University of Warwick s3

EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02

The Pink Collar Workers:

Young Women, Vocational Identification and Learning

Martin Bloomer, University of Exeter, UK Jennie Davies, University of Exeter, UK Michael Tedder, St. Austell College, Cornwall, UK

Paper presented at South-West Regional Learning & Skills Research Network Conference, Ilminster, 5th July 2002

Abstract

The paper is based upon work carried out for the ESRC-funded national project, ‘Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education’ (the ‘TLC’ project)1. It briefly notes the case for treating learning as a cultural, and not merely cognitive, phenomenon. It also presses the claim that studies which fragment human experience for research purposes and offer explanations in terms of simple factorial causal models can impede rather than enhance understanding.

On the basis of on-going TLC project case studies of an AVCE course and a BTEC National Diploma course, the paper illuminates processes of identity formation of twelve young women. Specific attention is given to the formation and transformation of vocational identities. The outline thesis presented here examines vocational identities as part of the emergent learning cultures of the two vocational learning sites concerned. The paper concludes by considering implications which this work might hold for student learning.

Introduction: The Significance of Learning Culture

The most orthodox practice in the research and theorising of learning throughout the twentieth century has been to detach learning from other human experiences in order to render it tangible, observable and measurable. Learning theory, cognitive theory and experimental psychology are just a few traditions which have followed such a practice.

There are two problems with these approaches. Firstly, they feed assumptions that learning attributes are discrete and even permanent or semi-permanent ‘traits’, and

1 The TLC project is directed by Professor Martin Bloomer (project co-ordinator, Exeter University), Professor Denis Gleeson (Warwick), Professor Phil Hodkinson (Leeds), Dr. David James (West of England, Bristol) and Dr. Keith Postlethwaite (Exeter), supported by a team of nine research fellows in universities and colleges.

1 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 that there are ‘types’ of learner. Such is the kind of thinking which underpins ‘learning styles’ theory (Honey and Mumford, 1992). This has led to two UK educational institutions planning to screen all new admissions in September 2002 for their ‘learning styles’ with teachers being required to ‘match’ their practices to their learners ‘needs’. While moral and legal processes have now almost expunged crude human typings from the public memory, popular psychology supported by the ill- informed mutterings of H.M. Government ensures that they live on.

Secondly, they are simplistic. It is true that research, and particularly social and educational research, of necessity, has to simplify reality in order that insights can be made communicable. The danger, though, is in thinking that the simplification is the reality, and that is what ‘learning styles’ theory and many other works of that ilk do. They fail to ‘reconnect’ learning with those other human experiences from which it is disconnected, thus presenting a grossly over-simplified account of a complex phenomenon. To be sure, such accounts have great appeal for obvious reasons. Less obvious is the fact that they mislead.

Before focusing down on the specific task in hand, it is appropriate to say a little bit more about certain approaches to research which are prevalent in further education (FE). Much contemporary work on ‘FE retention’, for instance, is simplistic in the ways we have described, being based as it is on simple factorial causal models developed from an understanding of what educational establishments might do rather than from an understanding of who students are (e.g., Martinez, 1997). There is a contrasting literature, incidentally, which provides insight into the complexity of the drop-out phenomenon (see Bloomer and Hodkinson, 1999; Kaufman, 2001) and which is critical of studies which extract drop-out from other life experiences (Dynarski and Gleason, 1998). The ‘factorial modelling’ employed, or simply assumed, in the approaches we criticise reduces potentially complex social phenomena to simple description, thus prompting equally simple explanations and solutions. Simple solutions to complex problems have obvious appeal and, under current pressures to deliver to targets, it is easy to see why. But simple solutions are seldom effective solutions: they may hide problems, they may suppress them but they do not solve them. What should you do, for instance, if you discover that low entry qualifications are associated with low retention? Well, first of all, there won't be any need for time to recover from the shock of this discovery because it barely reaches beyond the screamingly obvious. Secondly, the logical response is to raise entry qualifications. Of course, not all colleges can raise their entry qualifications at will; they have classes to fill and are not necessarily able to turn away students in significant numbers. Those that can, might do so, with the result that the displaced students are enrolled by a neighbouring college not able to raise its entry requirements. Through such processes inequalities are exacerbated, ironically at the very time that the government is pinning its educational credibility to notions of inclusivity and the like. Incidentally, our story is not fictitious.

Our intention here is not to suggest that because a situation is complex, it cannot be changed. Our claim is that informed understanding is a pre-requisite of effective change, where ‘effectiveness’ is judged in terms of the capacity to address the root problem: ‘Practices are changed by changing the ways in which they are understood’ (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p 91).

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Against this background have emerged a number of bodies of criticism. Anthropology (Lave and Wenger, 1991), sociology (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000) and neo-Vygotskyan psychology (Engeström, 1987; Wertsch, 1991) have spawned independent critiques of research which deals with learning and other phenomena in the ways that we have described. In a nutshell, they argue that the understanding of learning is not assisted by studies which reduce complex phenomena to simple description and which extract processes of learning from those of other human experience. The argument is that learning must be viewed as a social-cultural- historical process as well as a psychological process, and not as a psychological process operating within other ‘contexts’ (for further discussion, see Bloomer, 2001). The TLC project was planned (Bloomer, et. al., 2000) with many of these considerations in mind.

