On Friday 17 November 2023, Meg Maguire will be talking about the Young Lives, Young Futures project at GEPS (Globalisation, Education and Social Policies) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
She'll be thinking about young people’s in-school experiences and the part they play in shaping their post-16 ‘horizons for action’.
In particular, she'll be looking at the affectual accounts of one cohort of young people’s time in school - those who have decided to leave at sixteen to continue their education and training elsewhere and who are currently not intending to apply to university. She'll discuss how these experiences may have impacted their learner identities and their ‘horizons for action’; that is, how they understand themselves as learners and therefore, what pathways they see as more suitable for people like themselves.
One argument Meg will make is that, in cases like this, perhaps school becomes a source of problems rather than a solution, with potentially significant implications for how young people perceive and navigate their post-16 transition options.