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УДК 37.01
М. Куконато Болонский университет, г. Болонья, Италия
«Личностно адаптированная» концепция обучения на протяжении всей жизни:
теоретический подход
В статье представлен теоретический анализ перехода от концепции традиционного образования к кон -цепции обучения на протяжении всей жизни. Автор рассматривает концепцию образовательной траектории, в рамках которой образование рассматривается как часть и направление жизненного пути, а жизненный путь как то, что систематизирует образовательный процесс. При этом ключевое внимание уделяется интерактивной природе образовательного опыта человека, который является как результатом структурно детерминированных факторов, так и результатом субъективного выбора. В заключении представлены исследовательские вопросы, возникающие в рамках интерактивного подхода.
Ключевые слова: обучение на протяжении всей жизни, образовательные траектории, жизненный путь, переход.
Nowadays learning is seen as a lifelong process that is vital not just to countries' economic development but to their social cohesion and quality of life. However the institutional rhetoric of lifelong learning, promoting the centrality of the learner within formal, non-formal and informal learning experiences, ends with shifting to individual shoulders all the responsibility for coping with the societal demands of knowledge. In light of this consideration, the underlying question of this article is to what extent education still contributes to the social integration of young people, whose biographies, in comparison to those of the former generations, are increasingly exposed to disruptions and (Griebel, Niesel 2005). Despite this, as recognised in the European Employment Strategy, European social models are too rigid to cope with the deep and continuous change in production and labour market associated with globalisation and the growth of a knowledge economy, which should be characterised by high-skilled jobs and innovation, interlinking research to new forms of production and service. European education systems are perceived as struggling to fulfil their traditionally intended purposes as stated recently by the European Commission:
"There is an urgent need to ensure that the number of young people dropping out of school is reduced, that all young people acquire the basic skills needed for further learning and that there are more opportunities to learn later in life." (European Commission 2011, p. 1)
Both the accent set on 'lifelong' learning and the concerns for 'early' school leaving reveal that the public organisation of learning and education is con-
nected with normative assumptions regarding the timing of learning within individual life course trajectories. This normativity becomes evident especially at transitions in the life course which are institutionally associated with education. Here, the educational and learning processes of individuals are assessed against the measure of institutionalised life time schedules. However it should be highlight that the institutionally scheduled periods of education are then interpreted by individuals, who experience, reflect and evaluate their own learning histories differently, according to the meaning they assign to education for their life course.
To theorise this integrated relationship between education and the life course we develop the concept of educational trajectories which intends education as a part and a dimension of the life course and the life course as structuring education processes. With this article we aim at clarifying and conceptualising the meaning and the research implications of this concept from the two underlying basic concepts: education and life course. In the first article's section we introduce the concept and perspective of the life course as an institutionalised order of life ages and its most recent development implying the transformation of the traditional concept of education into (lifelong) learning. This implies relating institutionally foreseen trajectories to individual reconstruction in terms of subjective biographies. In the following sections we focus on the meaning of transition/school transition, particularly concerning the passage from lower secondary to upper secondary education and vocational training. A special consideration is given to those analyses and theories that
regard education more as a powerful factor of social reproduction than of equal opportunities. We will highlight the ways in which transitions are institutionalised in the European countries on the one hand, and the decision-making processes in transitions on the other, which are to be considered not only as active but interactive. Consequently we focus on the actors involved in transition and individual decision-making processes, considering both the institutional gatekeepers and the significant others. The final section concludes by suggesting a range of research questions implied by the interactive approach applied in this article.
1. Educational trajectories: at the crossroad between institutional and biographical meaning
The term life course refers to the emergence of a societal order based on the institutionalisation of an "age-based sequence of typical, socially defined conditions endowed with specific expectations (roles)" (Scherger 2009, p. 532). Emerging from historical individualisation processes such as the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial (and Capitalist) Revolution, modern life courses link the individual within the framework of a collective order through a gendered organisation of work, implying (male) productive and (female) reproductive roles. Two key institutions are appointed to regulate and order individual lives around work: education as the preparation for young people's socialisation into work-based lives and the welfare state as a system of incentives and guarantees granting this kind of lives (cf. Lessenich 2005; Mayer 2005). During the 1950s and 1960s, in most Western countries the Fordist economic model consolidated for the vast majority of individuals a standardised life course and transition steps. Very few people fell out of sequence or skipped the foreseen transitions and in this case they could still count on a generous (Keynesian) welfare system.