The TLC Project

The TLC project was announced in September 2000 and funded to the tune of £880,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council under its ‘Teaching and Learning Research Programme’. Its aims are to deepen understanding of learning and teaching with particular regard to learning cultures in FE sector colleges; to identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of learning opportunities; and to set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for research into FE practice. The research commenced in March 2001 and will run to early 2005. It involves close working partnerships between the researchers and teaching staff at four universities and four further education (FE) colleges: Coventry City College; Park Lane College, Leeds; City of Bristol College and St. Austell College. (While the FE sector has been re-badged the ‘Learning and Skills’ sector, this does not negate our continued use of the term, FE. We have chosen to use FE because of the clarity and meaningfulness it offers.)

The project is run by ten university staff and 20 FE staff from the four colleges. Within each college, four learning sites have been selected as the focuses for an intensive examination of educational practice, learning and learning cultures by means of a four-year longitudinal study. The sites have been chosen to reflect the diversity of learning situations in FE. Within each, the inter-relationships between student and tutor dispositions, the actions and interactions of both and the cultural and physical contexts in which dispositions and interactions are located are being researched. Data are drawn from repeated interviews with the 16 tutors and approximately half of the students in each site; questionnaire surveys of all students in each site; observations of teaching and learning activities in each site; interviews with college managers; and an analysis of relevant national, regional and college- based documentation. The project aims to identify aspects of learning cultures which are amenable to intervention and change, and to determine which types of intervention contribute to positive transformations in learning, and under what conditions they do so.

Project dissemination plans aim to widen opportunities for participation in the project to an expanded network of practitioners, managers and policy makers. The project will organise a series of college-based, local, regional and national workshops,

3 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 seminars and conferences in collaboration with the Learning and Skills Development Agency. Participants in these activities will be invited to research their own practices using ideas developed within the project, and will be encouraged to operationalise, experiment with and evaluate, the principles of procedure that have been identified by the project teams. Their insights will be fed back into the on-going work and thinking of the project. Thus, we aim to extend opportunities for participation in, and critical engagement with, the project to more widely distributed communities from FE and to do so in ways which will contribute to the validation and sustainability of the project itself.

An innovative feature of the project is that it is locked into existing communities of FE practice and entails the direct participation of college-based tutors and managers. It has been based on consultation with colleges and the wider FE sector and offers four principal benefits for those outside the research community:

(i) opportunities for practitioners (and managers) to deepen understanding of educational practice; (ii) opportunities for the development of strategies for the enhancement of learning cultures and for improvements in learning; (iii) from these developments, insights which may have importance for national policy development; and (iv) the enhancement of practitioner-based research capabilities within communities of practice in FE.

Further information can be found on the project website: http://www.ex.ac.uk/education/tlc

Some Initial Insights

At the time of writing, we had conducted one round of observations and interviews with students and tutors our sixteen learning sites. The remainder of this paper is based primarily upon the insights afforded by two of those sites: an AVCE Travel and Tourism (TT) course and a BTEC National Diploma Health Studies (HS) course. All but one of the students on the first year of the two-year TT and HS courses are female and most were either 16 or 17 years of age when they commenced their course in September 2001. Preliminary analysis of the data, drawing largely from the principles of ‘The Discovery of Grounded Theory’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1968), produced a number of insights. Among these were:

Most of the twelve young women interviewed revealed some form of vocational identification in their accounts of how they came to join their TT or HS courses. However, while the TT students’ identifications centred on notions of ‘wanting to travel’, those of the HS students were based on more ‘secure’ notions such as ‘becoming a nurse’.

The TT students without exception referred to air hostesses, couriers, festival organisers, holiday attendants and travel reps. in the course of

elaborating their vocational aspirations. They seemed to remain fairly constant in these identifications.

Social and family life appeared to be significantly related to processes of vocational identification.

In their accounts of how they came to join the course, the HS students most often identified nursing as their career intention. However, within two months, many had started to shift their identifications away from notions of ‘nurse as carer’ towards some more scientific interpretation of nursing or aspect of health care.

Most students declared that on joining their courses, they had no desire to proceed to higher education (HE) on completion of their TT and HS studies. However, within two months, half of the students on one of the courses had changes their minds while those on the other had not.

The principal criterion by which students judged the worthwhileness of any element of the TT and HS courses was its relevance to their vocational aspirations.

These observations, in turn, prompted a number of questions:

By what processes does vocational identification take place?

How do individual vocational identities contribute to a learning culture?

In what ways are vocational identities transformed by learning cultures?

What implications does vocational identification transformation hold for student learning?

Shortly, we shall examine these questions in the light of our case study data. However, before that we should like to consider what might constitute an appropriate theoretical framework in the light of our observations.

