Project Details
Projekt
Exclusive Educational Careers of Young People and the Role of Peer Cultures
Applicant
Professor Dr. Heinz-Hermann Krüger
Subject Area
Education Systems and Educational Institutions
Term
from 2011 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 184751107
This qualitative longitudinal study looks at educational careers of young people over a period of six years. It examines the role peer cultures play in their biography. We are interested in educational biographies and interpretative frameworks of excellence of pupils from four secondary schools with different claims to exclusiveness and one secondary school with an alternative concept. Starting with 16-year-olds, young people are accompanied from grade ten until they have finished the first two years at university or on a job. We thus study the relevance of peer cultures outside the classroom and school as well as after graduating from school for the pupils professional careers. The project ties in with the hypothesis of a verticalisation and differentiation of secondary school education. The focus of analysis though lies on educational careers as well as mechanisms of distinction and the construction of coherence in circles of friends. Social reconstructive and praxeological perspectives are the central theoretical points of reference. Methodologically we rely on qualitative interviews with the heads of the schools, the pupils and group discussions with the latter and their friends. At the core of second funding phase is the analysis of the second expert interviews with the schools head teachers as well as primarily the analysis and conduction of the longitudinal interviews and group discussions with young people and their peers in the second and third research phase. It will thus allow insights into the institutional codes and the mechanisms of school choice at exclusive secondary schools, as well as the biographical strategies and the early career paths of possible future functional elites of society and the role of peer cultures within these.
DFG Programme
Research Units