In the Fordist era, education was intended in terms of qualification (preparation for a labour market career), allocation (selection to different segments of the labour market and societal positions), and integration (in terms of internalisation of dominant norms and values). In the 1950s, the promise of social mobility through schooling set in motion mass education in order to "produce" future workers proficient in basic literacy, ready for a labour market in which they worked on a production line, performing specialised tasks repetitively. This bureaucratic education model privileged knowledge institutionalised in the curriculum and belonging to the cultural capi-
tal of the upper class over learning as a social practice that takes place in other life contexts, thus facilitating social control and reproduction. Following Michel Foucault (1972), the introduction of mass schooling may be interpreted as a main contribution to processes of individualisation whereby individuals accept individual achievement as the principle of social integration (see next section).
In the Post-Fordist era, the flexibilisation of the labour market increased the need for highly skilled workers, and young people started to remain longer in education in order to enhance their chances of a better labour market position. Individually, this shift went hand in hand with the emergence of new life styles and changes in values and norms, gradually leading to a decoupling of the school-to-work transition from other life transitions (family, housing, parenthood) and a consequent destandardisation of the life course. Stating the transformation of modern societies into late (high) or post-modern (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990; 1991; Bauman 2001), contemporary sociological analyses ascribe it to the erosion of traditions and normative frameworks. In the context of a post-traditional order, life ceases to be something 'given' and 'pre-structured' and turns into an individual 'task' implying choices in all spheres of life that no longer follows the linear ordering of the Fordist era and overcomes the roles and meaning assigned to it by the traditional societal order.
Accordingly the bureaucratic model of education has progressively shifted towards a managerial model (cf. Maroy 2004; Young 2007; Daun 2007) in accordance with the need of firstly the information-based and then know ledge-based economy. Within the life course perspective, learners' entrepreneur-ship represents the main proposal embedded in the new assumption of educational trajectories oriented to lifelong learning, which also claims to combine formal school learning with learning achieved in non-formal and informal settings. In the political discourse, an individual active approach towards learning across the life course seems to represent the only antidote for coping with the stressful and risky labour market and life conditions of late modernity. As a result, this places the responsibility on individuals for their own learning careers and consequently their social integration and life course development, relieving the education system and welfare state of their traditional duties of supporting individual integration in the societal order.
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Although until now we have introduced a mono-dimensional approach to the life course, the process of social integration and reproduction in the late modern society also imply a dialectic relationship between the system and the individual action (structure and agency, cf. Giddens 1984). Therefore the life course perspective needs to be complemented by a biographical approach. Biography refers to the subjective life stories that individuals construct in the process of dealing with and their identity and work while progressing through the institutionalised life course. This biographical perspective implies that individuals reconstruct their lives not independently from life course institutions and dominant normalities but primarily according to subjective meaning and continuity. It also corresponds to Emirbayr and Misches' (1998) temporal concept of agency as an iterative process across past, present and future, especially if understood as identity over time including retrospective assessment, prospective life plans and the strategies of coping with everyday life in which past and future culminate.
Between life course and biography there is a dialectic relationship as the life course states the keywords to which individuals have to refer in their biographical construction - affirmatively or in terms of resistance - while at the same time structures of the life course must be articulated by individuals using them for their biographical construction. In this perspective, educational trajectories become lifelong, overlapping with life course as a whole. Therefore also educational trajectories need to be analysed and rethought in terms of learning biographies (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000) for taking into account the underlying dialectic of systemic and individual action.
2. Transitions in educational trajectories: between structural path and social negotiated individual decision-making process
According to the dialectic perspective, educational trajectories are considered both as the individual life course phase, in which individuals are expected to attend and progress through institutionalised education (structure) and parallel as the experience that the individual makes of it, combining it in a subjective, meaningful way with the other spheres of his/her life course (agency). Therefore educational trajectories have to be intended not only in a longitudinal perspective but also in terms of horizontal or parallel life course trajectories (cf. Bronfen-brenner 1976). In this way they develop in learning
biographies, which are related — but not limited — to school or other formal education careers: although they are structured and institutionalised by formal education, they are appropriated by individuals in terms of their subjective meaning making, for their identity, work and biographical construction. This interplay between structure and agency is evident particularly with regard to the transitions within educational trajectories, which must be analysed in the relationship between the institutionally foreseen educational change and individual lives, focusing on the interplay of personal and institutional dynamics, which provides the temporal and social contexts for biographical planning and decision making. Indeed, during transition time and outcomes of individual educational decisions are influenced by both economic and societal factors and institutional settings.
