Abstract

The article aims to reflect — also through some ethnographic examples — on the experience of adolescence in the light of a category, that of social class, rarely used explicitly in pedagogical research. In some contexts, being working-class adolescents has a decisive influence on the relationship with the school, as well with the urban environment and the imaginations of self for adolescents, while it tends to be removed by the actors of educational processes. The interpretative axis of social class helps to reincarnate the theoretical construct of adolescence in the variety of material experiences that subjects have of being adolescents, favoring a clearer vision of the effects that inequalities have on life transitions and suggesting new directions of educational intervention.