Vocational Identity: An Outline Thesis

Little work has been done on the formation of young people’s vocational identities and yet there are compelling reasons why it ought to have been done. Over the last forty years there have been significant social and labour market changes contributing to potentially significant changes in young people’s ‘horizons for action’ (Hodkinson et al, 1996) and vocational identification. There has been a significant growth in medium- and high-skill occupations with a corresponding shrinkage in low-skill opportunities. Traditional community-based industries such as mining, farming and heavy and light engineering and manufacturing have become less labour intensive or more widely dispersed with the result that droves of school-leavers no longer tread the path to their local employer but have to find their own positions in the labour

5 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 market. Transition into adulthood has been prolonged and radically transformed (Raffo and Reeves, 2000) as young people, once referred to as youths or adolescents, are more aptly described as ‘part-time adults’ (Wyn, 2000). ‘Individuals are held more and more accountable for their own survival in a time where change is the only certainty’ (Ball et. al., 2000, p 2). Careers and lifestyles have become more diverse and ‘individualised’ (Giddens, 1991; Evans and Heinz, 1994; Roberts et. al., 1994) while opportunities for further and higher education have massively expanded. There are now more career possibilities than ever before, not just for the young women ‘pink collar workers’ in the health and travel industries but for all young people. One way of looking at the possibilities available to young people is in terms of the risk or uncertainty attached to each possibility (Beck, 1992; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997). While there has been an all-round increase in risk and uncertainty, the pursuit of immediate employment can be experienced as comparatively low-risk while further and higher education, dependent as they are upon deferred gratification, or the pursuit of celebrity status through sporting, artistic or other endeavours, are among higher-risk strategies. But risk calculation is compounded by the stakes involved in each individual case: the stakes can be perceived to be higher in the case of young people with modest financial and cultural means than in the case of those from wealthy or privileged backgrounds. ‘Applying for a place at university, for example, may be perceived as risky by a young person from a lower working-class family, whereas a young person with similar qualifications from an advantaged family may take their acceptance for granted’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, pp 7-8).

We shall now address the four dimensions of our provisional thesis.

Gender, Cultural Capital and Horizons for Action

The horizons for action of the twelve young women who entered the TT and HS courses were quite discernible. None reported that they initially envisaged continuing in formal education beyond their present vocational courses while some were emphatic that they would not continue into HE. For many, aspirations were focused on the parochial rather than the global with few indicating that they saw their long-term futures located far away from the towns and villages in which they presently lived. ‘And I want to move off to a bigger city like London or somewhere but I would always come back to Polcarrow, always … it’s such a nice town ’cause everyone does know each other; it’s just a nice town to live in’ (Kate, TT). Most were not able to outline secure career plans, often intimating that there was much about the future which was beyond their powers of control. ‘No, no, I don’t know. Maybe stay as an air hostess. I’m not sure; it depends’ (Michelle, TT). Frequently, they built their descriptions of their anticipated futures around their domestic aspirations with many anticipating being married or becoming parents by their early twenties. ‘(In five years time) I want to be married or at least with someone who I love who loves me, who’s nice looking. Some of my ex-boyfriends have been ugly …’ (Becky, TT). Their social-spacial-temporal horizons were clearly visible, delimiting opportunities for identification with any global socioscape (Ball et. al., 2000) or with the idealised long-term rational planning agent implicit in much public policy on careers decision making (Hodkinson, 1998).

There has for some time been a general understanding that structural and cultural phenomena in the form of opportunity structures (Roberts, 1975) and classed and gendered expectations impact upon young people’s occupational aspirations and expectations (see Marini and Greenberger, 1978). However, more recent work by Furlong, Biggert and Cartmel (1996) has sought to tease out the finer detail of relationships between ‘opportunity contexts’ (labour market, neighbourhood, social milieu, rurality), ‘individual attributes’ (class, gender, race, family, educational attainment) and occupational aspirations. They found that opportunity contexts, notably labour market and neighbourhood, were a significant component of occupational aspirations in the case of males. The relationship between these variables for females was much weaker owing to the ‘restricted nature of the female labour market in which the main types of opportunities available are relatively similar in most labour markets’ (Furlong et. al., 1996, p 561). However, in the case of males and females, it was found that educational attainment and mothers’ and fathers’ social class both had a significant bearing upon aspirations independent of opportunity contexts while, in contrast to males, females living in the most rural areas had the highest occupational aspirations. Of course, we are not able to examine these claims here since our present data and sample size do not permit this. However, the young women contributing to the study did bear out these findings in as much as they provided a number of indications that family, notably mothers, and educational attainment had had some bearing upon their aspiration-setting.

I had to make a decision whether I wanted to be a teacher or a nurse and my mum swayed my decision to be a nurse ’cause she said you get more out of it and you can’t get really far in teaching (Sandy, HS).

I spoke to my mum a lot about it … and said I wanted to do health studies and she was happy as long as it got me where I wanted to go (Bridget, HS).

Well, I wanted to do it to start with but then I got my exam grades and they were better than I expected so I thought it might be an idea to carry them on … (Tamsin, TT).

But it was also apparent from the TLC study that economic capital had a strong bearing upon these young people’s horizons for action. A primary concern maintained by these young women in ‘deciding’ to join their TT and HS courses was that they would not need to continue into HE and, in the case of the TT students in particular, that they could become wage-earners within a period of about two years. When these issues were interrogated, it was apparent that the anticipated costs of HE and a felt need to achieve economic independence of their families was the key consideration.

I thought about university before but my family was against it because they are worried that I’m not going to be able to afford it, because university is quite expensive and they’re worried about me getting into debt (Rachel, HS).

