Promoting vocational education-related standards of behaviour in classroom teaching in pre-vocational training measures (FöABv)
Final Report Abstract
Given the emphasis on social competencies in the context of dual vocational training, pedagogical institutions currently focus students’ behaviour on the transition from school to work. Societal expectations of the behaviours considered necessary for successful training are realised by teaching vocational preparation courses in a specific pedagogical order, which the study illuminates via an ethnographical research strategy. Teachers and other professional staff at vocational schools and educational training providers were interviewed, and participatory observations were conducted in the classroom. The aim was to determine to what extent and how pedagogical influence is exerted on the behaviour of young people and which normative objectives regarding expected behaviour become effective in the process. An obvious contradiction in the interviews between critically distanced positions on the institutional principle of normalisation and distinctly normalising constructions of adolescent behaviour points to a fundamental antinomy in the teaching of vocational preparation. The intended integration into apprenticeships favours a deficit-oriented view of youth behaviour, in the course of which the discursive practice of a lack of apprenticeship entry maturity is reproduced. This construction of adolescent behaviour corresponds to a comprehensive treatment of behaviour in the classroom. The study differentiates the processing of adolescent behaviour into five core dimensions, each of which is produced by related practices and recurs to adolescent behaviour in a specific logic. While ‘synchronising biographisation’ addresses life planning and calls for adaptation to the institutional normal life course, the ‘micro-politics of time’ focuses on the management of everyday time and aims at the internalisation of a time regime attributed to the world of work. The ‘dehabituation from behaviours of youth culture’ calls for performatively making the transition to adult status through the renunciation of youthful behaviour. By contrast, the ‘training of work virtues’ aims at comprehensively optimised youth performance through the acquisition of didactically largely pre-structured behavioural standards. The ‘modelling of the working body’, which takes place in workshops in particular, is intended to promote the transformation of the adolescent student body into the adult working body and to ensure targeted preparation for physically intensive work in vocational training. The study shows that pre-vocational instruction aims to change diverse areas of behaviour and fundamentally transform the way young people relate to themselves and the world by teaching them how to perceive the world no longer through the eyes of adolescents but from the perspective of (future) trainees and apprentices and to move in it accordingly. From this perspective, a specific adolescent form of subjectivation emerges in the classroom, which can be described as ‘ausbildungsreifes Selbst’ (i.e. ‘self-ready for training’). The institutionally anticipated and imagined behavioural expectations of potential training companies, to which the young person’s self-presentation is to adapt and submit as comprehensively as possible, are an orientation in this regard.
Publications
- (2019): Der professionelle Blick auf jugendliches Verhalten in berufsvorbereitenden Bildungsgängen zwischen pädagogischen Programmatiken und institutionellen Erwartungen. In: Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Heilpädagogik und ihre Nachbargebiete (VHN). 88. Jg./H.3, S. 224-236
Handelmann, Antje/Schütte, Dominik/Thielen, Marc
(See online at https://doi.org/10.2378/vhn2019.art31d) - (2019): Die Förderung ausbildungsrelevanten Verhaltens in der Berufsvorbereitung im Zuge des unterrichtlichen Entwöhnens von jugendkulturellen Verhaltensweisen. In: Ellinger, Stephan/Schott-Leser, Hannah (Hrsg.): Rekonstruktionen sonderpädagogischer Praxis. Eine Fallsammlung für die Lehrerbildung. Opladen u.a.: Barbara Budrich, S. 145-164
Handelmann, Antje/Schütte, Dominik/Thielen, Marc
- (2021): Die unterrichtliche Verschulung von Arbeitstugenden. Rekonstruktion eines didaktischen Formats zur Förderung ausbildungsrelevanten Verhaltens in der Berufsvorbereitung. In: Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Heilpädagogik und ihre Nachbargebiete (VHN). 90. Jg./H. 1, S. 11-23
Handelmann, Antje/Thielen, Marc
(See online at https://doi.org/10.2378/vhn2020.art31d) - (2021): Sozialpädagogische Programmatiken und Klientelkonstruktionen in Bildungsgängen der Berufsvorbereitung im Spannungsfeld von Subjektorientierung und Normalisierung. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialpädagogik. 19. Jg./ H. 1, S. 66-82
Siegert, Karolina/Thielen, Marc
