Periodic Reporting for period 5 - INTERESTS (Lost in Transition? Multiple Interests in Contexts of Education, Leisure and Work)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-04-30
“I am going to graduate! But what exactly should I do next?” All adolescents come to face this question in educational transitions. Essential for sustainable choices is consolidating one’s interest, as interest is consistently proven to be a natural motor for student engagement and learning. Yet, choosing a direction in line with one’s interest appears to be difficult, with many adolescents feeling lost, dropping out, switching programmes, or successfully finalizing a program but regretting choices afterwards. The overall aim of the ERC project “Lost in Transition?” was to investigate adolescents’ interests as they emerge naturally in life across all social settings (at school or home, with family, peers or in leisure contexts) and to follow how these interests develop and relate to future perspectives and choices that adolescents and young adults make.
We followed adolescents and young adults intensively over a period of three years, including a group of 158 participants transitioning from late secondary to postsecondary education, and 151 participants transitioning from late postsecondary education to early career. Their existing and emerging interests, social networks, learning ecologies and future perspectives were captured with repeated surveys and biographical interviews. Participants also recorded daily interest experiences and social interactions via a smartphone diary application with multiple reports during the day for 10 full weeks over the years. In addition, we conducted both a large social network study amongst school peers in participating schools and a more in-depth multi-site ethnographic study in which we shadowed four adolescents intensively during school, home and leisure activities.
The project lead to new theory about interest development and choice processes. First, the project allowed to shed light on the many, parallel interests that all participating adolescents have, often in much more divergent and dynamic directions than assumed in monodisciplinary, talent-based and linear perceptions of how adolescents develop. This finding radically challenges the idea that there is a substantial group of students who are unmotivated. Second, we found how a lot of interests emerged and developed in out-of-school settings, with a significant role of support by family and interests spread amongst peers. A third and noteworthy finding is how these more invisible out-of-school interests contributed as much to future aspirations in academic and work settings as do interests that are more known to teachers and parents in school. The multiple, divergent and life-wide interests of adolescents allows to better explain the difficulty of making choices in current educational systems in Western contexts, typically showing fixed and narrow disciplinary structures. The project findings can help to think about a more open and flexible form of education.