Article
- Title
- Schools and universities are not railway stations
- Imprint
- Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne, 2013
- Url
- http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/293962
- Abstract
This paper draws on three research projects: the Life Patterns longitudinal program, the Building Futures for Young Australians at Risk project and Making a Life. The authors note that, for over a quarter of a century, the same groups of young people have fared badly in education. These are young people from low socio-economic backgrounds, young Indigenous people, those with a disability and those from rural areas. These patterns recur across the scope of education institutions for young people aged 15 and over. The authors propose that governments and educational institutions are failing to get traction on addressing patterns of inequality, and this is a situation arguably getting worse rather than better. A rethink of the relationship between young people and education, in research, policy and practice, is needed.
Through the conceptual lens of transitions, education is understood as a series of pre-determined stages through which an individual must pass. [The authors] suggest that the transitions metaphor encourages us to think about schools and universities as if they were series of railways stations, which lead to a single destination - a job. This is an adult or externally imposed way of thinking about education. Young people's own accounts about their education are in contrast to this approach. Triggered by [the authors' own] empirical work with young people, this paper proposes a different kind of conceptual framing, a different set of images, and a different kind of measuring, based instead on the concept of 'belonging'. In contrast to the metaphor of transitions, the concept of belonging draws on a relational metaphor. [The authors] explore the differences between these approaches by analysing the traditional conceptual frames used to make sense of young people's relationships to education, and then to contrast it with the messages [heard] in young people's own accounts when they discuss education.