Head-first into Upper Secondary Education: Finnish Young People Making Classed and Gendered Educational Choices

Abstract

In this article, we analyse the narratives of Finnish young people regarding their educational choices for upper secondary education in a theoretical framework inspired by Bourdieu’s forms of capital and Skeggs’ concept of the classed value of self. Our data consist of interviews with 66 ninth-graders, produced in the Youth in Time research project. In the narratives, we identified six frames of choice between general upper secondary and vocational education and outside formal education. We also recognized that there was hesitation and various strategies that young people utilized in making their educational choices, based on their social and cultural capitals. Young people become aware of their value in the educational market through this process of making their choice. Their educational choices are complex and intertwined with gender, social class, social relations, racialization and locality.

Re-Imagining Sexual Harassment

“…In terms of theory, this chapter links to previous Nordic research on girls' and women's experiences of gendered and sexual harassment (for example, Koskela, 1997Koskela, , 1999Saarikoski, 2001;Aaltonen, 2006Aaltonen, , 2017Tolonen et al, 2021;Honkatukia et al, 2022) as well as theorisations on intergenerational inequalities and control in the public space (Walkowitz, 1992;Georgiou, 2013;Honkatukia and Svynarenko, 2018;Mulari, 2020). Regarding theorising about complex power relationships in the urban space, I have been inspired by feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed's theorisations of (urban) encounters and how, in each encounter, previous encounters between other people or material spaces are always present.…”

“…As Honkatukia and Svynarenko (2018) (see also Tolonen et al, 2021) state, young people's ambiguous encounters with adults in public spaces include sexual harassment and other forms of derogatory remarks and insults, such as comments on appearance, clothes, make-up, and behaviour, such as not standing up and giving your seat to an older person. These forms of adult control demonstrate how public transport, as an urban space in general, is always a space which is intersected by gendered, racialised and age-related hierarchies (Georgiou, 2013;Räthzel, 2000).…”

“…Gendering and harassment were things that almost everyone recognised as part of urban life. For many, growing up as an urban dweller meant compulsory learning and internalising of gendered, age-related and racialised urban hierarchies as well as unofficial, silent and embodied rules on how to act in the public space (see Georgiou, 2013;Ahmed, 2016;Honkatukia and Svynarenko, 2018;Tolonen et al, 2021;Honkatukia et al, 2022).…”

Negotiating Multiple Spatialities: Geographies of Youth Educational Subjectivity

“…Massey, 2005). Besides wider political and societal conditions, young people’s family, peers, and other relationships inform young people’s educational choices (Tolonen & Aapola-Kari, 2022), as well as the ways in which young people come to think of education through the values, expectations, and perceptions of what is possible or desirable (Williams, 2016). As Holloway et al suggest, ‘young people are not simply independent social actors; young people’s ability to exercise agency emerges in the context of inter and intragenerational dependencies which, depending on the context, can open or foreclose possibilities for meeting their current and future needs’ (Holloway et al, 2019, p. 463).…”

“…The upper secondary education consists of two-to-three-year long tracks: the general upper secondary track and vocational education and training track. General upper secondary is generally understood as the academic path, which is connected to success in earlier studies and leads to higher education, whereas vocational is often considered to prepare young people for working life (Ågren, 2021; Tolonen & Aapola-Kari, 2022). Spots for studying in upper secondary education are applied for in a joint application that is a national procedure taking place at the end of the academic year.…”