ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on the issue addressed in the previous chapter, i.e. to approach adult education as a site for the normalisation of citizens. Here, we particularly focus on occupational trajectories among youth recreational leader students and the ways in which they are shaped as role models. More specifically, we ask the following questions: how do youth recreational leader students talk about themselves, their studies and occupational trajectories? How is the youth recreational leader positioned as role model through such ways of speaking? In order to answer such questions, we draw on interviews with students enrolled in an educational programme for youth recreational leaders in FHS. Through a discursive analysis focusing on identifying regularities of descriptions, we demonstrate how a discourse on the role model emerges and operates. Through students’ statements, their own ‘beings’ are shaped as being located outside the mainstream – such as those with experience of being a criminal, someone with psychological problems or an immigrant – this ‘being’ on the outside is positioned as a resource, in order to engage in different forms of ‘doings’, such as dance, parkour, music, scouting and acting as a hockey referee. These ‘doings’, as they are talked about, becomes a path towards normality. Together, the ontological ‘beings’ and epistemological ‘doings’ thus make possible students’ becoming in terms of choice of career. More precisely, the becoming of a recreational leader in the future takes the form of a role model. Experiences of exclusion are thus here mobilised as resources in the normalisation of students.