2.1. The concept of transitions
Generally speaking transitions may be seen as the crossroads of individual life course trajectories where processes of social integration as much as subjective identities are being negotiated and redirected in terms of the passage between different social states and situations. While for anthropologists the status passages between different roles or forms of membership reflect the need of social communities to deal with human ageing and development and the changing needs and capabilities connected to it (cf. van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969; Glaser & Strauss 1977), social psychologists are more interested in the ways individuals cope with the ruptures and discontinuities that transitions imply for them (cf. Adams et al. 1977; Welzer 1993). From another side, sociological (life course) researchers consider transitions rather as institutionally initiated role changes marked by age, status, or achievement, which confront the individual with new expectations, status and practice (cf. Elder 1985; Heinz 1992; Heinz et al. 2003). According to this last perspective, people are confronted with individualised sets of roles, settings and expectations and consequently have to cope and experiment individually with switching between them, both diachronically in the life time and synchronically between life spaces (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Transitions are therefore social situations in which societal norms and structures of inequality are reproduced. Here, the concept of gate-keepers (see below) is central, referring to formal and informal actors making sure that general mechanisms of reproduction are applied also in the individual case. Taking into account the interplay between structure and agency, the sociological point
of view has to be complemented with the social-psychological perspective. This perspective highlights how transitions are interpreted from individuals in terms of meaning making and continuity and discontinuity in their identity process, in terms of increasing versus decreasing biographical options and in terms of stress resulting from and resources for coping with them (Adams et al. 1977; Welzer 1993; Keupp et al. 1999). All transitions imply limi-nality between two statuses, which demands from individuals an intensive and continuous activity of choosing and decision making, but in many cases they are not recognised (and therefore not supported) in the institutional assumption of normality regulating the collective provisions of transition regimes. From a biographical point of view, the most crucial transition regards the passage from lower- to upper secondary schools because this assigns children and young people the task of deciding where and how they assert themselves in the new forthcoming educational step, which in many cases coincides with the end of compulsory schooling, and confronts them with new (adults) expectations, status and practice, having a longer-term effect on their future life course.
Field-researches on school transitions are urgently needed because over recent decades the life course destandardisation process has multiplied their frequency and timing, creating a potential discontinuity that can be subjectively perceived as a challenge or a stressful moment, a gain or loss in status and opportunities depending on subjective evaluation, individual capabilities and structural resources and opportunities (cf. Elder 1994; Heinz e Marshall, 2003). Leaving one school level and waiting for entering into the new track (liminality status), students can feel overburdened with the duty of controlling the procedure implied by the change of task and responsibilities, adopting — or failing to adopt — a changing (or flexible) self-concept in response (or resistance) to the new school and environmental expectations (cf. Welzer 1993; Keupp et al. 1999).
2.2. Thestructuralpath of educational trajectories
Educational trajectories (stating the age of school entry and exit, curriculum and expected outcomes, qualifications for stratified labour market positioning) are institutionalised in order to prepare students for a standard adult life. The fact that children's education track and success are mainly determined by social and economic factors seems the evidence-based assumption of a wide range of comparative education and welfare analyses (Lessenich 2005;
Heinz et al. 2009). However, the emerging theories are not unequivocal in determining which specific social and economic factors contribute to its reproduction. While for some of them (cf. Sewell & Shah, 1967) reproduction is due to the individual educational aspirations, which students develop in the individual relationship with meaningful others (mainly parents and peers) , others introduce the concept of cultural capital (cf. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu, 2004) to explain that children from lower social classes lack some of the knowledge and competencies schools evaluate without succeeding in providing them. Other authors identify the main cause in the lack of economic resources of lower educated families (cf. Boudon, 1974), while another stream of theories aims to demonstrate that inequality reproduction is inherent to the organisation of the education system (cf. Gamoran and Berenson, 1987; Oakes, 2005).
