From marginalization towards togetherness – skills needed in decreasing school dropout
Keywords:
school drop out, participation, vocational education, counselling, social learning environmentAbstract
Refereed article
This article examines dropping out of school in terms of previous research of the social learning environment and operative school culture. The aim of this study is to explore research-based knowledge of vocational education to develop every day operations and cultures of school communities. In the case of school societies and school communities, we investigate what kind of skills the professionals should master and take into account in order to decrease discontinuation of the students ́ learning paths in vocational education. The phenomenon of dropping out of school should not be connected only to students. In parallel, the article provides an alternative approach, i.e., how do school communities cause students to drop out of school? This is what provides us a critical stance to discuss the concept of dropping out of school. In this article, we emphasise the studies that focus on reducing dropping out in their theoretical framework. We introduce herein the first research results from our school drop-out studies. