We take a life course approach to progress at school and at work. This means that we pay attention to how education, learning, and mobility are cumulative processes that unfold over time.
Pathways is a metaphor to convey this idea.
Days in school and at work are like steps in a journey that is always partly over and partly ahead. Seeing the journey through requires recognition of past, present, and possible futures all at once.
Most of our work addresses middle stages of the life course:
We pay attention to the specific order in which education, learning, and work experiences unfold. Much of what we do entails observing and modeling sequences with scaled and qualitative data.
Yet observing steps in a process only takes us so far.
People rarely make purely mechanical decisions on their journeys through school and work. Signals of belonging, and feelings such as passion, fear, and optimism influence how pathways unfold. This is why we spend a lot of time listening to people, and why our inquiries are sensitive to emotion, motivation, and identity.
And of course, people can only take paths are truly available to them. Our work attends to how schools, workplaces, and the structures that link them create conditions that enable or inhibit progress.
We’ve designed this site to share what we have learned so far. Click around to see where we’ve come, and be in touch if you’d like to join the conversation.