Abstract
This article provides an analysis of the processes through which young people make educational choices and shape their trajectories in globalised societies of lifelong learning (LLL). Investigating the articulation of LLL discourses in national contexts and local educational sites, it draws on both Foucault and Bernstein for theoretical insights: it shows how thinking with Foucault we can better exploit the generative power of Bernstein’s theory in complex fields of educational research. The article draws on a study carried out in the Greek Institutions of Vocational Education and Training (IVETs), which in response to European Union policies, offer training at post-secondary level in a range of specialties, broadening the limited choice opportunities for young people, especially of vulnerable social groups. Through semi-structured interviews with trainees, the study aimed to explore the relations between previous educational trajectories, their general understandings of LLL environments and demands, their choice to continue their learning trajectory at the IVETs, and their experience from their studies there. Tracing the movements of subjects within the temporal and spatial limits of the LLL discourses contributes in that it allows us to think of ‘flexibility’ as a conceptual means of identifying forms of regulation and identity formation in the new era.
Introduction
The logic and practices of lifelong learning (LLL) introduce the principle of flexibility in the rigid structures of education and its traditional vertical and horizontal demarcations and categorical distinctions, such as high–low status institutions, academic–vocational knowledge, education–work, etc., and in social relations, interactions and identities. The blurring of boundaries increases the options available in education for individuals and diverse social groups, but at the same time it intensifies uncertainty for students and families about which educational offers are worth investing in (money, time and effort). The crucial research question for us is how the global discourses of LLL are (re)articulated at the national and local contexts of policies and practices, and how young people operate in these complex LLL environments in order to make choices, which shape their trajectories in education, work and life (Alves et al., 2011).
The study aims to describe the post-secondary educational pathways available to young adults in Greece, and to explore their choices and transitions to Institutions of Vocational Education and Training (IVETs) structures of further education – an alternative to the higher education (HE) pathway, promoted by European Union (EU) LLL policy initiatives in the Greek national context. In our approach, IVETs represent local sites of LLL policies implementation which, operating as an extended system of institutions across the country, offer a range of choices in specialised professional training at post-secondary level. They are developed to realise the EU strategic objectives of LLL policies, aiming to prepare a skilled workforce and to ensure high participation rates and retention of individuals in education and training structures, especially those from vulnerable groups (European Commission, 2009, 2010).
To take account of global discursive resources, new forms of regulation and technologies of the self, inscribed in the global space of LLL, we approach students’ choice through analyses grounded in the theories of Foucault and Bernstein. A Foucauldian lens recognises the ‘governmental’ (Lemke, 2001) dimension of LLL discourses that position individuals as ‘subjects of choice’. This is to be flexible and mobile, act with autonomy and responsibility, aim at learning and improvement, practice self-reflection and self-management, and calculate investment and security (Bansel, 2007).
On the other hand, Bernstein’s perspective focuses on how flexibility is mediated by pedagogic processes and practices, raising questions of power and control relations. Flexibility implies a weakening of boundaries, changing the foundations of identity formation. The conceptual apparatus of Bernstein, especially his model of official knowledge and pedagogic identities for managing change in contemporary contexts, allows us to rethink the idea of ‘flexibility’ as the fundamental condition for the enactment of LLL in various contexts and by different people. More specifically, the concepts of ‘classification’, ‘framing’ and ‘orientation to meaning’ (Bernstein, 1990) help us to study how shifts from rigid to flexible boundaries create differentiations and distinctions in educational choices and learning trajectories. That is to say, they provide the basis either for ‘specialised identities’, enabling individuals to progress through recovering a coherent ‘knowledge’ past, or for ‘flexible identities’, where people re-form themselves according to external contingencies (Bernstein, 2000).
The theoretical value of this work lies in the recognition that the analyses of students’ choices and identities often rely on common sense understandings of flexibility or classical sociological definitions of boundaries. Bringing in poststructuralist intellectual resources (Diaz, 2009) allowed a movement back and forth between the two theories orientating the study, thus facilitating a re-conceptualisation of the problem and a rethinking of the main concepts and their operationalisations in this research. Producing systematic descriptions and making sense of the patterns we have identified in our data was enabled by Bernstein’s theoretical lens which focuses on changes in pedagogic discourse. This helped to make a link between, on the one hand, education choices and, on the other, knowledge structures and pedagogic forms of communication, the limits and limitations of which constitute the pedagogic subject, privileging certain types of identity and marginalising others.
Our main argument is that ‘trainability’ (Bernstein, 2000), adapting constantly one’s knowledge and skills, leads to a foregrounding of post-secondary structures of LLL and training within knowledge economies and societies. This trend, in turn, translates into pressures and challenges for increasingly wider accessibility to post-secondary education and training. Multiple trajectories result from such accessibility policies, which tend to replace the linear trajectories of the past and lead ‘learning itself [to] become understood as an individual task rather than as a collective project’. Understanding such processes could renew questions on ‘the democratic function of lifelong learning’ and could re-stimulate debates on previous and new forms of inequality vis-a-vis the agenda and the conditions of LLL in contemporary societies (Biesta, 2006: 169; cf. Reay et al., 2010).
LLL and youth policies in Europe
Tracing the EU policy in its development, it becomes evident that there has been a tightening of the connections between LLL initiatives and youth policies, making explicit the intended relationship between education and employment.
In the post-Lisbon period, LLL has been a core objective and a policy tool of the EU to create links between people, institutions and countries in education, training and employment and to support exchanges of learning experiences in Europe (European Commission, 2001). During this phase of the strategy, measures and processes were institutionalised and promoted for facilitating effective transitions of students and trainees within and between national education and training systems of member states and for creating open and flexible learning pathways, in order to avoid dead-locks (European Commission, 2007). In the Europe 2020 Programme, the targets for improving the rates of educational attainment, LLL and employability, especially for young people, are at the top of the political agenda (European Commission, 2010). The key EU policy tool of ‘Youth Guarantee’ has been developed to facilitate and support young people’s education-to-work transitions, an increasingly complex, unstable and protracted issue to be managed at the European level by member states (Council of the European Union, 2013; Hadjivassiliou, 2015). Through this tool the EU puts a new emphasis on LLL and work-based learning for national systems and individuals alike, identifying and promoting them explicitly as key standardised solutions to the employability problems of young people (Borbély-Pecze and Hutchinson, 2013, 2014).