But I decided that I’m definitely not going to uni so it might be better to do, like, a vocational course when you’re more likely to get a job at the

end of it. So I’ve come back to this … It’s (university’s) expensive. It’s quite expensive. I don’t think my mum will fund it and I’m not going to be able to afford it although you can get grants. But then you’ve got to pay them back and it’s all too much hassle.’ (Tamsin, TT)

There appear to be two possible reasons for these concerns. Firstly, as Ahier and Moore (1999) point out, the Thatcherian critique of ‘dependence’ on the state is reflected in current policy developments and in a wider rhetoric which promotes the view that paid labour is the only way of escaping dependency of any form and is thus a prerequisite of adulthood. Secondly, material needs are experienced in greater proportion by working class families than by others and it is therefore not surprising that economic concerns should occupy their imaginations. Ahier and Moore, drawing on the work of John Goldthorpe, place risk calculation at the centre of their analysis:

… the context in which working class families make calculations about which courses to take, and at which institutions, is different from that of the service class because it is, ‘… towards the end of the period of children’s compulsory education, when crucial educational choices have to be made and when questions of opportunity costs first arises, that the earnings curves of parents in different classes are likely to be at their most divergent’ (Goldthorpe, 1996, p 493). As Goldthorpe suggests, in this context it may be that, for the working class, the ‘best buys’ with the lowest risks are the vocational courses (Ahier and Moore, 1999, p 526).

Under the various circumstances briefly noted here, it is absurd to describe post-16 progression routes simply as the product of ‘choice’ or ‘decision-making’ processes. In so far as they are choices or decisions at all, they are very heavily constrained choices and decisions. The idealised rational planning agent that we referred to above and which provides the platform for public policy is little more than a figment of the imagination. The fact that young people may present themselves as individual free-handed choice-makers in the contemporary climate of individualism should not obscure the fact that many are anything but free agents they suppose themselves to be. For a rich and detailed discussion of these issues, see Ball et. al., 2000.

There are ample indications from the TLC study that cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) is also linked to aspiration-setting. Many of the parents of the young women enrolled on the TT and HS courses had no personal experience of full-time post-compulsory education, for instance. Thus, they were not able to advise their daughters on the basis of any direct or up-to-date knowledge of the post-16 education system and its current links with the labour market. Instead, they frequently drew upon culturally-bounded general, historical or ‘common sense’ understanding of the implications which different opportunities held.

’Cause I’m close to my mum and I talked about it quite a lot actually. And she said it would be good for me ’cause she can see me as an air hostess. It seems my kind of job.

Yes. Do you know why she feels it would be your kind of job?

She’s always said I’m quite sophisticated and she said, ‘You look at the air hostesses and they’re quite sophisticated and they’re really smartly dressed.’ And she said that it suits me; it’s my kind of job’ (Michelle, TT).

I told them what I was interested in – my parents – but my step dad, he wasn’t … he like said to me, ‘Are you sure that’s really what you want to do?’ ’Cause he thought – ’cause he doesn’t really know much about it – he thought it was very, like, an easy course and it was just a kind of way of bumming out for two years (Lindsay, TT).

Having said that, parents often gave strong encouragement, albeit encouragement into the unknown, usually of a ‘we will support your decisions (what ever they might entail)’ type. ‘She wasn’t really an influence on me. She was, like, what ever I wanted to do, she was always like: “Oh yeah, that’s a brilliant idea. Go for it”’ (Lindsay, TT). ‘Yeah, yeah, my mum – if I tell my mum, I want to do a course, she always encourages me anyway: “Fantastic Becky! Go and do it”’ (Becky, TT). ‘My parents are both factory workers. They support me in everything I do as they didn’t get the support when they were at home’ (Judy, HS). Ball, et. al. (2000), commenting on working-class parents contributions to post-16 decision-making, make similar observations: ‘(They) cede decision-making to their child while expressing concerns or giving their backing to the choices explored by their sons and daughters … purposeful intervention is difficult’ (p 144).

There has been ample research into the culturally-grounded values, attitudes and beliefs which affect educational aspirations and expectations and which constitute cultural capital. We will elaborate a little on this below, but for the present we will simply note that in the TLC project we found numerous illustrations of (working) classed and (female) gendered expectations and values which fit this description. Values and expectations such as these were mediated and sustained through friends and, particularly, families:

My mum - her mum wasn’t really into it (schooling) at all: ‘Don’t go to school. You’re getting up too early and waking me up. If they brought homework home then her mum and dad would tear up the books and send them back - basically write that my child isn’t doing the homework. They didn’t think school was worthwhile. They thought that mum should have gone out to work to support her brothers and sisters because she had 14 brothers and sisters ... I know the women despised the men in (our) family because they used to come in and turn the telly over and say, ‘We’re watching this.’ They couldn’t complain to the mother because she didn’t care. If the girls earned more money than the boys, the girls had to quit their job because they had more money than the boys ...

What kind of jobs did the sisters do then?

Anything. Any job they could get their hands on – work on the farm, milking cows … (Judy, HS).

I mean, even my mum, she like encourages me loads but even sometimes she’s like, ‘Oh, why don’t you come down stairs and we’ll have a drink’ or something like that. ‘Why don’t we just go to the pub, just for like an hour.’ And it’s like they really don’t understand how much, I mean they think I could just take my time in doing it … They’re like, ‘Oh no, you’ve got to stop that.’ And it’s like, ‘No, I need to do it.’ … My mum would be, like, ‘Oh, go put the rubbish out quickly’ and I was like, ‘No, I can’t.’ And I tried … explaining to them so many times and they just really don’t get it at all and they think I’m just being lazy by saying, ‘No, no, no’ (Lindsay, TT).

I see my Aunt Alice with her three children - two little boys. I like one of them but not the other as he creeps to his mother when his brother hits him (Judy, HS).

