Session Information
23 SES 06 B, Youth Policies and Educational Transitions
Paper Session
Contribution
The educational transitions of the youth with the immigrant background are generally challenging. Also in Finland the young people with immigrant background confront difficulties in twofold matter: they have more difficulties in transition to upper secondary education and they seem to drop out more often than their Finnish-origin counterparts (Kilpi-Jakonen 2011). The outstanding successes in PISA-tests may overemphasis the quality and equality of comprehensive school and overwhelm the socially diversifying educational pathways of secondary education. First, young people from low-educated families are over-represented at the vocational training, and the dropout rates are higher in vocational education than in university education (Statistics Finland 2015; Myrskylä 2009). Secondly, despite the general equality of Finnish comprehensive school system, non-native children have difficulties in following the mainstream educational pathways and face higher risk of dropping out. (Statistics Finland 2013; Itkonen & Jahnukainen 2007; Järvinen & Jahnukainen 2008.)
This presentation focuses on the group of immigrant youth moving from comprehensive school to the secondary education. In the European context, Finland offers a unique education policy field, where multiculturalism meets quite uniform and homogenous society operating traditionally in according to Nordic welfare model and the strong ideology of equality. Finland can be categorised into universalistic transition regime (Walther 2006), which is commonly based on the comprehensive school system and post-comprehensive routes of general and vocational education, that equally guarantee access to tertiary education. Although there are no educational dead-ends, these branches divide the youth into vocational and academic tracks. In the universalistic transition regime counselling is widely institutionalised throughout all stages of education, training and transition into employment.
In this presentation, we look at a group of young people at a particular moment of their post-compulsory education transitions. In the theories of late modernity some “ways of being” have become more dominant and better rewarded than others (Wyn 2009, for instance). As a vital part of transition from youth to adulthood, secondary education school choice entail possibilities and risks that are “--contingent and linked to complex interactions between individual decisions, opportunity structures, and social pathways” (Heinz 2009). Theoretically, the immigrant youth face a variety of expectations and considerations of their own possibilities, risks and educational trajectories (Heinz 2009; Ogbu & Simons 1998). Higher expectations and believe in education might burst into the reality where language skills and learning difficulties, but also cultural and social differences limit and restrict the actual possibilities. The immigrant youth in Finland seem to follow the educational paths resembling the paths of the Finnish pupils with learning difficulties (e.g. Järvinen & Jahnukainen 2008).
In our previous article (Kalalahti, Varjo & Jahnukainen, forthcoming), based on survey data conducted just prior the upper secondary choice (n = 317), we concluded that the immigrant-origin young shared more positive attitudes for, and believe in education than the Finnish-origin young, but they also faced more learning difficulties. Moreover, especially boys with immigrant origin were the most indecisive of their upper secondary choice, but simultaneously, most determined and career-decisive. In this presentation, we focus on these contradictions between expectations and attitudes, as between indecisiveness and determination of upper secondary and career choices in more details by analysing a set of thematic interviews (n = 22) implemented with the same young that took the survey. Our aim is to complement the view of the complex intertwinement of attitudes and experiences with the upper secondary education choices and indecisiveness of the transitions after comprehensive school. We are especially interested in the consistency of the plans for the short-term upper secondary choice and more long-term career choice in relation to origin.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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