Regarding implementation of LLL and youth policies, there are differences in the ways EU member states have been responding to such initiatives, especially regarding their levels of emphasis on education. In the case of Greece, LLL has been mainly understood as a way of enhancing adult education and developing the post-secondary vocational education and training sector, and so covering the needs of the labour market (European Commission, 2007). In this context and with the financial support of the EU (Gouvias, 2007), the national post-secondary vocational and training sector, founded legally in 1992, has enjoyed a great expansion of the structure of public and private IVETs under the authority of the Ministry of Education.
In globalised educational contexts, such institutions appear as an alternative option to studying in HE, as they are to offer a high level of vocational training and professional skills that meet the needs of the labour market. In the case of Greece, IVETs are attractive to people with an upper secondary level of education because they offer two-year programmes of study in a variety of modern specialisations, but also because the selection of students is done at the level of institutions, applying flexible criteria. Especially for young people from less privileged socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, IVETs seem to promise recognised qualifications, capable of protecting them against the risk of long-term unemployment and social exclusion. However, compared to HE, IVETs are of rather low status, which is attributed to their organisational and educational structures and the kind of specialisations offered. Furthermore, they offer no paths that could enable the continuation of studies in relevant disciplines in HE. The expansion of the Greek post-secondary training sector under the influence of LLL discourses and widening participation policies has created the conditions for multiple trajectories which tend to replace the linear trajectories of the past. Therefore, this article starts with the assumption that the increasing complexity of choice-making in education should renew the sociological interest in this topic, the perspectives adopted, and the research questions that could be raised.
Theorising LLL regimes of practice and identity
Educational choice, LLL and the related policies of widening participation in education have been extensively studied, being approached through theories of social and cultural reproduction, notably Bourdieu’s theory (1998). Such studies have problematised the widespread ‘choice’ policies and their individualistic assumptions and revealed, crucially, the social nature of decision-making in education and other social fields (Archer et al., 2003; Ball et al., 2000; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000; Moniarou-Papaconstantinou and Tsatsaroni, 2012; Reay et al., 2005, 2010; Sianou-Kyrgiou, 2010). A central aim in this research production has been to reveal the structural constraints on choice. Essentially, it is argued that the disparities in the availability of cultural and social capital among people from different socio-economic backgrounds affect their ability to make educational choices concerning their learning and future professional paths, and to improve their social position (Archer et al., 2003; Reay et al., 2005; Sianou-Kyrgiou, 2010). Furthermore, students’ choice and trajectories in vocational training or HE have been explored in critical educational research in terms of the complex interrelationships between structure and agency. For instance, Ball et al. (2000: 12) have argued that learning is about ‘social biographies and identities’, and they documented the claim that young adults’ choices are ‘complexly raced, classed and gendered’, and also that they encompass significant changes in time and space.
Conceiving more broadly this field as a governmental site for identity formation in contemporary societies, we extend this problematic to include questions of how power/knowledge inscribed in LLL discourse is mediated by pedagogic discourses in local sites of practice where subjects are constituted. Bernstein’s theory of symbolic control and totally pedagogised society (TPS) and Foucault-inspired theories of governmentality in education frame our study. In so doing, this article puts forward the argument that EU policies of LLL and more broadly the current developments of Europeanisation of education (Lawn and Grek, 2012), with its powerful discourses, represent a challenge to the more consolidated, sociological interpretations of ‘choice’.
LLL as governmental sites of choice
Following the literature on governmentality and LLL, and in order to understand the rationality of the new spaces of regulation, it is essential to see education, training and LLL not only as structures, but also as sites of politics. By politics we mean what Foucault describes as ‘both the interplay of […] different arts of government with their different reference points and the debates to which these different arts of government give rise …’ (Foucault, 2008: 407 cited in Peters, 2009: xIii). For example, if we take global education policies, we could think that there is still in place a powerful disciplinary national education system, then there are the global economic agencies and there is the imperative of an entrepreneurial self. Therefore, there is interplay among these different forms of government, the operation of which in localised spaces, keeps producing new discourses on education and choice-making in contemporary LLL environments.
Such a theoretical conception recognises the governmental dimension of global policies and practices of LLL which constitute sites of power and regulation; crucially, exercised and deployed through discourses of development, improvement, flexibility and freedom. As such, LLL is a discursive space which institutes new regimes of rationality about education and employment, constructs legitimate practices and constitutes individuals as free, actively engaged and responsibilised ‘subjects of choice’ (Ball, 2009; Bansel, 2007). Choice is a constituent element of LLL discourses and practices. Therefore, the contemporary sites of LLL are broadening the range of possibilities and options available to young people to position themselves as lifelong learners and to make choices about their educational trajectories.
In the new regimes of LLL, every individual operating as subject of choice is expected to improve their qualifications, often through self-funding, in order to have success as a ‘portfolio worker: a mobile, flexible, multi-skilled, entrepreneurial worker who will have multiple careers’ (Bansel, 2007: 286). Also, the centrality of training and credentialism is premised on the view that this helps individuals to remain employable, protected from poverty and social exclusion resulting from unemployment. Compared to schooling institutions of formal education, where the boundaries between success and failure are clearly demarcated, in such environments boundaries tend to blur. Opportunities and possibilities for education and work are, in principle, everywhere and it depends on the individual to exploit these in ways that ensure security and self-advancement. The research questions this approach raises are;
How do students locate themselves in the LLL space?
What strategies and practices do they use to negotiate their subject positions in the discursive space constituted by freedom and choice as a power–knowledge device?