We maintain that the cultural capital which the students bring to their courses is reflected in the TT and HS learning cultures and, in turn serves to define the practices of those functioning in those learning cultures. For instance, when embarking on their vocational courses, most students did so without any intention of proceeding to HE as we have seen. In so far as this was so, it would not have been necessary for them to obtain the higher course grades required for entry to HE. The extent to which this has been reflected in the learning cultures is difficult to say at this stage of our study. However, it is this notion which is captured by Sandy when she refers to group expectations of ‘not having to do our real best’: ‘Yes, ’cause we’re all much friendlier in the class and more relaxed ’cause we’re not having to do our real best – else we’re going to be excluded from the group’ (Sandy, HS).

Another example concerns the gendered vocational aspirations. As we mention later, in the case of the travel and tourism students, these often develop and become progressively focused around the notion of the well-groomed hostess than around that of the unisex business executive. The profundity and immediacy of gendered identification is starkly mirrored, also, in students’ perceptions of those parts of the college where the car mechanics dwell. Bridget (HS) had to visit other college departments as part of her health promotion project: ‘We went to the areas the rest of the people didn’t want to go to – the scary places as they call them – the mechanics, builders, welding … non-girl territory.’

These insights raise three important questions as far as our on-going research is concerned. Firstly, how does this situation come about? In crude terms, is it the cultural capital of its members which impacts upon the learning culture or are young people drawn to vocational courses through processes of gender or class stereotyping of occupations? There is at least some evidence that the second line of speculation may have substance (Furlong and Biggert, 1999). Secondly, in so far as these vocational learning cultures may be permeated with classed and gendered values, what implications does this have for young people and their dispositions to learning and learning practices? Thirdly, how amenable to change through intervention are the learning cultures (and hence the learning) that we describe? While, with very good reason, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) have argued that there is a strong relationship between the possession of cultural capital and the capacity to

10 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 invest it profitably, and attainments within the educational system (pp. 73-74 and 99), our intention in the TLC project is to see whether it is possible to affect those relationships through intervening in the processes of learning cultures. Moreover, we have claimed elsewhere that ‘cultural capital does not only help define horizons for action: its utilisation is one of many factors that contribute to achievement within those horizons’ (Bloomer and Hodkinson, in press). Thus, we shall need to be especially mindful of the continuing development of our young people’s learning careers (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000) and their deployment of cultural capital in the process.

Having briefly outlined the situation as we are coming to understand it, we are reminded that much post-war social and educational policy and legislation has been designed to address the very inequalities that we describe. Moreover, processes of individualisation alone, it seems, ought to have contributed to some erosion of crude class inequalities at least. Possibly, our insights are premature, we shall see as we interrogate the cases of our 12 young people and their teacher further. However, the claims by Furlong and Cartmel on this subject may well prove to be the kind of understanding that fits our case: ‘… structures have fragmented, changed their form, and become increasingly obscure … (while) the greater range of opportunities available helps to obscure the extent to which existing patterns of inequality are simply being reproduced in different ways’ (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997, pp 2 and 7).

Social theory has provided many different accounts of the emergence of horizons for action, vocational aspirations and identities, post-16 careers and learning cultures. Almost all see fit to make some kind of distinction between external structures over which an individual may exercise little control and cultural phenomena to which the individual contributes and into which s/he is inextricably bound. Distinctions between structure and agency, structure and culture, or opportunity contexts and individual attributes are cases in point. Identification and learning outcomes are invariably attributed to both ‘sources’ of influence although seldom does modern theory lapse into simplistic causal factorial modelling such as we have already criticised. Structure and agency, and structure and culture, are not presented as dualisms but as dualities. To separate them and their ‘sub-factors’ out into discrete explanatory categories would be to fragment human experience to the point that each element was rendered meaningless or at best trivial. This much must be evident from the few insights that we have already provided: how is it possible to disaggregate cultural and economic capital and local labour market structures in explanations of post-16 ‘choices’, for instance? And what would each discrete element mean without being interpreted in the light of the other? This is why the metaphors of causality, variance and factorisation are unhelpful in accounts of complex social phenomena; they over- simplify. In more responsive social theory theorists speak of intricate and unstable combinations of factors setting the context in which individual actions are constructed. For example, on the subject of occupational aspiration-setting: ‘… young people’s occupational aspirations are shaped as part of an interplay between individual attributes and opportunity contexts’ (Furlong et. al., 1996, p 553). On the subject of drop-out:

(A particular student’s) withdrawal is more comprehensively understood as having taken place against the background of continually changing configurations of meanings, interests, values and

perceptions. It was a particular configuration at a particular time that presented the conditions under which … she elected to withdraw (Bloomer, 2001, p 443).

Horizons for Action, Vocational Identification and the Learning Culture

The vocational aspirations and identifications of the young women in the TLC study were ‘shaped’ under conditions such as we have highlighted here. Quite visible in this shaping, as far as we were concerned, were the classed and gendered values we have already mentioned. For example, many of our 12 young people displayed a relatively short ‘time-span of anticipation’ (Bernstein, 1961, pp 296-7) in their accounts of their vocational aspirations. They also displayed a tendency to attribute responsibility to fate rather than to themselves and emphasised security or, to put it another way, they sought to minimise risk by opting for courses which had secure connections with employment.

