Turning to character: teachers’ narratives of youth futurity and educational responsibility

ABSTRACT In this article, I connect two topics that are relevant to debates in educational studies today: an understanding of how educational discourses and practices convey and produce a definite kind of future, and the debate on what has been defined as the ‘turn to character’. I do so by means of interviews with secondary school teachers in Sardinia (Italy), discussing how participants conveyed a discourse characterized by an individualized view of their students’ futures (residing mainly within their character) and a narrowly ‘institutionalized’ view of the responsibility of the school in helping them to shape it. Both discourses allowed teachers to avoid taking on more of a direct, personal, and caring sense of responsibility regarding their students’ futures. I argue that, in order to reinforce the role of education in empowering students’ capacity to aspire, a stronger anticipatory responsibility must be activated.