Ideas of the future and their place in young people's internal conversation

Young people's ideas of the future are important. The connections between young people's aspirations and the educational choices they make are of great interest to educators and education researchers. However, despite the attention paid to the nature of young people's ideas of the future, the connection between young people's ideas of the future and their educational decisions is not well understood. This research explores the nature of young people's ideas of the future in light of the role they play in young people's educational decision-making, developing new ways to describe the work done by young people's ideas of the future in their decision-making, and showing that, for some young people, the nature of the future is very different to that represented in education policy and research. The thesis argues for the need to better understand the place of young people's ideas of the future in their internal conversation, and to develop empirical methods to make the action of these ideas visible. Drawing on work from a range of disciplines, and on data from a series of interviews with young people in the process of choosing GCSE subjects, it develops a methodological approach that recognises language as a generative mechanism at work within the internal conversation, identifying language structures that produce futurity in speech, such as deixis. The thesis proposes a theoretical framework centred on the internal movement of the subject between dispositional, reflexive, and speculative modes of producing ideas of the future, and, in considering how these three modes interact and produce each other, reasserts the capacity of habitus to drive anticipation and speculation. The research suggests that young people adopted multiple different stances towards the future depending on the context in which the future is encountered, and discusses the practical implications of this for educators and researchers.