Between gate-keeping and support: Teachers’ views on their role in young people’s educational trajectories

none3Teachers are the most influential institutional representatives and professionals involved in the educational trajectories of students. They prepare students for transitions, they assess their achievements and eventually compensate their failure. While (individual) teachers can potentially become significant others for (individual) students, they first of all represent the school system, that is the standardised curriculum as well as the meritocratic function of school. However, this function of “gate-keepers” has changed. On the one hand, education gets more important to secure life chances in knowledge societies. This growing importance assigned to education puts teacher under pressure due to the high expectations of families and society as a whole. On the other hand, compared to the Fordist era when schools had to produce future workers who were proficient in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic for the labour market, today schools and teachers do no longer know what kind of knowledge and skills are relevant for students’ later lives. Education transcends the classroom and school can no longer work in isolation. It is expected to find meaningful partnerships with the labour market and other agencies concerned with non-formal as well as informal learning (family, local government, third sector, youth association, media). This chapter is concerned with the question to what extent teachers perceive the growing importance of these new challenges. Do they try to mitigate or move around the structural meritocratic rigidity of the system or do they simple reproduce it? In a comparative perspective, a question is if structures of school systems – differentiated versus comprehensive – make a difference in this regard. The aim is to verify first whether teachers are aware of this challenge and second how they perceive their role in supporting pupils’ school transition in a life course perspective. The chapter takes existing research on teachers’ professional identities as a starting point. Whether teachers perceive themselves as ‘transition supporters’ is assumed to be influenced by the ways they consider themselves as subject matter expert, pedagogical expert, and didactical expert. We present qualitative data from expert interviews with teachers and school principals carried out in the qualitative case studies as well as with teacher trainers. The presentation of findings starts with teachers’ view on students’ lives and on the assessment of the adequacy of their abilities and aspirations. It continues with teachers’ opinions of parental involvement and their acceptance of cooperation with other educational actors out of school.The chapters collected in this report draw on the findings of an EU-funded research (under the 7FP) “Governance of educational trajectories in Europe. Access, coping and relevance of education of young people in European knowledge societies in a comparative perspective” (GOETE). Countries covered by the study are France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The chapters focus on the decision-making processes in young people’s educational trajectories, especially at the transition from lower to upper secondary education or training. The data and analysis documented by this report emerge from the following sub-studies within the project: • individual survey with students in their last year of lower secondary education (N=6390) and their parents (N=3290) on progression through education, problems and support, teaching and individual learning, future plans for education, training and employment; • institutional survey with headmasters on key challenges, social contexts of schools, living conditions and future life chances of pupils and students, problems and available support, curricula and standards, links with other actors (N=984); • comparative analysis of teacher training through document analysis of teacher training curricula (N=118) and expert interviews (N = 65) in selected higher education institutions; • qualitative local case studies on ‘local school spaces’ in socially deprived areas (3 cases per country, N=24) including views of students during (N=195) and after lower secondary school (N=109), parents (N=109) as well as professionals and experts (teachers, headmasters, counsellors, external experts; N=208) on interactions at the transition from lower to upper secondary education and training; • expert interviews with high-level policy makers and stakeholders (N=95) and critical discourse analysis at national level on current policy reforms and discourses.noneMorena Cuconato; Manuela du Bois-Reymond and Harry LunabbaMorena Cuconato; Manuela du Bois-Reymond and Harry Lunabb