What influences young people’s aspirations?
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What influences young people’s aspirations?
Professor Louise Archer, Professor of Sociology of Education at University College London, led the ASPIRES project to investigate the influences on young people’s science aspirations. She coined the term ‘science capital’ to help explain their involvement, or lack thereof, in science. Here, she discusses the role of capital in determining young people’s STEM and SHAPE aspirations.
What is science capital?
Science capital refers to all the science-related interests, engagement and resources that a person has. This includes what you know and how you think about science (your attitudes, understanding and interest), what science-related things you do in your spare time (such as reading science-related books, watching science-related TV programmes, using science kits, visiting science centres, etc.) and your science-related social contacts (the people you know, such as friends, family and teachers, who talk with you about science or who have science-related jobs).
Science capital is accumulated throughout life through a range of experiences, including at home, at school and in out-of-school settings. Crucially, the value of someone’s science capital is not fixed, but is shaped by the context they are in.
How did ASPIRES study young people’s aspirations?
Between 2009 and 2021, ASPIRES tracked a single cohort of young people from the age of 10 to 22 to understand the factors shaping their life trajectories. The project studied the educational and employment aspirations, choices, experiences and outcomes of thousands of young people in England, and how these experiences and pathways are shaped by gender, race/ethnicity and social class.
We started by inviting families of children in Year 6 (age 10/11) from primary schools across England to participate, generating a demographically and regionally representative sample. In addition to children answering surveys in school, we also interviewed a subset of children and their parents/carers. These surveys and interviews were repeated every couple of years as the cohort moved through secondary school and then into further education or employment.
The surveys and interviews asked a range of questions to help us understand more about the young people’s lives. We wanted to know what choices they were making at each life stage and what factors were influencing these choices. We asked about things such as their experiences, hopes and aspirations, their identities, and what they did in their free time. We asked about their opinions of school and, as ASPIRES was originally focused on STEM, about their views on science, maths, engineering and computing.
Throughout the project, we kept interviewing the same young people who we first met when they were 10 years old. Tracking the same cohort for 13 years allowed us to build a rich picture of who these young people are, what matters to them, and the complex ways in which they navigate their educational and career pathways.
What determines a young person’s aspirations?
Through the ASPIRES project, we have discovered that many factors influence a young person’s education and career aspirations and trajectory. The key influences can be summed up as the interaction of identity, capital and field.
© Yolanda Hadjidemetriou
Interviews and surveys revealed that the extent to which a young person felt that their identity ‘fit’ (or didn’t fit) with a particular subject or career option varied over time and by gender, race/ethnicity and social class. This identity strongly shaped whether they pursued, or aspired to pursue, that subject or career.
If a young person has the relevant capital, this will facilitate their identity and trajectory in that subject or career. For example, statistical analysis of our survey data from thousands of young people showed that those with higher levels of science capital were significantly more likely to aspire to continue with science when they were younger and were then significantly more likely to study science at A-level and university. We found that science capital is important for building and sustaining interest in science and developing a science identity, playing a valuable role in supporting young people to feel that science is ‘for them’.
Science capital is just an extension and application of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s wider theory of cultural and social capital. The concept of capital relates to any area and is as important in relation to young people’s SHAPE aspirations and trajectories as it is to STEM aspirations and trajectories.
Capital also refers to the extent to which educational systems and wider societal structures and relations support or hinder young people from accessing a particular subject or career. The third factor, which we refer to as ‘field’, is particularly important in this respect, as our data show that even highly talented and interested young people can be prevented from continuing on their desired trajectory due to barriers put up by educational systems.
Why did you use the arts to present findings from ASPIRES?
I was interested in trying to find new and more creative ways to convey our research findings and was influenced by Roland Barthes’ concepts of studium and punctum. I felt that while we were good at conveying the dry, intellectualised messages (the ‘studium’) through the usual range of reports and academic papers, we were missing a more emotive aspect (the ‘punctum’).
I was delighted to meet Maxi Himpe, an interdisciplinary artist and director who uses co-production techniques to produce verbatim theatre. We discovered that our interests strongly aligned, so we collaborated to produce a play, called Fortuna, to showcase the findings from ASPIRES. The process of creating Fortuna was amazing to watch – Maxi led workshops with young people in East London to devise a performance based on verbatim responses from the 13 years’ worth of ASPIRES interviews. In the play, we follow four main characters through their lives from the age of 10 to 22. These interview answers, reflecting the changing thoughts and aspirations of actual ASPIRES participants, are woven into the characters’ stories.
The final performances were powerful and moving, while also conveying the humour and vitality of young people. It was great to see so many school and college students in the audience, and it was a real privilege to hear how they felt the play had done justice to their experiences, views and voices.
We also represented one participant’s story through an art installation, called The Lost Scientists, to convey issues around injustice and exclusion. When we first interviewed Vanessa, aged 10, she expressed a passion for science and at 13 she aspired to be a forensic scientist. However, her interviews revealed that as she moved through secondary school, she realised that her ‘love for science wasn’t enough’ to motivate her through educational challenges, and by the age of 18 she no longer wanted to pursue science. The art installation was inspired by the Wolfson Rooms at the Royal Society, which, like so many professional society rooms, is filled with marble busts and paintings of scientists who are overwhelmingly old white men from privileged social backgrounds. The installation consists of a bust of Vanessa, a young, working-class Black woman, and empty picture frames, representing the scientists who have been lost due to societal exclusion.
As Fortuna and The Lost Scientists have shown, I think the arts can be incredibly powerful for sharing the emotive aspects of our messages.
Meet Louise
Like many young people, my aspirations were shaped a lot by my family context. As so many of my family worked in education, it was perhaps unsurprising that for a long time I wanted to be a teacher! I’m also aware of how my family capital and privilege played a key part in not only shaping my aspirations, but also providing the possibility of making these aspirations a reality.
I am very proud that ASPIRES has been awarded three impact prizes (from ESRC, the Royal Society and the British Education Research Association). It was fantastic to receive these awards as we are passionately committed to achieving impact through our research. These awards value our extensive work with teachers and educators (both in and out of schools) to co-design resources and approaches to help support practitioners towards social justice pedagogy and practice.
I’m passionate about social justice approaches to education. I’ve always been interested in researching young people’s identities and choices, and the role of educational inequalities in relation to these. I think this is due to the politics that I was exposed to at home and school, my own personal experiences during my late teenage years and early adulthood, and studying sociology at A-level. The latter was really formative for me – it helped me to think differently, and most importantly, critically, about the world. It was an amazing feeling to come out of each sociology lesson seeing the world slightly differently.
I think a key goal of education is to support young people to have agency and voice and to provide the context and resources to enable them to succeed in whatever they want to do in life. In this respect, I see STEM and SHAPE as vehicles that young people can use to achieve their goals, rather than being just destinations in their own right. Teachers play a valuable role in helping to show the breadth and versatility of both STEM and SHAPE, and how they interact and overlap.
Drama and the arts are powerful tools for sharing messages. In addition to using the arts to highlight findings from ASPIRES, I used to be involved with a feminist academic performance group called FAAB. We used satirical performances to channel our frustrations with the academic inequalities that we were experiencing in a creative way, and to provoke discussion of these issues.
About ASPIRES
ASPIRES is a 13-year-long longitudinal research project studying young people’s education and career aspirations. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with additional support from the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.
Find out more and read the ASPIRES reports: www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society/aspires-research
Do you have a question for Louise?
Learn how Stemettes is campaigning for a curriculum containing more diverse role models:
www.futurumcareers.com/striving-for-a-curriculum-of-role-models
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