When you’ve got A-levels, you should really go on to university and I was thinking, ‘If I don’t do that then I’ve wasted two years.’ So that’s when I was a bit unsure but then I thought about this travel and tourism course and because it’s a vocational A-level, it’s like, it’s got so many different options you can do afterwards. I thought, ‘It suits me better’ (Kate, TT).

The clearest indication of the presence of gendered values or, to be precise, gender stereotypes, is in the particular vocational courses that the young women enrolled on. Furlong and Biggert (1999) have shown that male and female occupational aspirations at the age of 16 are strikingly different. For males, the top eight aspirations in order are: forces, joiner, mechanic, teacher, police, fireman, architect, computing. For females, the top eight are: teacher, clerical, nurse, nursery nurse, hairdresser, secretary, shop assistant, social worker. While there are many distinctions to be made between these two lists, we shall focus on just two. Firstly, a number of occupations in the male list might be identified as ‘technical’ (forces, joiner, mechanic, fireman, architect, computing) or ‘manual’ (forces, joiner, mechanic, fireman) while such descriptions are less easily applied to occupations in the female list. It is, of course, quite possible to distinguish nursing and hairdressing as technical or the work of a shop assistant as manual but only after recognising that they are most widely perceived to be concerned with service. In fact, it is ‘service’ (teacher, clerical, nurse, nursery nurse, hairdresser, secretary, shop assistant) which most readily capture the flavour of female occupations. It is also possible to distinguish a number of these female occupations in terms of their supporting, domestic or ‘hand-maidenly’ roles, at least in the sense in which they are sometimes popularly seen. Nursing is seen in terms of ‘caring’ for or ‘waiting on’ others; hairdressing is about ‘dressing’ another; secretarying and clerical work are about ‘tidying up’ and organising for another; while shop assisting is about ‘assisting’. Teaching may even be seen in a similar light by some. So how do travel and tourism and health studies relate to these stereotypes? It is our contention that both are heavily gender stereotyped (and that it was no accident that the groups consisted almost entirely of female students). In the case of health studies, students accounts of their aspirations were initially constructed around nursing and notions of caring:

12 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 the accounts of the travel and tourism students centred tightly on notions of air hostess and travel courier:

Yeah, (I’m) still deciding between holiday rep or, I thought, because to be an air hostess, you have to be twenty-one, so I thought if I go (and) do holiday rep first and then air hostess (Michelle, TT).

Our impressions of the travel and tourism students seem to be supported by the fact that none mentioned the ‘business side’ of operations as drawing them to the TT course. Instead, many students communicated their aspirations by reference to some public performative role:

I wanted to, everyone laughs when I say this, I wanted to be a red-coat at Butlin’s and I still kind of do. And this (the TT course) is of course another avenue into going into it (Hayley, TT).

These observations prompt two questions about the processes of identification. The first relates to our earlier observations about ‘choice’ and concerns the extent of young people’s control over their own identity production: to what extent did they ‘drift’ (Matza, 1964) into TT and HS course within the opportunities allowed by structural and cultural constraints? Lawy (in press) opens the question up rather neatly by drawing upon Côté’s notion of ‘identity capital’:

Côté (1996, 1997) has asserted that young people have capabilities – described as ‘identity capital’ – which alongside other ‘net assets’ such as those described by Bourdieu (1976), enable them to take control of their own lives. However, because of the problematic character of life in late-modern society and the ‘exploitative consumption-orientated patterns’ orchestrated by the consumer industries, young people have tended to ‘drift from image to image’ rather than become ‘pilots of their own destinies’ (Côté, 1996, p 423).

Of course, we are not able to subject these claims to any scrutiny in the TLC study at present given that to do so would require a temporal dimension to our work. However, it should be possible to do so after the next few rounds of interviews. Suffice it to say for the present that we are aware that young people (and others) are inclined to stress agency in ‘decision-making’ processes, but that this is not necessarily borne out by closer inspection. At the same time, it is worth noting at this juncture the observations made by Inge Bates on the subject of vocational identification in circumstances not dissimilar to those we have described here. Her comments are focused on the way that working class women on YTS schemes, the ‘Care Girls’, adjust their aspirations and senses of identity when they become engaged in a caring occupation and its dramatic challenges of dealing with violence, incontinence and death in care homes for the elderly:

… after about six months on the scheme, the majority had developed a pride in the job and were keen to find work in this field. … the process of coming to terms with an ‘awful’ job involved two critical components: the reconstruction of individual biographies and adaptation to the occupational culture (Bates, 1993, p 22).

Our second question concerns other identifications taking place simultaneously with vocational identification. Some of the young women of the TLC study have given quite clear insights into their domestic identification: ‘Five years? How old will I be in five years? Twenty-three. I would like to be thinking about having children, getting married’ (Hayley, TT). For some, though not all, there is some correspondence or overlap between their vocational identification and their domestic identification. Both are rooted in notions of caring and in some cases, even in waiting on and tidying up. The question, therefore, is: how, if at all, are they related? Is it the processes of domestic identification which in some way ‘drive’ those of vocational identification? Again, in order to interrogate these matters further, we shall have to wait until after the next few rounds of interviews in order to see how these processes of identification pan out over time.

