Talk about Careers in Science

Non scholae sed vitae discimus, we learn for life rather than for school. In this Roman saying, the ultimate reason for school is recognized as being a preparation for life. High school science, too, is a preparation for life, the possible careers students identify, and for defining possible future Selves. In this book, the contributors take one dataset as their object of scholarship informed by discursive psychology, Bakhtin, and poststructural positions to investigate the particulars of the language used in interviews about possible careers conducted both before and after an internship in a university science laboratory. Across this collection, some contributors focus on data driven analyses in which the authors present more macro-perspectives on the use of language in science career talk, whereas others see the data using particular lenses that provide intelligible and fruitful perspectives on what and how students and interviewer talk careers in science. Other contributors propose to transform the database into different representations that allows researchers to single out and demonstrate particular dimensions of discourse. Thus, these contributions roughly fall into three categories that are treated under the sections entitled “Discourse Analyses of Career Talk,” “Discursive Lenses and Foci,” and “Innovations in Theory, Method, and Representation of Career Talk Research.”