"becoming professionals"

exploring young people's construction of alternative futures

Elsa de Mattos

Antonio Marcos Chaves

pp. 131-155

in: Giuseppina Marsico, Marilena Ristum, Souza de Souza Bastos (eds), Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the process of the construction of alternative futures among disadvantaged youths. We draw from two conceptual analytical frameworks of cultural psychology and dialogical self theory, to explore and discuss transformations that occur during a critical developmental period when youth start to participate in the world of work and begin to actively imagine what they are going to become in the future. In this chapter, we advance the idea that the construction of alternative future perspectives emerges through semiotic processes conceptualized as cycles of production of innovation (Valsiner 2006) in the self-system. In the case of disadvantaged youths, we argue that these cycles may produce a new sense of "becoming professional." We present a longitudinal study of three cases of young people who participated in a social project in Salvador, Bahia, to illustrate this process. Data was collected through two rounds of in-depth interviews at ages 18 (first round) and 21 (second round) years. Analysis followed a mapping of positions and counterpositions, as well as emerging tensions and their resolution over time and in different spheres of life (i.e. work and family life). The idea is to show how negotiations of new identities evolve, through a mechanism of integration and differentiation of meanings in the self-system, in which new flexible meanings are created that allow for the emergence of alternative life trajectories.