Pedagogic processes of LLL and identity formation
These questions are also central to Bernstein’s theory of symbolic control and TPS (Bernstein, 1990, 2001a), which focuses on how education institutions, with their structures of knowledge and forms of pedagogy, that is to say through symbolic means, shape legitimate ways of thinking, relating and feeling within a given society. Symbolic control is defined as ‘the means whereby consciousness is given specialised form and distributed through forms of communication which relay a given distribution of power and dominant cultural categories’ (Bernstein, 1990: 134). ‘Total pedagogisation’ introduced in the field of symbolic control by policy processes and practices in globalised societies, captured by the notion of TPS, extends significantly the theory (Bernstein, 2001b, 2001c). It helps to trace the radical shift from the paradigm of education to the paradigm of LLL and to reveal the changes in the modes of pedagogic communication through which institutions and individuals are regulated (Ball, 2009; Bonal and Rambla, 2003; Gewirtz, 2008; Singh, 2015). Through this notion, in particular, we can make sense of current shifts, for example, between teaching and learning, learning and doing, education and work, or work and life. In particular, it helps to conceptualise the changes in knowledge structures, forms of pedagogy and evaluative practices, and the relationships between global governmental agents (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and EU), the state and education in the struggle to manage social, economic and cultural changes and to transform collective and individual identities (Tsatsaroni et al., 2015).
Bernstein’s theory of symbolic control and TPS contributes to the research field of LLL by providing a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of the principles of knowledge organisation, ‘orientation to meaning’, pedagogic discursive codes, and modes of subjectification. Specifically, it aids the exploration of the differences between options and ‘learning’ trajectories that form a basis for ‘specialised identities’, and those which create conditions for individuals to adopt ‘flexible identities’; adjusting themselves to external and changing demands, effected by the volatility and contingency of contemporary conditions (Bernstein, 2000).
Flexibility is a core element of current policies, hegemonic discourses and practices for trainability and employability in the fields of production, culture, education and the labour market. Diaz (2009) refers to the complexity of the term and discusses its semantics, political dimensions and consequences. Flexibility has no univocal definition, and this creates a lot of ambiguity around the concept. In current conditions, flexibility has become a signifier, the meanings of which ‘are attached to other signifiers such as “globalization”, “openness”, “free market”, “technologies”, “deterritorialisation”, “tolerance”, “democracy”, “disposition to change”, “adaptation”’ (Diaz, 2009: 499). The change in its meaning implies changes in its values and uses. The semantics of flexibility have been multiplied and ‘[i]t is precisely the emptiness of the signifier which allows the allocation of any meaning in any [given] context. Hence, the signifier flexibility can be seen as a signifier without any identity, susceptible to being easily recontextualised. Thus, it can take positive values that are of great importance for certain interests, especially for the hegemonic ones’ (Diaz, 2009: 499–500). Therefore, flexibility that carries invisible controls is not equivalent to flexibility that promotes responsible autonomy. The meaning of flexibility that attempts to enhance the democratic character of teaching and learning, for example, by promoting participatory processes in education and increasing the control of students over them, differs from that which supposedly provides unlimited choices in the multiple quasi-markets of educational processes and products. Here, questions about boundaries become fundamental in describing, analysing and understanding the types of knowledge and the forms of social relations that are valorised in given contexts.
In the structuralist inheritance, boundary refers to demarcations that separate two fields of influence. Boundary is the foundational concept in Bernstein’s theory and his efforts to describe the field where identities are constituted and reconstituted in the constantly proliferating spaces and open contexts, characterising contemporary societies. Boundaries, Bernstein writes, express a concern ‘with how distributions of power are realised in various, and often silent, punctuations of social space’ and a concern with how they ‘are relayed by various pedagogic processes so as to distribute, shape, position and opposition forms of consciousness’ (Bernstein, 2000: xiii). Boundary is a line and a special device ‘that permits us either to unite or to divide’. …. [B]oundaries ‘constitute the difference and the belonging sense. Every limit conveys difference’ (Diaz, 2009: 501). However, there seems to be some rigidity in the understanding of the boundary, owing to the use of conceptual oppositions (identity/difference) characteristic of this inheritance. Diaz from a post-structuralist and post-modernist perspective points to the ‘outside’ as a condition for thinking the ‘limit’/‘boundary’ of a discourse, arguing that traditional philosophy appropriates the concept of limit and thinks that it dominates its own margin. In this way, it tends to evade the double function of a limit and so while maximising its contingency, it nevertheless denies ‘the potential instability intrinsic to any boundary’ (Borradori, 2003, cited in Diaz, 2009: 502). Accordingly, flexibility is a relational principle which implies the existence of limits, demarcations or boundaries. The latter are physical or symbolic constructions that structure positions, differences, identities and value systems. Under the new socio-cultural conditions, with the decentering of – dominant in modern societies – individual and collective identities, new forms of identification arise. These ‘have become fundamental in the symbolic market, homogeneous in [their] supply, unequal in [their] consumption, and unstable in [their] temporality’ (Diaz, 2009: 504).
For Bernstein, the contemporary changes in the pedagogisation of knowledge represent, through their different biases and foci, ‘different approaches to regulating and managing change, moral, cultural and economic’ and ‘are expected to become the lived experience of teachers and students, through their shaping of pedagogic identity’ (Bernstein, 2000: 66). Robertson (2011, 2012, 2013), utilises the concept of boundary for describing the transformations in education, brought about by the action of global governing agencies. She identifies the re-bordering and re-ordering processes which reconfigure, territorially and functionally, the national scale along spatial levels from global to local and, through the production of knowledge (e.g. about the good lifelong learner), alter agents’ practices and identities within the field of symbolic control (see also Kanes et al., 2014; Tsatsaroni and Evans, 2014).
Following Bernstein (1990), the primary analytical resources to describe changes in pedagogic knowledge and practice, in the case of our research on how policies of LLL are mediated by pedagogic discourse and its realisation in local sites, are relations between (classification) and relations within (framing) symbolic categories. These concepts, corresponding to power and control relations, respectively, trace the degree of insulation of boundaries (strong or weak) in a given field of pedagogic action. Another important analytical resource, helpful in identifying power relations and control modalities of pedagogic knowledge, is ‘meaning orientation’. This concept refers to ‘privileged and privileging referential relations’ (Bernstein, 1990: 15, emphasis in the original); that is, the prioritising of meanings within a context, and the power – deriving from relations between contexts – which is attributed to certain meanings and those who select them. Orientation is defined in terms of ‘elaborated’ or ‘restricted’ meanings, related to ‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’ knowledge forms, respectively, and corresponding to introjected or projected types of identity formation. The former promotes inwardness, generating inner commitments related to the perceived intrinsic value of specific knowledge domains, while the latter promotes out-wardness, reflecting demands and contingencies of external fields of practice (Bernstein, 2000; Beck and Young, 2005; Sarakinioti, 2012; Sarakinioti et al., 2011).
