Complementary reading

Youth subjectivities and educational trajectories: tensions and challenges for

secondary educationClaudia Bracchi and María Ines Gabbai
In Kaplan, C Student cultures. Sociology of bonds in the school.

"Studying trajectories makes it possible to reconstruct the process of assigning

"people to social positions as a process related to the time of their lives but at the
same time to a certain perspective of historical time" (Mayer, 1987:51, cited by
Dombois, 1998:449). It also allows to establish the impact of processes, institutions,
social norms and their changes on the structuring of these patterns.. Among the most
important institutions, we can mention: the school, the transition steps between
education and work, and those linked to the world of work, companies, trades and
professions, the formality of employment relations, etc. (Dombois, 1998). (...) we move
away from the positions that place all the responsibility on the individual's educational
and social biography. These same positions understand educational paths as
"successful" or "unsuccessful", terms used in both academic and political discussions
that mark students with "negative" marks, without taking into account the
responsibilities of other mechanisms, agents and institutions and the economic, social
and cultural conditions in which these young people develop.
Therefore, subjects must be placed within the sociocultural contexts that function as a
framework or as conditioning factors (but not as determinants) for the unfolding of
their experiences as well as their subjectivity. According to Kablan (2008b), the
analysis of trajectories requires a dialogue between objective limits and subjective
hopes: the objective limits configure a sense of subjective limits, a sort of anticipated
symbolic calculation of what can or cannot be projected for one's own social career.
Based on this, we argue that traditionally, the schooling of all students was considered
to be homogeneous and linear according to time and school grades, as if it were a
common experience for all. Addto this the fact that, at present and as a result of the
changes that have occurred in the

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In recent years (...) it is necessary to point out that the school experience of students-
is diverse and heterogeneous and acquires its own unique features according to the
different groups of students.
(...) It is the actors themselves who, according to their own resources,
build their school experience and construct themselves as subjects of
their studies. Some achieve this goal, others do not. Some get it in
school, others carry it out in spite of it. In all cases, socialization and
subjectivation are knownran as well as the internalization of models and
the distancing from them (Dubet and Martuccelli, 2000:211).
(...) Why do we choose to call the journeys made by the students "educational" and
not "school"? It might seem to be a semantic distinction, but in reality, when talking
about heterogeneity of experiences or experiences in the plural that students construct
according to their contexts, this difference in terms makes more sense. "School
trajectories" implies thinking about - and above all recognizing - the different paths,
routes and ways of traversing any institution within formal education. With this
conceptualization we would only be thinking of "those who are inside", that is, young
students who only go through their formative processes within the educational system,
leaving out of the analysis other experiences that are also formative and make up their
general social trajectory.. The perspective of "educational trajectories", on the other
hand, makes it possible to consider and recognize all those formative environments
through which students' biographies and paths are constituted (the first job, various
work experiences, political activities and participation, permanence in non-formal
educational institutions, among others). These educational trajectories haveas a
reference to the set of all those conditioning factors (experiences, knowledge, etc.)
that have an impact on subjects' path through institutions.) that have an impact on the
path of the subjects through the institutions.
In order to analyze and try to understand such paths, it is necessary to focus on the
complex mosaic in which the subject is configured as he/she progresses through
school.. Studying it implies referring to the progress, the choices made in the
itineraries undertaken, the setbacks, in some cases the abandons and in others, the
changes of schools made, among several positive situationsbles. (Bracchi and
Gabbai, 2009)

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