Abstract

This article was made to find out the life trajectories of high school students in contexts of socioeconomic poverty. It is a qualitative and biographical approach, carried out between 2015 and 2016, in nine high school in the province of Bío Bío, Chile. From a biographical approach, it was possible to access the educational trajectories of 180 secondary school youth through the life stories of the participants. The main findings show three types of trajectory: defined, diffuse, and undefined according to the establishment of goals and life projections identified by the student body. These trajectories are differentiated according to expectations of personal, work and / or academic achievement, beliefs and affective attunement linked to beliefs. The main findings reveal diversified trajectories according to reflective processing around the process of construction of projects. Characteristic of this generation would be the feeling of pragmatism; they see in a practical and experiential way if their optimistic expectations are correlated with their life experiences. There is, then, a mismatch between these high expectations, which they find difficult to specify, due to the unequal access to social opportunities, so that the way to resolve the complexity in their trajectories, would account for diverse reflections that collide with life experiences linked to structural handicaps.

Key words: high school student; poverty; exclusion; educational trajectory; biographical approach.