Research topic

The traditional explanations to the decreasing number of applicants to the teacher training programme has to do with decreasing status and stagnated wages. This is complemented with explanations linked to the expanded number of alternative and more attractive educational options. The effect becomes a shifting social recruitment pattern. The traditional applicants to upper secondary schoolteacher programme, that this paper focuses on, origin from academic and economic (upper) middleclass and are slowly abandoning the programme. In the same time the share of students from lower middleclass and working-class are increasing. These drifts create a social heterogenic group of students at the programme. In this paper an attempt to enlarge the understanding of the limitations of the widened recruitment is being made in relation to a social position that are on the relative move downward. This is being made with two genealogical perspectives as starting points: first the educational and vocational genealogy of upper secondary schoolteachers and second from an analysis of the social background (an individual genealogy) of the students. The use of divided habitus and vocational habitus is in the centre of the theoretically framework of the paper.

Methodology

From conducted biographically influenced semi-structured interviews with upper secondary schoolteacher students it is possible to identify the educational and vocational motives and conceptions, a relevant starting point in the attempts to understand how the students manage their academic training. The vocational and educational genealogy is carved out from a broad selection of stories collected from the history of grammar school and upper secondary school.       

Conclusion

Using a genealogical approach, this paper will illustrate and explain the limitations of the social heterogeneity. The distance between the individual and the vocational habitus is a crucial explanatory factor when understanding the individual success or failure at the programme. Both the vocational and individual genealogy is haunting the students like a ghost in the struggle for educational success and can therefore enlarge the understanding of drifting social recruitment to a higher education sector and a vocation under social transformation.