Finally, to return to the issue of learning cultures, it is apparent that classed and gendered values and identifications have significant implications for the TT and HS learning cultures. How this comes about and what implications it holds for learning are issues that we shall pursue further. But what we have witnessed up to this point is the formation of learning cultures in their relatively early stages, that is within the first two months of their existence. At the time of our first round of interviews, students had still to be exposed to the full demands of assignment work and to other course expectations and it is to be expected that by our second round some changes will have taken place in the ways in which students experience their courses and in the ways in which they describe their own identifications and aspirations. What ever else happens, identification will continue – it is never complete but always ‘in process’ (Hall, 1996)2 – and it is difficult to imagine that the vocational identifications and learning cultures we have described thus far will have survived without change. In fact, on one of the courses, there are already clear signs that some such changes have begun to occur.

Transforming Identities

One thing that did become apparent to the new students within the first two months of their new courses was that, through their TT and HS studies, a wider range of occupations could be available to them than they had originally supposed. Consequently, or at least simultaneously, the horizons and aspirations for some students began to shift. However, it appeared that for the TT students, the changes took the form of tighter focusing upon opportunities within their original TT horizons. So they began to be more specific about their hostess or courier roles:

I never wanted to be like a travel rep or a travel agent. I just, I had no idea. I mean, I didn’t even have the slightest hint of what I wanted to do and everyone was like, ‘So why are you taking tourism?’ And I was like, ‘’Cause I want to, but I just have no idea what I wanna do.’ But now I’ve got more of an idea ’cause, like, I’ve seen the kind of things

2 While the influential work of Erikson (1950, 1968) and Marcia (1966, 1980, 1993) framed identification in terms of developmental stages, or identity statuses, concentrated largely in the ‘formative’ or adolescent years, recent cultural theories have given far more weight to the decentred subject, grounded in multiplicity, and to the claim that identification continues throughout life.

you can do … so I rough, I mean I know the kind of area I wanna work in now.

Yes, so how would you describe that?

I wanna work in like organising events like festivals and stuff like that … Which kind of relates to when I was younger, when I was nine or ten or something, I used to wanna be like a party organiser for, like, rich people. (Lindsay, TT)

The same was true of the HS students with four of the six having re-focused their aspirations on midwifery, psychiatric nursing or paramedics.

And what fascinates me is how they change their minds after they come to you. You know, I get a high proportion on health studies who come on ’cos they want to be a nurse, but we don’t get that many who go out nursing because they’ve perhaps had their thoughts stretched or expanded - their horizons expanded (Gill, HS tutor).

But what was also apparent among the HS students was that they were beginning to redefine nursing itself, shifting away from notions of ‘nursing as a caring practice’ to notions of ‘nursing as a scientific practice.’ Moreover, in their aspirations, some moved beyond nursing towards more ‘scientific’ health care occupations:

I’ve got one who wanted to nurse and we’re just exploring a degree in diagnostic radiography, which, we’ve had students who’ve done this before, and therapeutic radiography, or a degree in oncology, that is (Gill, HS tutor).

However, the most discernible shift in horizons and aspirations among the HS students was in terms of their higher education aspirations. Most had originally been strongly set against HE for reasons discussed earlier but after two months of the course, half had come to see HE as being not only within their grasp, academically and financially, but desirable for the purposes of enhancing their vocational prospects.

I thought, ‘I’m doing this. I want to carry on.’ When I was at school I thought, ‘I’ll go to college, then I might get a job.’ But now I’ve come here and started doing this course, I’m here because I want to be here. It’s something I want to do whereas at school you have to be there. I think I can go on to uni to get a good qualification and a good job (Lynne, HS).

I wanted first of all to be a carer and work with special needs children. But now I’ve changed my idea because I’ve got more options on this course and now I want to go to university and become a nurse … I didn’t really think about it seriously ’til I came here, in the first couple of weeks, and then everyone wanted to be nurses. I never really thought about being a nurse before and everyone else on the course really want to be nurses and I thought that might suit me. Then I started

looking at universities and NHS bursaries and I thought, ‘Yes, I can do that’ (Rachel, HS).

Alongside these changes in definitions, horizons and aspirations were transformations in students’ vocational identifications. They were beginning to redefine themselves as health studies students, as prospective health workers and as persons. The key questions which arise from these observations are quite clear. Is it the case that one of our two vocational learning cultures is proving more powerful or enabling than the other in transforming the aspirations of is students into something less tightly bound by classed and gendered values and stereotypes? If so, why?

At this preliminary stage of the TLC project, we are only able to offer an outline response to the second of these questions. There are indications that the transformations which did occur were somehow linked with the students’ perceptions of how the taught part of their courses linked with their vocational identifications. We have already mentioned the newfound place of science to students’ perceptions of nursing and, from their accounts, it is possible to see how this came about. They frequently stressed the relevance of the science they encountered on the HS course: ‘Biology … here it’s a lot more relevant to what we’re doing’ (Rachel). It is not insignificant, we believe, that the HS course tutor, Gill, when describing her own educational practice and principles mentioned the centrality of ‘relevance’ in her teaching of science:

If you just got up there and just talked about science in general, they just wouldn’t see the point, would they? They need the relevance. So, yes, I think I could safely say that I always ensure that in every lesson. I point it to the vocational area (Gill, HS tutor).

Similarly, psychology was seen by students to ‘tie in’ with their developing understandings of health care and to prompt new identifications and aspirations.

I’ve always wanted to be a children’s nurse. Because I did child development at school, that was my idea when I came here. But since going to Greenham House, I’m thinking maybe psychiatric nurse or children’s psychiatric nurse. It has changed my ideas a bit but I’ll have to see … When I first came here I was quite set in that I wanted to be a children’s nurse. That is what I wanted to be; that was my aim in life. But I’ve never done psychology before. I didn’t realise how interesting it was so I think that sounds quite good actually. I’ve not got rid of my idea but I’ve added to it a bit (Lynne, HS).