These primary conceptual means we see as grounding Bernstein’s modelling of resources, positions and identities in the struggle for dominance in the arena of education policy and practice. His typology, offering four types of identity – retrospective, prospective, instrumental, and therapeutic mode – projected by the state and/or the market onto the social/symbolic space, is crucial in studying pedagogic discourse, processes and practices, and their regulative and instructional aspects (Bernstein, 1990, 1999, 2000; Power, 2006; Sarakinioti, 2012; Tyler, 1999).
Bernstein describes pedagogic identity as ‘the result of embedding a career in a collective base’ (Bernstein, 2000: 66) provided by the principles of social order in a given society. Pedagogical identities arise in each case through the relationships established between identities of mutual recognition, support and legitimisation, in contexts of constant negotiations of the existing collective and individual goals and resources (Bernstein, 2000). Retrospective identities are expressed through the maintenance of elements from the past, their use in the present and their transfer in the future. Prospective identities are formed through the selective recontextualisation of elements from the past in order for the structured discourse, in Power’s (2006) formulation, to articulate novel collective narratives oriented towards the future. The instrumental identity is formed on the sole criterion of maximising the exchange value of the outputs of education in the market. Finally, for the therapeutic identity ‘…the concept of self is crucial and the self is regarded as a personal project’ (Bernstein, 1996: 77). As opposed to market/instrumental identity, the therapeutic identity ‘…takes the form of an open narrative which constructs internal linearity. Like the market identity, for the therapeutic boundaries are permeable and the past is no necessary guide to the present or future. If the market identity is dependent upon the segmentation of the shopping mall then the therapeutic is dependent upon internal making-sense procedures of the external segmentation’ (Bernstein, 1996: 77–78). So, while the instrumental/market position ‘projects contingent, differentiated competitive identities’, the therapeutic position ‘ideally projects stable, integrated identities with adaptable co-operative practices’ (Bernstein, 2000: 70).
To conclude this section, we approach the institutions of IVETs and their students – the object of our inquiry – both as governmental sites for exercising choice in education and training, and as sites articulating pedagogic discourses on knowledge, learning and identity formation. This allows us to trace the movements of individual students in learning spaces, that is to say, ‘the practices of the self’ in the pedagogic context of studying in IVETs; and also, to identify the shifts in discourse, trainees’ positionings and identities. In other words, to understand the ways knowledge articulates with power in this action field, and the ways individuals are shaped in their entanglement with global governmental rationality (Lemke, 2001, 2009) in local contexts.
Exploring students’ positions at local sites of choice-making and learning
Bernstein’s ‘oeuvre’ (Moore, 2013: 1) suggests that in research we begin with a problem and then mobilise and direct our resources, theoretical and methodological, around that problem. Furthermore, our resources should be mutually supporting and collaborative in their distinctive ways, ‘implying …a translation device that can read across approaches and bodies of data in a synthesising manner’ (Bernstein, 1977; Moore, 2013: 4). Our problem is to identify young people’s positionings in the symbolic market of LLL, through investments in studying in the Greek post-secondary vocational education and training sector, the discursive means they use to exercise choices and the forms of identification they engage in while making such choices.
The study
This article draws resources from a small-scale study carried out in 2012–2013 which, starting from questions about recontexualisations and enactments of EU LLL policies and practices in the public IVETs, aimed to investigate trainees’ choices and learning trajectories, attending courses of various specialisations (Tsatsaroni et al., 2013). The data we utilise have been produced through semi-structured interviews with 20 trainees, 10 women and 10 men, who expressed interest in participating in the qualitative part of the research, after an initial survey questionnaire was distributed to students of seven public IVETs located in poor and relatively well-off urban areas in the cities of Athens and Corinth. The age of the trainees participating in the interviews ranged from 19 to 45 years. Most of them came from lower middle-class family backgrounds and at the time of the research they were unemployed and most of them anxious to find a job.
Trainees as ‘subjects of choice’
For analysing data in terms of meaning-making processes on educational choice, we have utilised Bansel’s (2007) Foucault-inspired idea of identifying discursive complementary couplings that operate as analytical/deconstructive categories. That is to say, they allow the researcher to ‘trace movement between the terms, where one both necessitates the other and involves a sharing or exchange of meaning’; therefore, to capture how ‘[t]hrough this regular appearance together, and exchange of meaning, they come to signify “the same thing” by establishing some discursive equivalence or interdependence’ (Bansel, 2007: 287). In developing our analytical tool, we have constructed five such couplings: flexibility–mobility, autonomy–responsibility, learning–improvement, reflection–self-management, investment–security. The discursive grid that these couplings create allowed us to assemble data together in order to make sense of the repertoires identified in the trainees’ talk about their educational experiences and trajectories, and the meanings they attribute to the LLL objectives of ‘learning’, ‘trainability’, and ‘employability’.
Flexibility and mobility are among the dominant forms of practice that trainees exercise for exploiting possibilities and opportunities so as to become trainable and employable for life. Choosing post-secondary vocational training is for the majority of them a way out of the deadlock that they risk falling either after completing secondary education and failure to enter HE or – for the older people – after losing their jobs. Many of the interviewees say they chose to attend an IVET in order either to utilise their free time resulting from lack of employment or as a means of expanding their vocational skills and thus to increase their chances to work in more occupational sectors and specialties. IVETs represent for them a place where they can explore new areas of knowledge and can acquire experiences and qualifications that could be useful for them in the future in order to be ready to exploit better opportunities for education and work, whenever they appear. The following extract illustrates their movement within this space:
In my opinion, any type of knowledge is worth it. We need to be receptive, and we should be able to take in any type of knowledge we happen to come across…. maybe not at the highest level, but we should be aware of a subject and when it is least expected one usually needs it and so can use it.
