Abstract
This study aims to analyze the role of a Finnish guidance center in developing agency among young people who are both outside the education system and unemployed. The main focus of the research is to examine the ways young people construct themselves as agents in their personal career stories, using a narrative approach and positioning analysis. The context of this study is a local youth guidance and support project in Eastern Finland, the Guidance Center, and its group-based vocational training program, Open Vocational College. The data consist of 17 initial interviews and 12 follow-up interviews of young people who participated in the project. The study points out that the participants were able to position themselves as agentive in relation to their peers and counselors in the Guidance Center. Agency was often narrated as co-action with others. The young people constructed their career paths through individualistic discourses and primarily in relation to the “dominant institutional model” of youth as a linear transition to adulthood. However, the interactions at the guidance center also offered counter-narratives to these dominant models.
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- 1.
The Youth Support project has also been studied by Määttä and Saastamoinen (unpublished).
- 2.
Finland has 30 one-stop guidance centers which are being developed as ESF-funded projects. In the national concept the emphasis is on individual support measures and they do not provide any group-based vocational training, which has been developed further within vocational institutes.
- 3.
A young person enrolled at the GC would be assigned a personal guidance counselor who would be his or her primary contact person.
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Mäkinen, S., Vanhalakka-Ruoho, M. (2018). Guidance Center as Sites for Construction of Agency Among Young People on the Educational Margins. In: Cohen-Scali, V., Rossier, J., Nota, L. (eds) New perspectives on career counseling and guidance in Europe . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61476-2_11
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