• Goals of the project – "Questions"

A number of educational approaches to the acquisition of language and other new knowledge systems have underscored the relevance of cultural conventions and subjective sense of self. The question of how young children and adolescents perceive and position themselves vis-à-vis others in the classroom (peers and instructors) is of utmost relevance for the success or failure of how information in the educational setting is perceived and processed. The demarcation of a particular group identity, but similarly the position taken vis-à-vis the adult world, surely influence the interaction processes within which the emergence of new knowledge can be facilitated in an optimal way. However, the study of the cultural conventions and subjective senses of selves, and how they jointly impact the educational setting, is by no means a straightforward enterprise. Differences in cultural conventions are manifold, and subjective senses of self change rapidly in the process of growing up, particularly transiting from childhood to adolescence. In addition, investigations of how identity formation processes in children and adolescents take place cannot be confined to the educational setting. Rather, they have to include peer group interactions as well as family and other institutional settings.

The proposed project is an investigation of children’s and young adolescents’ subjective sense-making processes. It attempts to explore in depth how 10- to 15-year old young males in three different nation states form their identities as ‘young men’. The basic assumption from which this project starts out is the thesis that conversation participants draw up positions in their talk with others, and that these positions are windows to how the participants "want to be understood", i.e., they open up insights into the identity formation processes ‘under construction’.

While it is commonly acknowledged that childhood and adolescence, as well as masculinity, are cultural constructs, most developmental theorizing and most of the parental as well as pedagogic advice-giving literature are influenced, in one or another way, by universalizing concepts of what it means to be a child and adolescent, and by generalizing principles of how boys turn into men. The proposed project intends to bring a methodological perspective to the business of growing up that (a) credits cultural differences between childhood, adolescence, and different forms of masculinity, and (b) attempts to explore how young males make sense of themselves within their specific cultures as children and as adolescents in their own ways. "Making sense of oneself" here is understood as portraying one’s self in terms of a position vis-à-vis others (and ‘self’ as the becoming of a reflexive subject). Since this is done primarily in discursive acts, the proposed project targets these kinds of practices along a limited range of different discourse settings and a limited variety of discourse topics. Thus, although youths do not position themselves purely in terms of gender and age (but also in terms of race, ethnicity, or socio-economic class), this study nevertheless attempts to center on what is typical in the manifold identity projects of 10-year-olds versus 12- and 15-year-olds as males in the three different nation states (1).

A second goal of this project is to explore the variety and potential contradictoriness in the ways the positions are fashioned within the different discourse settings and across the different discourse topics. Thus, while the study projects a gradual global transformation from the cultural construction of self as ‘innocent child’ to the construction of self as ‘more reflective and responsible adolescent’, it also intends to explore more fully the local open-endedness of these constructs, their contradictions and their fragility, particularly with regard to other possible positions that can be identified as ‘male’ alignments.

Of particular interest will be the exploration of cultural/national variations of the male child and the young male adolescent, and the passages between them. As such, the project explores the following three problem areas:

• Changes from childhood into adolescence (how new discursive positions are formed along a possible transition from ‘innocence’ to ‘responsibility’ – in different nation states, different discourse settings, and across different discourse topics)
• Formation of masculinity (changes in ‘male’ positions across the three ages – alongside with an exploration of the fragility and increasing contradictions between different ‘masculine’ positions – again tied to particular nation states, discourse settings, and discourse topics)
• Methodological issues (identity constructs as from the perspective of the producer – through analyzing discourse positions by discourse analytic means; enabling insights into the local processes of how identities are interactively fashioned – for purposes – by use of discursive means).