Also, most trainees believe and express the hope that the knowledge they gain from their studies at IVETs will enhance their employability:
… I tried to find a job. And to enhance my job prospects, let’s say, to reinforce my CV [curriculum vitae], and in order to have more fields to look for a job, that’s why I started IVET again.
The most important barrier for all trainees to becoming flexible and mobile is the school-like, tight organisational and pedagogic environment of the IVETs. The various structural and bureaucratic constraints described by students, distort the logic of the sector as an open-ended LLL environment that operates with the principle of flexibility. As regards those who are employed and combine work with training, they mention that they face difficulties due to the strict rules about absenteeism and the working hours of IVETs. Because of these, the combination of training and full employment becomes impossible, and the combination of part-time employment and training is extremely difficult to handle. Additionally, these institutions appear to lack pathways to other education structures, information services and student career counseling, mobility through European programmes, teaching materials, open knowledge resources and technologically advanced equipment. These are widely described by trainees as obstacles to their flexibility:
It’s …I don’t know about other IVETs, but specifically at mine, I think that I am put off by all that bureaucracy. That is, a certain person in an office who believes he can do whatever he thinks, it’s …it’s what we call in Greece bureaucracy and everybody is against, all that is present at IVET. [….]
No. I haven’t been informed. I’ve heard about it, I don’t know what it is. I once went to ask at the office, and they told me to check it on the Internet. That’s all.
There is a problem with the photocopies – first: we don’t have any books. We depend on our instructors who give us electronic files: word, pdf, power-points. Some photocopy them.
Regarding the ways trainees place themselves within the widespread discourse of autonomy and responsibility, data show that the majority consider themselves responsible about how they exercise their freedom and the choices they have made so far in terms of their education, training, and work. Individuals, who have failed to enter HE, blame it on themselves and on the wrong choices they had made in their educational trajectories:
I might have tried more in the last grade of Lyceum. Then … To pass [be admitted] in another institution, …. where I would like to be … so as not to waste time.
As I said, if I could turn back the time, after Lyceum, I would study. I don’t know whether I would be happy or not, but that’s what I would like to do, to study [at the university].
Moreover, trainees appear to have strongly internalised the idea that they have to be active, and they take responsibility for their engagement (or not) with their studies in IVETs. Although they point to a variety of problems that they encounter during their studies in the IVETs, overcoming the fatigue, the extra costs, the doubt about their future and the anxiety they usually feel, they nevertheless take an active role in their everyday practice as trainees to compensate for the “dysfunctional” aspects and the poor material conditions of the institutions. The following extract illustrates this point well:
But the administration office is always complaining about not having enough money. And they don’t allow us as a department to buy toner for photocopies and we know: a toner can produce 500 photocopies… We could also get 2 packs of paper A4 for our department. It would be better and the cost wouldn’t be so high for 20 students… We should have some books … But instead we get the material e-mailed to us or we get photocopies. [We] all have access to the internet … There is internet access. And those who do not have access from their homes can have from the school. So, they either bring their computers or somebody else brings it … that is if they have a desk-top somebody else brings a lap-top, downloads the files, saves them on a removable disk, and that’s how it’s done.
The discursive pair of learning and improvement captures trainees’ descriptions of themselves as lifelong learners, who intend to exploit every available opportunity to broaden their knowledge. In their experience, participation in IVETs is an exercise in learning to learn that keeps them in ‘learning shape’ and makes them better persons:
In fact, access should be given to people… to be educated at an older age, what’s known as lifelong learning, it’s good. Because one acquires knowledge and uses it as [he/she] wishes. It’s not only what you learn at school and from teachers, it also depends on what you do.
On the other hand, there are trainees whose reasoning on learning and improvement relies on the idea of high specialisation which would permit them to be successful in their future work. There are cases where the meaning and the expectations that they project on to their course specialisation varies considerably. A characteristic example is that of a young woman trainee, studying fashion design, who stresses that the knowledge content taught in her IVET does not correspond to the ‘modern’ professional practices of a fashion designer but to the traditional image of a ‘seamstress’:
Probably not, if it had the same courses and the same content in the courses, no. Because the title [of the course] does not correspond to what is taught in the programme. That is, I enrolled there to become a fashion designer, but instead I will become a ‘seamstress’. If another programme told me, ‘yes, we will make you a fashion designer’, then yes, I would choose it.
Also, trainees responding to the question, ‘How do you think that the knowledge you obtain from IVET will be to your benefit?’, express the view that real knowledge is the practical knowledge transmitted by experienced professionals in the field, for example, an accountant, and not only by teachers specialised in knowledge fields:
The biggest advantage is that most of the instructors are … for example in our department, in Accounting – [they] are either accountants or they work in an accounting office or in a company, which means that they are experienced. And they can easily get us in the job and show us what’s really going on. [It’s] better than having simply a teacher.
Finally, some trainees argue that the kind of specialisation courses offered by IVETs does not allow them to be independent in their work, but only to be employed as assistants:
Oh…. by having a general understanding of things when eventually you get a job at a garage, of course not becoming a technician, right? Just to know what you are doing … Oh … being able to communicate for example with your employer who will be telling you what to do, being able to understand things. Not that you can’t fix a motor by yourself. You have the basics.
Practices of self-reflection and self-management indicate that trainees do not present themselves as self-reflecting persons and persons with well framed career plans. In most cases they appear to go with the flow, keep themselves busy by being involved in various activities, for example sports, languages, hoping to gain experiences, while some time afterwards they might abandon them to do something else. In terms of the trainees’ preferences vis-a-vis the specialties offered at IVETs, the data show that approximately one-third of the respondents followed a specialty which was not their first choice. However, ultimately, they appear interested in following it:
I chose at random a specialty which …appealed to me in some way, which was more or less what I wanted, like civil engineering ….