In Lynne’s case, her work placement also helped to trigger new insights and opportunities:

Denise set me up with work experience at Greenham House which is a mental health centre. I’ve been there two weeks and I’ll be starting again next week which is really interesting, working with people with problems like that. It’s given me a new view because I just thought, ‘I don’t really understand much about people with mental health

problems’ because we’ve only touched on it in psychology at the moment. So I didn’t really understand it. But now I understand it a lot more: like the problems people have and how to deal with them and how to be tactful which was good, through communications which links a bit to psychology in body language and the way people react. You can watch people and see how they’re reacting, and observe them which I find really interesting (Lynne, HS).

The point is that the science, psychology and work experience which students encountered on the HS course were, in most cases, judged to be coherent and most of all to have a relevance for those young people at that particular stage of their vocational and personal identifications. They stood in stark contrast to the communications and key skills components of the HS course which, for different reasons, were not seen as coherent or relevant, and did not appear to have any connection with students’ progressive identifications. Of course, we recognise that much of what we have said about identity transformation could be interpreted in terms of socialisation through the learning culture. However, this would be a relatively crude theoretical representation of what is actually happening since it precludes any recognition of what the young people themselves may have brought to the processes of identification – and our indications are that they brought much to those processes as we have already indicated. Our early analyses suggest that interpellation (Althusser, 1971) is a more apt descriptor than socialisation. Our young people interpellated their HS course experiences into their existing conceptual frameworks and on-going identifications. Following Lawy, (in press), ‘Interpellation, or hailing as it is sometimes known, describes the ways in which (people) are recruited into () positions by recognising themselves. (They) become transformed as they are named and positioned within symbolic structures and practices.’

But what of the future? How will these young people interpellate their future health studies and other experiences in their continuing personal and vocational identification? Will horizons continue to expand with consequent transformations in identities, aspirations and the learning culture? Will those transformations be translated into achievements, vocational and personal, or will the young aspirants be somehow thwarted? Will horizons expand for some but not for others, resulting in some bifurcation of the learning culture. Or will there be some reversal of the transformations that we have witnessed, as the full weight of structural and cultural constraints is felt. Will the HE aspirants actually go to university? Will their lack of cultural capital undermine them in the end as it did Tamsin Rooke (Bloomer and Hodkinson, in press)? We do not know the answers to any of these questions; all that we can say at this initial stage is that all things are possible. And what of the TT group? Will there be some transformation of vocational identities and learning culture there? We shall have to wait and see.

Identification and Learning

As the TLC project, we are concerned with two main questions. Firstly, to what extent and in what ways do the transformations described here impact upon young people’s dispositions to learning and upon their learning practices? Secondly, in what ways can students, teachers or outsiders effect transformations for the

17 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 enhancement of learning potential? The second of these questions is a specific concern of the second phase of the project, commencing September 2002. While we have further work to complete before moving to a confident response to the first question, it is possible to offer some brief insights on the basis of the work completed to date.

In the case of students on the HS course, there was a more-or-less uniformly positive response to the science and psychology components of the course. The reasons, according to the students, had much to do with perceived relevance and with the way in which the courses were taught. By the same criteria, the students unanimously condemned the communications and key skills components of their courses. As far as work experience was concerned, student responses were much more varied with Rachel claiming, ‘There’s really a lot of job satisfaction for me’ and Carol finding that, ‘I’m basically making cups of tea for people every day, all day, and then just taking the dinners out. I’m not actually doing anything – I’m not really learning anything because I can do all that anyway.’ Some students such as Judy had mixed experiences: ‘I did child care in the nursery. Children were always around your feet. You couldn’t get rid of them. … Then I was with special needs at St. Hilda’s and they were all really sweet.’ Where work experience, science and psychology were judged to be successful, it was because it was perceived as ‘relevant’ but, more importantly, because they contributed positively to the interpellation of experiences into students’ existing conceptual frameworks and on-going vocational and personal identifications. While positive dispositions to learning may be stimulated by the intrinsic qualities of the subject matter or by the teaching, without the successful interpellation of experience, teaching and subject matter count little towards the achievement of successful learning.

From this emerge two lines of enquiry which will guide our further research. Firstly, we must interrogate processes of interpellation further in order to deepen our understanding of how processes of identification and the formation of learning dispositions are related. Secondly, we shall examine how, if at all, interpellation and disposition-forming impact upon learning practices and learning achievement.

Endnote

As we have already remarked, our research is in its early stages and the insights and understandings that we are developing must be regarded as tentative and therefore provisional. Nonetheless, we do maintain that, in pursuing the opportunities that we have identified here on the basis of the model that we are developing, we have the prospect of deepening understanding of vocational learning in a manner which has appropriate regard for the complexity of the problem. We also believe that such an understanding will enable us to present clear implications for educational practice. One thing that we are clear about already, though, is that our advice will not take the form of simple one-line assertions such as stem from over-simplistic modelling of complex problems (see, for example, Martinez (1997) or Reynolds (1998)) or from the unresearched policy assertions of our present

18 EX_JMB_JD_MT_PUB_05.07.02 government, both of which profoundly constrain FE practice and the opportunities available to young people.

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