Youth under observation. The institutional processing of developmental diagnostics and support in school-based career orientation

• Applicants: Dr. Stephan Dahmen; Professor Dr. Marc Thielen
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505852785

The project investigates how the instrument of potential analysis, increasingly used in vocational orientation and counselling of young people from grade 7 or 8, is implemented in practice in schools and linked to classroom activities and extracurricular arrangements. The project examines different variants of vocational competence assessment in two German states to find out in which institutional contexts, which procedures are carried out by which specialists, how individual competence profiles of young people are generated, translated into pedagogical issues and mobilized as an occasion for processes of learning, education and counseling. The project aims at the reconstruction of the institutional practice of specific cultures of (self-)observation in early adolescence and its impact on learning cultures. In the light of the political aspiration to use the results of the potential analysis in further support of vocational orientation, the project looks at school-based activities for vocational orientation and asks to what extent and how the development potentials and goals documented in the competence profiles are taken up and referred to by teachers and specialists and how the young people are addressed pedagogically. The project contrasts the school-internal variant of competence assessment practiced in Lower Saxony, which is carried out by teachers, with the cooperative model in North Rhine-Westphalia, in which external providers are responsible for the analysis of potentials. The project provides a contrasting view on the differences in the institutional, spatial framework of the diagnostic practices and the different ways of integrating the procedures into the programs of career orientation in individual schools. The project uses an ethnographic research approach combining participant observation in different institutional settings, qualitative interviews with teachers and professionals, and document analysis of testing procedures and instructional materials. The sampling includes different types of secondary schools in both federal states in order to take into account a broad spectrum of vocational guidance programs, aimed at students with heterogeneous school backgrounds. The project thus makes a fundamental contribution to the question of the transformation of educational institutions in the light of the increased focus of educational policy on vocational orientation in the last ten years and the implementation of new diagnostic and support procedures that accentuate young people's competencies beyond school standards.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants