Understanding Life Trajectories: Ideas, Advantages, and Insights
The workshop was aimed at creation of a ground for interdisciplinary communication among specialists studying life trajectories in the field of education. Another task was to discuss methodological tools of the longitudinal research of life trajectories of students and graduates of Russian secondary and higher schools.
The idea of the workshop belonged to Dmitry Kurakin, the leader of the longitudinal research of life trajectories organized by the Institute of Education, the leader of the cultural sociology research group in the Center for Cultural Sociology in the Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities in honour of A.V. Poletaev (HSE). The key problem that outlined a spectrum of questions for the workshop was a disproportion of the amount of collected data and theoretical resources for its analysis and interpretation that usually characterizes longitudinal studies. That’s why the agenda of the workshop was formulated as a search for productive theoretical ideas and approaches from cultural sociology and cultural psychology that can effectively be used for data analysis.
The workshop was an open event. Among the lecturers were Katrin Kullasepp(PhD),Associated professor at Tallinn University, Researcher at Tartu University (Estonia), Anna Lund (PhD), Co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (Linnaeus University), co-coordinator for the Swedish network promoting research within the sector for art and culture and Faculty fellow at Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (Sweden), Tania Zittoun (PhD),Professor at the Institute of Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Humanities, Neuchatel University (Switzerland).
The first reporter was Katrin Kullasepp.Her presentation was dedicated to professional identity construction of psychology students. One of the key theoretical ideas used by Katrin Kullasepp is the dialogical self model. According to that model a person’s self consists of different I positions. Each new I position is a potential source for new life trajectories. From this point of view professional becoming can be considered as a process of appearing of I position “I as a psychologist” and its adaptation to “I as myself” position. Depending on different kinds of relationship between these I positions Katrin Kullasepp marked out several types of professional identity becoming. She used different methods including interview, open-ended questionnaire, essays and some other tools. Longitudinal design afforded to see the dynamics of professional becoming.
The second report belonged to Anna Lund who worked on the project on school achievement and multicultural incorporation in Sweden. Key idea of her report was identity as potentiality. An illustration of this idea was a story of Aisha, a palestinian girl born in Sweden to whom happened so called “cultural disruption” that radically changed her negative beliefs about herself supported by society (negative perception of immigrants, muslims as people who can’t study well or make a good career). Anna Lund and her colleagues on the basis of Aisha’s story marked out several aspects of an enacting symbolic structure for school achievement: learning expectations, teacher concern, didactic cooperation, competence and responsibility, individual recognition, deliberative spirit, and circuit of friends.
The report of Tania Zittoun was dedicated to the role of symbolic resources in the construction of life course. She started with a short overview of sociocultural psychological approach to life course research. Key questions that she is interested in are: how people interpret and make meaning of their life trajectories and what symbolic resources they use in the process? Symbolic resources (language, literature and other cultural symbols) are considered as mediators between people and environment. With the help of symbolic resources people make meaning of their lives and exchange experience with other people. Another important concept is sphere of experience. It refers to an individual’s perception of situations and social frames. Theoretical framework offered by Tania Zittoun is aimed at interpretation of transitions which every individual faces during his or her life course. These are so called bifurcations points in which important changes happen. One of the main questions formulated by Tania Zittoun concerns symbolic resources used by an individual for facilitation of the transition process and adaptation to new roles or new spheres of experience.
As an example of her ideas Tania Zittoun gave a story about Mark, a young dyslexic boy, whose study experience was negative. But when his new French teacher organized learning process in such a way that Mark managed to succeed, his perception changed. He started noticing that situations described in a recommended novel were to a large extent alike his own life situations. That’s how the novel became a symbolic resource that Mark could use in some spheres of experience.
During the workshop a productive ground for discussions and exchange of ideas between the specialists studying life trajectories from different disciplines was created. Important theoretical ideas and methodological problems were discussed. Discussions provoked insights that could be very productive for further development of the longitudinal research being made by HSE scholars.