Young people pursuing futures: making identity labors curricular

ABSTRACT

Young people’s processes of forming identities, linked to the work of anticipating futures, involve significant labors of thought, feeling, ethics and imagination. These labors proceed across both life-worlds and school-worlds, often in tension, especially for those from marginalized positions in social-structural power relations. This paper explores such identity labors, drawing on rich ethnographic data from research, during 2013–2014, that engaged students in Years 9 and 10, from working-class, immigrant and refugee backgrounds, who attended an inner-suburban school in Melbourne, Australia. We investigate two student groupings: (a) selected by the school for “accelerated” curriculum paths; and (b) the “others” we label written off by the school in terms of academic potential (a division we diagnose as driven by policy measures of institutional “performance”). In different ways among students in each grouping, we find their identity labors to reflect historical conditions for what Berlant calls “cruel optimism” about futures. Yet their identity dynamics also draw on rich funds of knowledge from their life-worlds that our research shows to offer resources – funds of identity – for more viable future imaginaries. We argue for curriculum and pedagogy that supports young people in their identity labors to live from their present into emergent, new-generational futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This project, funded by the Australian Research Council (DP120101492) 2012–2016, included Research team members Lew Zipin, Marie Brennan, Sam Sellar, Trevor Gale and Iris Dumenden.

2. As our data suggests, the prefix “dark” is not pejorative in connotation. It does not signify a negativity, or deficit, in either “dark FK” or those who embody it. Rather, it signifies rich knowing about lived conditions associated with social-structurally “dark” injustices of poverty, racism, sexism and more. Zipin (2009) noted that young people’s FK about “dark-side” life conditions was turning up in his and colleagues’ research, yet was absent in most literature about FK praxis that seemed to build curriculum units only around “light-side” FK (nor does “light” here signify less substantive or less worthy knowledge).

3. We put “race” in scare-marks to indicate our political caution to signify a constructed, not natural, sense of this term.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP120101492].