[en] Based on a multiple case study, the overall aim of our research is to analyse critical factors in transitions to intermediate courses of VET (ISCED3b), from perspective of their specific learning cultures. We explore key processes in these cultures and their connections with broader cultural and social processes, such as ways in which we define today the transition to social adulthood and its relation to work. Roles of teachers, relationship to learning, and construction or readjustment of students' forms of identity are central to recognizing what kinds of issues are at stake in disengagement processes observed. Moreover, from different scales of observation, the analysis of participants' discourses and practices will show us how the construction of the "VET student", or tensions between different interests that historically converge in their scenarios, are embedded in several ways of problematizing difficulties, hindering more effective measures. Our outcomes are based on an etnographic fieldwork carried out for two courses in a public school, in a city near Barcelona. In addition, we include data from a previous field work, which we carried out in the same school and on the same subject. Our cases include students and teaching staff from three vocational courses, two in an industrial specialty and a third in services. The analysis of interviews, observations and other sources, at different levels, is organized in three parts: in the first, we characterize key aspects of learning cultures based on institution standpoint (management and teaching staff), on rationalities with which young people have enrolled on each course, and the confluence of this in a particular way of relating to learning. In the second part, we illustrate the complexity and diversity of intermediate VET through three types of situations that were frequent: the return after dropping out, dropping out within the cycle, and intermittent trajectories. In the third part we address the construction of drop-out problem in our context and its limitations, as well as the processes followed by those who left and those who finished through some examples. From a critical socio-anthropological point of view, specifically focused on the particularities of intermediate VET, we show processes, micro processes and transformations at different scales, connected to broader cultural and social frameworks, which account for the complexity of this courses as liminal devices, where, beyond graduating or not, complex aspects are settled, related to construction of social identities or with some socio-cultural foundations of the device itself, such as the assumptions of temporal linearity in a career, meritocratic distribution of the labor force or the dominant "market-centric" discourse in VET.

[es] Nuestros resultados se basan en un trabajo de campo etnográfico, cuyo núcleo se ha desarrollado durante dos cursos escolares en un centro público de una ciudad de la provincia de Barcelona. Además, se incluyen datos de un trabajo de campo anterior que realizamos en el mismo centro, sobre el mismo tema. Nuestros casos los conforman alumnado y profesorado de tres CFGM, dos de una especialidad industrial y un tercero de servicios. El análisis de entrevistas, observaciones y otras fuentes a distintos niveles se organiza en tres partes: en la primera caracterizamos aspectos clave de las culturas de aprendizaje de los distintos ciclos, a partir de la visión de la institución (dirección y profesorado), las racionalidades con las que los jóvenes han accedido a cada ciclo, y la confluencia de ello en una particular forma de relación con el aprendizaje. En una segunda parte ejemplificamos la complejidad y la diversidad de los CCFGM a través de tres tipos de situaciones que fueron frecuentes: el retorno tras abandonar, el abandono dentro del ciclo y las trayectorias intermitentes. En la tercera parte abordamos la construcción del problema del abandono en nuestro contexto y sus limitaciones, así como los procesos seguidos por los que marcharon y los que finalizaron a través de algunos ejemplos. Desde una mirada crítica socio antropológica, específicamente centrada en las particularidades de los CFGM, mostramos procesos, micro procesos y transformaciones a diferentes escalas, conectados con marcos culturales y sociales más amplios, que dan cuenta de la complejidad de los CFGM, entendidos como dispositivos liminales, donde más allá de graduar o no la etapa se dirimen aspectos complejos, relacionados con la construcción de identidades sociales o con algunos fundamentos socioculturales del propio dispositivo, como los supuestos de linealidad temporal, la distribución meritocrática de la fuerza de trabajo o el discurso "mercadocéntrico" dominante en la formación profesional.