Koo, 2016; Yi et al., 2018). Woronov explored in ethnographic detail student perspectives in two vocational schools in Nanjing. She found the various creative ways the students managed their time and energy in school every day, including sleeping through class, as a reasonable response to the ways the curriculum and teaching were structured. She notes that given the lack of training in any real vocational skills, and the dearth of actual curricular content or exams that matter, the vocational students have no reason to wake up for their classes (2015, pp. 89-90). Woronov also demonstrated that the students were having a hard time narrativising their goals or desires (2015, p. 111). When looking for jobs, the students seemed to be less prepared or informed, and they experienced short-term horizontal ‘job jumps’, with relatively low pay and little chance of advancement (2015, p. 134).

Also using an ethnographic approach, Ling focused on the experiences and subjectivities of migrant youth in Shanghai who have been in vocational schools. Similar to Woronov’s observation of vocational students’ sleeping through class, Ling also found a classroom culture of ‘passing time’ which disengages migrant students from schoolwork (2015, p. 112). She notes that the youths identified the vocational route as an inferior option for ‘low-quality’ students (2015, p. 123). Moreover, unlike their parents, most of whom were either manufacturing workers or low-skilled service-sector workers, this second-generation of migrant youth shared their urban peers’ aspiration for less labour-intensive, white-collar professional jobs (2015, p. 115). However, when choosing their subject of study, they had limited access to information, social networks and institutional support (2015, p. 118).

In Koo’s (2016) research, she investigated the vocational students’ educational demands and the means by which they made their decisions to go to vocational school in Chongqing. Although they faced different difficulties and considerations, their major motivation for post-compulsory education was very consistent: obtain higher credentials to secure a better life in the future (2016, p. 51). The vocational students expressed optimism about their future development as they believed the investment in higher credentials would lead them to better employment (2016, p. 54). However, their internship experience left them very pessimistic as many of them spent months working as cheap factory labour. They were concerned about the high chance that they would continue in stressful and tiring labouring work as their future employment (2016, p. 55). Facing the discrepancy between their dreams and the harsh reality of their factory lives, some declared that they had no more motivation to study after ‘discovering that they were trapped by the schools’ (2016, p. 55).

The above section illustrated the relevant literature on the young people’s experience of vocational education. The following sections explore the concepts of youth transitions and youth agency, and how the perceptions of the choice-making process among young people are examined in the field of youth studies.