190078 SE M7.1 Bildung, Biographie und Lebensalter (2023S)

Recent social and economic transformations across western societies have fundamentally altered the conditions under which young people are growing up today. Particularly the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and the concurrent growth of service-sector employment intimately tied successful entry into the labor market to ever increasing levels of formal education. Longer periods of schooling, in turn, also indicate a prolonged reliance on family and non-family resources and supports in order to successfully navigate extended and more ambiguous transitions into the labor market. Particularly for young people from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, relationships with non-family adults and mentors can be critical in shaping their school-to-work transitions because they can provide access to resources such as knowledge about higher education, career advice or information about academic supports that may not be readily available through their family networks. Drawing on reflexive life-course interviews with former participants of an intensive youth mentoring program in St. Louis (USA), this course explores the program’s long-term impact on the respondents’ subsequent lives.

While students in this course will examine the changing landscape of the transition to adulthood through course readings, this will primarily serve as background for an in-depth engagement with the empirical material provided by the instructor at the beginning of the course. The goal of this course is for students to (I) gain a nuanced understanding of education and disadvantage in the context of recent societal transformations and (II) the analytic ability to interpret the actual experience of young people in order to generate practice and program implications (so what?) for youth programs in St. Louis and beyond.