”Design my everyday life, my tomorrow, my future, on my own, without anyone helping me”: Future Orientation Among Vocational Education Students in Israel

ABSTRACT

This article offers an interpretive examination of the future orientation of students in vocational schools as part of their vocational habitus. Through in-depth interviews with 30 adolescents (16 boys, 14 girls), the study identified three key future orientations: (1) the vague use of the term ‘success’ in the absence of an accompanying description of specific goals for achieving that success; (2) the future described through ‘hard individualism’––a future replete with many challenging anticipated scenarios: constant struggles to achieve goals, lack of control, and an inability to predict reality, becoming accustomed to failures, and self-reliance; (3) preference for occupational independence or being solo self-employed, partially motivated by a desire to avoid future experiences of subordination, exploitation, and humiliation––factors characterising their current employment. The effects and implications of vocational school students’ structural vulnerabilities and experiences of social exclusion on their future orientations are discussed. Further research of future orientation is critical in its role as a component of vocational habitus to achieve a complex understanding of the educational work in vocational schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Future orientation
• vocational education
• exclusion
• solo self-employed
• vocational habitus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article we use the concept of future orientation which has been theoretically and empirically examined by many researchers. At the same time, many researchers use related concepts such as: aspirations, expectations and imagined future. These concepts often offer a similar definition that refers to the ways and content through which people describe their future. For a description of the fuzziness between these concepts see Frye (2012), 1566.

2. Frye (2012) does not use the concept of future orientation in her research but several concepts such as: aspirations, expectations, and imagined future. Crivello (2015) makes use of the concept of aspirations. At the same time, these concepts, like future orientation, refer to people’s descriptions of their future, so in this article, we refer to their research findings as well.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [1253/17]