Private and public experience captured: young women capture their everyday lives and dreams through photo-narratives

Abstract

Recent studies about young people suggest a need to change the way researchers and policy-makers have traditionally understood the concepts of youth, transitions to adulthood, educational participation and the need for young people's voice to be heard. For many young women the taken-for-granted features of everyday life such as family, social, education and paid work are the priorities in their lives. Yet those priorities are frequently masked in large-scale studies, resulting in homogenising the diversity of young people's experiences and abstracting educational engagement from other parts of their lives. The study reported in this paper approaches the issue of young women's construction and defining of their identities in interaction with the broad institutional milieu that is part of their everyday experiences. This approach seeks to understand this lived experience through the use of photo-narratives. The paper explores a rationale for this approach in methodological and ethical terms. It allows for an exploration of the complexity of young women's multiple identities and the changing nature of young people's engagement with post-compulsory senior secondary education.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go to the young women who were collaborators in the study; to the two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments and helpful suggestions on the manuscript; and to Professor Marie and Professor Alison Mackinnon for their continued support.

Notes

[1] The South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) is a certificate awarded to students in South Australia who have satisfactorily completed the post-compulsory stage of their secondary education.

[2] The response of the previous Australian Government to the globalised workforce was to introduce a new industrial relations regime, and a range of significant welfare reforms, largely identified as the ‘welfare to work’ package. The package brought in significant changes for those needing income support. Sole-parent families have been particularly targeted with reduced income support payments and harsh penalties if they do not meet activity requirements (ACOSS 2005). Many young women in the research cohort for this project will know of, or be experiencing, life as a sole parent. Education as a pathway to support their future well-being will be an even greater resource for them.