The choice of studying in a public IVET, in the trainees’ talk, appears relevant to the discursive coupling of investment and security. Public IVETs, in Greece operating as a quasi-market parallel to the private sector of vocational training, is the site where trainees are constituted as consumers of education and training. The benefits accrued to individuals from being engaged in training and LLL courses are connected, in the trainees’ views, not only to discourses of improvement, as already shown, but also to discourses of being at risk of unemployment. People invest money and effort to be trained in order to feel more secure with their worker portfolio. This practice is more common among older people who are long-term unemployed or among younger people who come from less well-off family backgrounds, which cannot offer them enough financial support to go on studying. Having accreditation, in any case, is seen by the trainees as the only proof of their effort and investment in their training. The state certification of graduates of IVETs’ courses is viewed by trainees as a means to protect themselves from being at risk of losing job opportunities because of the lack of recognised qualifications. This is more important in the cases where somebody wishes to work in the public sector where professional knowledge and skills are recognised only when they are officially accredited:
– Oh … because now…because I feel insecure, because I had problems in the past, I feel insecure and also that I might need it. That is, I might need it perhaps for a public position, something may change about the TEI [HE technological institutions] and people with accreditation may be admitted, so it is a certificate that I want to have.
Another trainee, replying to the same question, states:
– Yes, of course
– Because… as far as I’m concerned, it’s …you can work for the public sector, not that I’m aiming at that … and it is more… shall I say ‘recognised’? ….it counts more in the market anyway …
The analysis so far helps us to trace the movements through which the trainees delineate the complex discursive terrain of LLL in which choice, learning and employment prospects are re-articulated in IVETs. Discursive couplings used in the analysis capture the range of possibilities as well as limitations in the resources and practices trainees engage in, and the ways in which this terrain becomes meaningful to them. Flexibility motivates and mobilises trainees to seek and explore opportunities for learning and future employment. They struggle with the obstacles, which they connect to factors such as their previous education trajectories, associated with failure, and the guilt they feel for not being more responsible vis-a-vis their studies in the past. So, they see their present engagement with learning in IVETs as their second chance to improve their position. The structural problems of the institutions and the poor knowledge resources offered there constrain the horizon of their expectations about their improvement. Nevertheless, they keep investing time, money and effort, to overcome the anxiety and the risk of unemployment and marginalisation. By positioning themselves as lifelong learners they place themselves ‘somewhere’, and so they feel more secure. Being limited in resources for reflection, trainees selectively appropriate elements associated with the circumstances of their unsuccessful choices and trajectories of the past. Developing self-managing practices in the present they recognise the necessity of accreditation for their qualifications, hooked by the idea that investment in learning and accreditation offer security and open up new possibilities for their future.
The living experiences of trainees struggling in education and training to confront the problem of insecurity and risk require an understanding of how the structures of pedagogic knowledge within the IVETs mediate such experiences. So, in the next section we look at the recontexualisation of pedagogic discourse in IVETs, in the context of which identities are shaped and legitimised.
LLL practices and trainees’ pedagogic identities
The majority of trainees’ responses regarding their educational choices and trajectories are associated with the idea of ‘learning’. However, the different weights and meanings which they attributed to learning seem to be mainly related to their pedagogical identities, which are the results of pedagogy, namely the continuous social and educational processes of regulation exercised both by the official state agents of symbolic control and the informal modes of pedagogical communication in everyday life and action contexts. In analysing trainees’ identities, we deploy the concepts of classification, framing, and meaning orientation to describe how the meanings of (lifelong) learning informing trainees’ decisions, as realised in the educational environment of IVETs, are concentrated around, mapped onto, the four types of pedagogic identities of Bernstein’s model – retrospective, prospective, instrumental and therapeutic. This is essential for understanding changes in pedagogising processes and, reflecting on boundary work (at its limit) both for the researched and the researcher, to reveal their social implications, related to the maintenance or transformation of existing standards of legitimate conduct, knowledge and practice, thus to possible reconfigurations of individual and collective identities (Bernstein, 1999, 2000; Power, 2006; Sarakinioti, 2012).
The main feature of the retrospective type of identity of the trainees at the IVETs, participating in our research, is that they appear to recognise and accept the entrenched hierarchical relations in the fields of knowledge and the division of labour. These identities do not dispute given boundaries, hierarchies and roles (strong classifications) as they draw from meta-narratives, such as, for instance, the reputation of institutions, and the status of the different educational levels. They recognise the existing hierarchies within the post-secondary and further education sector, and attribute greater status to HE qualifications:
Almost all trainees who participated in the interviews had previously attempted to enter universities or technological institutions of HE and resorted to an IVET only after failing the university admission examinations:
You will notice, when you go to an IVET, that most say ‘Hey, okay, I did not make it there, and that’s why I came here’. … ‘I tried, I took the Panhellenic university entrance exams, well, I didn’t succeed and I had to come here’… ‘So, I don’t know … well … okay – we failed, so let’s take this at least, … to get it over with’.
At this point, it is worthwhile noting that when they were prompted during the interview to say which of the choices made in the past they wished they could change, in many cases trainees replied that they wished they were more disciplined during their secondary education so as to have succeeded in their HE entry examination. Moreover, a number of them stated that studying at the university is in their future plans, as they accept as given the higher status of HE institutions and the greater purchasing value of their qualifications. The majority of interviewees recognise the incapacity of IVETs to intellectually form the trainees and to foster their development into independent pedagogical subjects of knowledge and professional/occupational practice. This results from the lack of a clear, well-structured programme and firm institutional control over the educational process. Also, they tend to be positive towards the perspective of greater specialisation and a deepening of knowledge if the institutional conditions were ever to allow individual initiative.
A typical example of a retrospective identity, according to our analysis, is a 31-year-old woman who acknowledges the importance of strong classifications on the argument that they ensure the acquisition of academic knowledge. She favours strong framings which are a prerequisite for the acquisition of knowledge representing distinct academic disciplines:
… Perhaps a bit more strictness towards the students who are not willing to have a lesson and are noisy … ehm … it’s an issue, at least for our class, when it comes to noise. I mean there is a lot of noise. One’s ears ring after class. And there should be greater strictness. That is, they should be expelled from class, and it doesn’t really matter if one or two fail, this way they may be more serious about it. Because there are people who come to the IVET after work and leave with a terrible headache.
