School Practices of Students Career Guidance

This paper is devoted to the study of school practices of students’ career guidance, which are carried out in schools to form professional claims. The research focuses on an environment in which claims of professional trajectory appear. The study is based on the analysis qualitative data. The empirical base is represented by semi-formalized interviews with administration and teachers of Russian schools. The interviews cover general and profound schools both from well-off and poor areas. The method of thematic coding and the method of portraits are used in data analysis. The application of the thematic coding method allowed to obtain a thematic structure of the whole data set, containing the variety of practices. Method of portraits is used for grouping schools and identifying the environment in which the students' claims to the choice of a professional trajectory take place. On the one hand, the results of the study show that students’ career guidance in schools varies depending on the characteristics of families, the differentiation of schools and the regional, which complements and deepens the existing knowledge about the existence and reproduction of educational inequality. On the other hand, high variability of practices leads to the fact that there is no clear understanding of what the students’ career guidance should be.