Vocational narratives: How students make sense of their educational choices

Abstract

This article explores how young people use vocational narratives to make sense of their Post16 educational choices. Based on 97 qualitative interviews with students from Barcelona and Madrid, the analysis examines the vocabularies of motive – such as personal fit, passion, interest, ability and future projection – that students use to legitimise their choices, revealing the symbolic hierarchies shaping these accounts. The study also analyses the timeframes employed in these narratives, illustrating how past experiences, present realities and future aspirations interweave to inform educational trajectories. By conceptualising vocation as a socially and historically produced repertoire rather than an inner inclination, the article explains how young people mobilise inherited cultural meanings within unequal fields of possibility. In doing so, it offers a relational approach that foregrounds the narrative practices through which aspiration, legitimacy and vocation are constructed, highlighting the dynamic interplay between habitus, social fields and the temporal structures organising students’ trajectories.