6 - Forming Learning Identities through Narrative

Summary

Chapter 6 uses young people’s educational experiences and choices over time to explore how they learn to understand themselves as learners. Over the duration of the project the young people changed in both expected and unexpected ways. Some young people were able to construct narratives about their changing learner identities, and the tropes they used within this story-telling process revealed: first, a process of reflexivity, and second, the construction of their own agency. Making use of cultural resources is one way that young people can create plausible futures for themselves. Three of the four cases presented in this chapter show how informal youth-centred digital culture and global popular culture can be central to the processes by which young people construct stories about their possible future trajectories. The Chapter concludes by reflecting on how paying attention to narratives produced by young people about themselves and their “horizons” over time can help us to understand how change is conceptualized in terms of possible, implausible, and impossible futures. Seeing the immediate, the local, the national, and the global as cosmopolitan arenas for action is central to how these young people use narrative to create agency for themselves.