This trainee can imagine and position herself in such institutions of ‘higher learning’, which she clearly distinguishes from the IVETs, on the basis of the criterion of analytical thinking, which she favours, and practical application, which she deplores (introverted meaning orientation) (Sarakinioti, 2012):
… I think I have gaps in my knowledge I mean that there is a point where you stop. I can’t go further than that or I don’t have the responsibility. Do you see what I mean? How can I put it? … let’s say I constructed roads, OK? So … I might have designed a turn which was very sharp but to me it looked fine. Do you see? That gap of knowledge was there and I couldn’t get why that turn is too sharp. I’d like to know why or how is it measured? Why is it that the road cannot be like that, you see?
This is a version of a retrospective identity that encourages the specific individual to desire having a place in HE, despite the existing institutional barriers. Individuals with elements of a prospective identity perceive the object of their study as a field of specialised professional practice with strict classifications, which they contrast to more technical–practical versions of this field. They are critical towards what represents a purely practical form of knowledge, on the argument that it does not allow them to move independently with knowledge and understanding in various occupational fields. They appear open and receptive to a range of opportunities to acquire knowledge related to innovative subjects. They prioritise the modernisation and up-grading of the IVETs’ programmes of study, the utilisation of new technologies, the continuous training of trainers and the ensuring of a high level of professional competence for themselves. Their discourse positions them as individuals who wish to possess certified knowledge, and they are, in principle, able to operate within the contemporary applied fields of occupational practice. A typical example of a prospective identity is a 21-year-old woman. She acknowledges the importance of strong classifications of educational knowledge but with recontextualisations which provide conditions for the initiation of trainees into specialised vocational practices – in this case costume design. Concerning the practices of the IVET, in which she takes her training, she rejects the strict and explicit rules regulating trainees’ behaviour. At the same time, she characterises as a weakness the absence of a stricter control in elements of the instructional discourse, as for example in ‘sequencing’ (Bernstein, 1977). Therefore, she understands the object of her studies as a specific field of specialised vocationally-oriented knowledge and practice, with strong classifications, and she contrasts it to more technical–practical versions of training and future work, that is, dressmaking. This is the main reason that in many parts of her interview she becomes extremely critical towards what represents a purely practical form of knowledge (see in the previous section the difference she points to between a costume designer and a ‘seamstress’). Her identity is formed as a prospective one through her desire and disposition to move autonomously in a variety of working environments (e.g. magazine publishers and theatre), responding adequately to different requirements:
[Ironically humorous] I believe I will become a seamstress [we laugh]. That is what I have understood. And that’s what they want us to believe.
Yes, or stylist, or whatever may come from this area. Costume designer in a theatre, for a performance, anything, they don’t give you alternatives. To be sure, there are three courses, and all the others are a little bit of this, a little bit of that … that is, they won’t broaden your mind, they won’t tell you that you can do more, that you can look for other things, no. I will become a seamstress. That’s what I’ve taken in.
Individuals with features of instrumental identities are interested in investing in education not in order to develop greater understanding or better insight but because this is a current demand of the market. They are interested in acquiring a set of horizontal skills which, on the one hand, are considered necessary in the present circumstances and, on the other hand, can be supplemented with experience-based skills in practising their specialty in the future. They do not care to acknowledge that different levels of education can provide qualitatively different kinds of knowledge, and they do not appear to possess or utilise sophisticated tools to distinguish between different forms of knowledge. Essentially, their talk is permeated by the view that knowledge is cumulative. Any attempt for admission to HE is aimed at obtaining qualifications with greater exchange value in the labour market (Moniarou-Papaconstantinou and Tsatsaroni, 2012). As an example, our analysis in this case concerns a 19-year-old man, who identifies significant shortcomings in relation to the knowledge offered and more so with the pedagogical relations formed within IVETs, which often prevent learners from effective engagement with the processes of training. He clearly states that he is preparing for admission to HE institutions and stresses the greater exchange value of tertiary level qualifications in the labour market. His identity carries characteristics of an instrumental identity as he is interested to invest in education in order to maximise his chances to respond adequately to the current demands of the labour market:
I would suggest making an effort to get into a HE technological institution (ΤΕΙ) or university that he/she prefers, one with future prospects, for example, OK, physiotherapy, one could of course- the one I wanted to follow in the past-even now if I was given the chance to get in to some TEI either for physiotherapy or anything else, I would go. One can have better prospects abroad-this is the only definite thing, if we do not get out of this financial crisis in our country, abroad you may find a job a lot easier, that is if you are a university graduate in ICT, a university … with things like training and the like, you may work easier abroad and that’s why I would give this advice.
Trainees with characteristics of a therapeutic type of identity possess forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1998), which are incompatible with the educational environment and culture of IVETs. They appear to have an elaborated meaning orientation, recognising the value of knowledge per se and the introverted forms of knowledge, which they relate directly to their personal development. Their identity tends to be constructed with reference to fields of practice and discourses, outside the field of IVETs. For instance, in our analysis, a 38-year-old man appears to manage adequately what he perceives to be an absence of (specialised) knowledge demarcations at an IVET, where he ended up due to adverse conditions, and he acknowledges the value of knowledge in the content itself and in its own right (introverted orientation). The following statement by this trainee illustrates his disposition to knowledge:
But the knowledge I acquire, that I will acquire and have acquired so far, helps me also and …as a personality, I learn new things, and I have learned, really, a lot of interesting things… and even if I don’t continue my studies and if I don’t get the job I want, … I will learn some things for myself… which I find very important.
The analysis of trainees’ interviews from the Bernsteinian perspective shows that the pedagogical discourse articulated by the IVETs allows and accepts as legitimate all four positions of identity formation. At one level, this seems to confirm the projected profile of these institutions as an open and easily accessible learning environment. At the same time, it reveals the contradictions and tensions in the principles of organisation and transmission of knowledge, which was one of the main problems that emerged in the talk of almost all trainees, regardless of identity type. This suggests that this pedagogic discourse, being contradictory in the pedagogic messages it conveys, creates segmented pedagogical practices, incapable of supporting adequately any of these identities. Moreover, it appears that terms such as flexibility, choice, mobility and independent learning, which are the core of LLL, as mediated by the pedagogic discourse in IVETs, remain unarticulated and therefore empty of any pedagogic meaning. This means that as floating signifiers, they can be appropriated and used conveniently in different circumstances, conveying various ideological messages, and serving different political purposes and interests.