Among the (f)actors involved in structuring students' educational trajectories, gate-keepers play a pivotal role (cf. Heinz 1992) with regard to upward or downward mobility. First of all teachers, who are institutionally appointed to make students progress through education, could adopt a supportive (enhancing) or discouraging (cooling out) attitude toward students' plans and ambitions. This role of teacher differs according to the more selective or comprehensive nature of the education systems. In the first case, if they have failed to compensate students' learning gaps, at the moment of transition their guidance task revolves around tracking the best learning achievers towards general upper secondary education and 'condemning' the others to vocational paths without having the possibility to consider students' interests and aptitudes. However also in this case teachers could engage in negotiating students identify the vocational branch that best suits them. Also non-teaching pedagogical staff (psychologists, social or youth workers cooperating with schools internally or externally) represents an important reference point especially for (disadvantaged) students who still haven't developed a clear idea about their future path or lack support in their family or social environment. However, the most influential significant others in students' decision-making process are parents, who are concerned with future family status as well as the care for the well-being of their children and in this sense can act as gate-keepers, over-or underestimating their learning attitudes, skills and interests. At such a young age, also students' friends and peers represent significant others who can act as
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gate-keepers, as school experiences and future destinations are negotiated in youth cultural contexts (cf. Willis 1977). Although we have presented all these actors separately, in many cases their role as co-decision makers develop conjointly and virtuously when they move in the same direction, and with confusing consequences when they don't, and students have to flank one or other position without no clear rational.
In the European context, different education systems have historically developed different mechanisms of social reproduction. Allmendinger (1989) proposes a classification of education systems based on the two dimensions of standardisation and stratification.
• Standardisation indicates the extent to which the education system of a certain country is regulated by centrally defined standards (teacher training, curriculum, school cycles and leaving certificates), which should ensure a certain homogeneity across the national education system and through educational trajectories. This dimension indicates the levels of centralisation and autonomy within an education system. Generally speaking, a centrally managed education system shows a higher level of standardisation, which should grant similar education outputs and a basic level of quality for all. In contrast a higher degree of autonomy can be supposed to expand freedom and innovation processes in schools on one hand, while on the other it could increase the segmentation of educational achievement according to the human and economic resources at its disposal. If school staff had more freedom in designing the curriculum and teaching methods, we could suppose that educational trajectories would be better tailored to the needs and interests of students, but at the same time, differences between schools could grow according to their territorial location and catchment areas. Correspondingly good students in affluent regions or schools could become even better, while in adverse school conditions the average and disadvantaged ones could fall even further behind.
• Stratification refers to the level of internal and external differentiation (tracking) within an education system, which determines the percentage of a given age cohort able to attain the highest level of education foreseen in the system. This tracking process usually takes place at the (lower or higher) secondary level of education. The higher the proportion, the less stratified the system. In other words, stratification states "the degree to which systems
have clearly differentiated kinds of schools whose curricula are defined as 'higher' and 'lower'" (Kerckhoff 2001, p. 4). As a final consideration, it should be highlighted that within the same system the degree of stratification differs across education levels and influences the level of individual decision-making an education system allows students. Apparently it could be argued that education inequalities are more likely to occur in more stratified education systems as they imply a higher level of rigidity in the educational trajectories (tracking according to grades).
To analyse students' educational trajectories in a life course perspective, the typology of education system has to be combined with the welfare dimension, which represents the collective setting of norms and regulations framing and securing individual life in terms of education, employment and social security (cf. Allmendinger 1989; Mayer 2005; Blossfeld et al. 2005). To this aim it could be useful to adopt the model emerging through the comparative welfare analysis, which distinguishes four regime types (cf. Esping-Andersen 1990; Gallie & Paugam 2000):
1. Universalistic, prevailing in Northern Europe where individuals have access to inclusive education, work and social security based on their status as citizens;
2. Liberal, associated with Anglo-Saxon countries where entitlements cover basic needs while individual responsibility plays a central role;
3. Conservative or employment-centred, in which social rights differ according to family and employment status;
4. Familistic, sub-protective or under-institutionalised, where large parts of the population are excluded from social security, especially young people.
As underlined in the previous sections, research on transition should also analyse how the structural aspects of educational trajectories in terms of the socio-economic and institutional structures interrelate with individual agency.
