"The Efforts of Advancement": Case Reconstructions with Regard to Familial and Education Biographical Dynamics of School Careers "Contrary to Expectations"

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Mirja Silkenbeumer; Professor Dr. Andreas Wernet
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: from 2010 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 190045770

This research project focuses on the issue of the course and the immanent dynamics of academic attainment contrary to expectations. We assume a great importance of the inherent logic of family interaction. The aim of the project is to investigate empirically by means of case reconstructions which family constellations facilitate educational careers. We do not reconstruct this logic of career as a punctual, rational choice but as a continuous process of the formation of an educational self in the sense of the development of an educational biographical identity. The knowledge gain by the continuation project applied for lies especially in enabling us to analyze success of advancement, failure of advancement and abandonment of advancement in a case reconstructive and case contrasting manner.While the actual project has analyzed the transition situation during the change from general or middle school (comparable to secondary modern or junior high school) to grammar school ("Gymnasium", comparable to senior high school) at grade 10 and 11, we want to focus in this continuation project on the investigated students' further course of development over two years. Thus, we are able to analyze the entire cycle of advancement in a longitudinal study - from the admittance to the grammar school and the coping with the change, the situating at the new school to the future oriented perspective on studying at a university resp. entering employment.Our actual case reconstructions have shown a differentiated tableau of very different familial constellations and self-designs. The advancement orientations reconstructed by us conglomerate in the interaction of social and familial dynamics in subjectively very different ways. The attempt to conceptualize this variety has led us to three types of subjective self-positioning in the school area of action: the disintegrated-instrumental educational self, the relaxed-pragmatic educational self and the educational self that utilizes school for gaining autonomy and familial detachment. This typology is one of the key empirical and theoretical results of our project. The further development of this typology aims at ideal-typical specifications as well as at real-typical differentiations.From the continuation of our research project, we expect especially an empirical consolidation and a material saturation of the so far rather heuristic typology of the educational self and an in-depth analysis of looming patterns of educational advancement, of multi-generational familial structures of demand and of subjective processes of mastering.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants