From the Analysis of Pedagogical Discourse to a Reflection on the Integration of Knowledge about Youth

This paper offers a reflection on educational discourse with particular focus on pedagogical discourse about youth. It begins with terminological and methodological assertions. Making a distinction between the discourse of educational practice and pedagogical discourse, I attempted to identify some types of discourse about youth which have become prominent in pedagogical research. To grasp the characteristics of the discourse I referred to quite a wide selection of pedagogical texts which provide data about the ways of problematisation of the theme of youth. They included monographs devoted to youth, research reports and articles from pedagogical periodicals, published in the last decade. My research tools in the qualitative analysis of the texts were two basic analytical categories: ideological dominants (the concept of youth, dominant values attributed to young age and youth) and interrogative dominants (fundamental practices of formulating questions about youth, problematisation, and typical conceptual categories). The typology of discourses about youth derived from empirical studies was used to construct a theoretical model of the analysis of integration of knowledge about youth. The concluding section poses several questions pointing at some potentially interesting areas for future research into heterogeneous sources of knowledge about youth.