2.3. The social negotiated individual decision-making process in educational transitions
An educational transition confronts the students with the task of indentifying the type of school or training in which his/her education trajectory is to be continued. Adopting a biographical approach, educational transitions oblige students to "goal-directed behaviour in the presence of options" (Hansson 2005), that is: to a (cognitive) decision-making process which will lead to a choice among different
possible further educational trajectories. This task implies a complex reflexive activity concerning the contents of teaching, training and learning, status and functionality for general life plans. Such decisions are expected to be scheduled and supported by the education system for all students of the same class/year/cohort. In some cases, however, they are influenced by changes in other life conditions (e. g. moving house), individual reactions to adverse experiences in current education (e. g. bullying) or problems with coping with the demands of a specific educational course (again upon own assessment or 'pushed' by the system). Also age and poor past life experiences make this task particularly difficult, because while marking the initial status passage from youth to adulthood, it implies the acceptance of educational trajectories and future work careers of different status at a very young age (academic vs. vocational). That's why further research is needed to reconstruct how young people's decision-making at the end of lower secondary education evolves differently: how do young people refer to decisionmaking? What criteria are most relevant for them? How do they experience and express choice and constraints? What other actors are involved and in what way?
Theoretically we start from the assumption that decision-making is a very complex process "in which habitus, personal identity, life history, social and cultural contexts, actions and learning are interrelated" (Bloomer & Hodkinson, 2000: 46). Therefore it is neither a merely intra-individual process (cf. Breen & Goldthorpe, 1997) nor an automatism translating structural constraint into individual action (cf. Furlong & Cartmel, 2006), but emerges from the interplay between structure and agency. It is embedded in relationships, communication and negotiation and is affected by psychological, social and economic factors in the living environment of decision-makers. It implies cognitive and emotional aspects, combining individual motives and preferences, feelings of self-efficacy with the available structural opportunities and alternatives as well as disposable information and family resources.
Moreover, in analogy to Emirbayr and Misches (1998) concept of agency, decision-making relates past experiences and imagination/desires regarding the future to present situations structured by different/unequal possibilities and barriers. Consequently students' transition from lower secondary to upper secondary school or vocational training should be analysed according to the past ruptures they have
experienced in primary and/or lower secondary school and the previous transition from primary to lower secondary school, connecting future educational and vocational paths to present choice (whether they want to remain in full education, start vocational training, enter the labour market as soon as possible, or start a family, etc.) and future destination (the level of education students expect to achieve and their ideal or desired job).
3. Conclusion and research questions
In this theoretical article we have described how the transition from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist labour market has progressively destandardised the life course and transformed the traditional concept of education into (lifelong) learning. According to Giddens (1984) in modern lives have become individualised and fragmented and have to be experienced as reflexive projects due to the need/possibility of continuous decision making, regarding the multiple roles and often contradictory demands emerging in all spheres of life. Assuming that social integration stems from the interplay between structure and agency, the life course approach needs to be complemented by a biographical approach. In the same way as educational trajectories become lifelong, overlapping with life course as a whole, they also need to be analysed and rethought in terms of learning biographies (Bloomer & Hodkinson 2000). This means relating institutionally foreseen trajectories to individual reconstruction in terms of subjective biographies (structure vs. agency). Educational trajectories are neither linear nor continuous but structured by transitions that are both institutionally scheduled and deriving from an individual decision-making process, which in turn evolves through interactions with other actors (gate-keepers and significant others). From this theoretical framework some research questions emerge, which should be considered in the planning of future studies on education in a lifelong and lifewide learning perspective: How are trajectories experienced and assessed individually? To what extent are the experienced transition steps the result of own choice or imposed externally? To what extent do patterns of educational trajectories reflect structures of national education and welfare systems, class, gender or ethnicity? To what extent are experiences and expectations of students regarding ruptures versus smooth progression, future destinations and own choice structured by social factors (class, gender, nationality, socio-economic context of schools) and/or structure of education and welfare systems? How do gate-keepers (teachers) and sig-
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nificant other (parents) act in supporting or cooling out students' educational aspirations and decisionmaking process? How do students experience and reconstruct decision-making themselves?
In terms of hypothesis, it should be verified on the field whether the alliance of less selective education systems and broader welfare education policies proves its adequacy in terms of granting more students access to the educational trajectory they are oriented towards, supporting their efforts in coping and offering the possibility of subjective meaning making both for social inclusion and individual biography.
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M. Cuconato University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy For a more "individual tailored" concept of lifelong learning:
a theoretical approach
The article provides a theoretical reflexion on the shift from education to lifelong learning, proposing the concept of educational trajectory as a new interpretative tool of education as a part and a dimension of the life course and the life course as structuring education processes. In depicting this theoretical framework, the focus is posed on the interactive nature of the learning experiences, which result from both structurally determined factors and subjective choice. The article ends with proposing some research questions deriving from this interactive approach.
Key words: lifelong learning, educational trajectories, life course, transition.