Concluding remarks: Thinking flexibility, rethinking boundaries
This article has been developed around the argument that in contemporary globalised ‘knowledge’ societies, policy discourses and practices have reinvented the notion of education as an open-ended space of LLL, inviting young people, in particular, to make their own choices and to develop strategies to exploit the available possibilities and opportunities in work and life (Ball, 2009; Gewirtz, 2008). Our study aimed to explore the pedagogic discourse formulated within the framework of post-secondary, non-tertiary education and training institutions in Greece and to understand the choices made by individuals in connection with these institutions and with reference to global LLL policies. For doing this, we made a brief reference to the changing EU policy context and the requirements for LLL and training, and described the ways this supranational framework has influenced the IVET sector at the national level. Then we focused on the ways students of IVETs talk about their learning experiences, based on their participation in these courses, especially their reasoning about and justification of their choices and trajectories.
Our approach was generated by adopting two different theoretical perspectives which, as we have shown, are complementary in producing the analytical space of our research. Foucault’s and Bernstein’s theoretical resources allowed us to interrogate learning within an articulatory process consisting of two layers of meaning-making. One is around learning as a core term in the discursive shift from education to LLL. It suggests the exploration of the place of IVETs within this new space and the expectations associated with it. The other layer refers to practices with which individuals engage and make choices. Students position themselves in the present, imagine their future trajectories, and (re)invent themselves within these discursive spaces.
More specifically, interrogating the globalising projects and processes within the ‘education ensemble’ (Robertson and Dale, 2015: 1) or alternatively, the governmental sites for practising choice, as they are inscribed in the field of LLL (e.g. Ball, 2009), we have utilised Foucault’s (1988) theorisation of power and subjectivity. This aimed to analyse the global formative influences of hegemonic discourses as well as the new forms and technologies of social regulation through which ‘[i]ndividuals succeed or fail by dint of their own self-discipline, hard work, personality, ambition and effort’ (Bansel, 2007: 298). The ways in which individuals engage with, contest and exploit potential for meaning-making in education, life and work contexts, that is their positionings and their understandings of the terms of the discursive couplings, varied, depending on their educational trajectories, backgrounds and experiences. This perspective, therefore, captures the complexity and flexibility of the discursive space of LLL, where individuals become ‘subjects of choice’ (Bansel, 2007). Bernstein’s perspective contributes to raising questions on how flexibility is mediated by pedagogic processes and practices. From his theoretical perspective, flexibility implies a weakening of boundaries relaying power and control relations in the pedagogic field, changing the foundations of identity formation. Therefore, the analysis of knowledge organisation and modalities of pedagogic communication, as represented in trainees’ talk, becomes crucial in identifying and illuminating differences in their positionings as ‘subjects of choice’.
The organisational characteristics and the position of IVETs as education institutions between secondary education and HE have been established on the basis of a claim for knowledge and learning both as a right and as an opportunity, reinforcing the idea that individuals should act as flexible and responsible ‘subjects of choice’. Bernstein’s metaphor of boundary has allowed us to think of ‘flexibility’ as the fundamental principle of LLL discourses and their enactments in local sites, rendering meaningful the projected profile of these institutions as open and easily accessible learning environments. At the same time, the Bernsteinian analysis reveals the contradictions and tensions in the principles of organisation and transmission of knowledge, which was one of the main problems that emerge in the talk of almost all trainees, regardless of identity type. This suggests that this pedagogic discourse, being contradictory in the pedagogic messages it conveys, creates segmented pedagogical practices, incapable of supporting adequately any of these identities, resulting in their deregulation. Our findings underline the need for reforms in the sector of IVETs to support LLL and successful trajectories for trainees. Reforms need to create a distinctive and strong structure of knowledge specialisation and vocational training which, through appropriate pedagogical arrangements, would allow access for trainees to other educational structures and knowledge environments (Beck, 2013; Wheelahan, 2011).
The contribution of this article lies in the attempt to bring in post-structuralist intellectual resources (Bansal, 2007; Diaz, 2009; Foucault, 1988) in order to rethink ‘flexible boundaries’, not only from the perspective of the researched but also from our point of view and our use of theories. Linking flexibility with the notion of boundary on the one hand facilitated research but, on the other hand, the more static depictions of reality that it produces might gloss over the complexity, the fluidity, the negotiations and the contestations in the processes of identification, in contemporary societies. Therefore, in our research, the movement back and forth between the two theoretical frames served to destabilise, so to speak, the somehow more rigid conceptualisations of boundary that researchers tend, especially, to attribute to, or themselves use from, Bernstein’s theory.
The research gains lie in the emphasis such an approach gives to the idea that any heuristic device developed in research – here the typology of identity – not only describes and illuminates what it speaks about, but also actively ‘engages with, becomes entangled in, and shapes the formation of the “real” world’ (Singh et al., 2014: 834). That is to say, such analytical devices do not only describe but also perform social realities. Moreover, in the current political context of the supposedly unlimited possibilities of LLL, engaging with the philosophical and epistemological analyses of the assumptions carried by flexibility, boundaries and limits, becomes a necessity. The expansion of flexible boundaries as a principle of knowledge organisation and therefore the multiplication of the pedagogic spaces raises questions about how people navigate the instability and constant change of boundaries. The idea of ‘flexible boundaries’ expands the field of inquiry, to include new categories such as overqualified but unemployed young people, obliging researchers to renew their problematics and their analytical devices to the study of educational inequalities. In this sense, our approach challenges the more consolidated, sociological interpretations of education policies, here of ‘choice’, showing that by ignoring the governmental and pedagogic dimensions of such policies they effectively narrow and close down the field of research. Therefore, our approach encourages researchers to adopt ‘open-ended forms of inquiry’, avoiding reductionist approaches and pessimistic understandings of current changes in the field of education (De Queiroz, 2011; Singh, 2015). We have argued that such resources can be particularly profitable for scientific inquiry, and can help to enhance our reflexivity about how ‘theory is done today and how the fields and contexts in which theory is done might shape or constrain it’ (Cooper, 2009: 14); as well as strengthening the sense that research has to be both systematic and open.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has been supported by the University of the Peloponnese [Grant number 0168-00].