Bloomsbury Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe: Pathways, Policy and Practice

About the Author Andreas Walther is Professor of Social Pedagogy and Youth Welfare and Director of Education and Coping in the Life Course Research Centre at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.Marcelo Parreira do Amaral is Professor of International and Comparative Education at the University of Munster, Germany.Morena Cuconato is Associate Professor for Social Pedagogy at the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy.Roger Dale is Professor of Education at the University of Bristol, UK, and at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Product Description Drawing on findings from a large EU-funded research project that took place over three years, this book analyses educational trajectories of young people in eight European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. Contributors explore interactions between structural and institutional contexts of educational trajectories, the individual meaning attached to education and the strategies adopted by young people to cope with its demands. The book also analyses the decision-making processes of individual students, placing them firmly within the social contexts of their families, local schools, national education systems and welfare states, as well as transnational policy contexts. In considering educational disadvantage, the book is based on primary, cross-national research with systematic analysis of the different themes addressed. As every chaptersis co-authored by two or three researchers, each based in a different country, the book goes beyond the usual country-based chapter design to provide an enriched insight into both comparative theory and research methods. Review I welcome this ambitious book which represents a genuinely original approach to comparative analysis. I was particularly impressed with its attempt to grasp the complexity of what is happening to young people in eight European countries with strikingly different histories. The finding which stood out for me is the enormous pressure that an increasingly instrumental approach to policy puts on young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The books attempt to relate changes in governance to the educational decision-making of young people is well captured in the three case studies and their analysis. Life histories have much to offer in fleshing out abstract policy ideas such as lifelong learning. --Michael Young, Emeritus Professor of Education, Institute of Education, University College London, UKThis is a thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of papers that sets out to trouble common-sense assumptions underpinning much of the master discourse around competitivity, lifelong learning, and the learning society. It does so in ways that are theoretically informed, with a firm grounding in empirical data from eight European countries. By giving importance to the specificity of the local, while carefully reflecting on the way this interacts in complex and multifarious ways with the transnational, this volume generates an impressive range of insights that help us better understand how the trajectories of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are the result of complex interactions between societal structures and individual subjective action. Such engagement with both lifecourse and governance perspectives help bring back the political, contesting the insidious processes of responsibilisation that the hegemonic discourses around employability promote. With its rigorous approach to generating rich data and nuanced interpretation of the challenges young people face in navigating life, this is an example of collaborative European research at its very best. --Ronald G. Sultana, Director, Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research, University of Malta, Malta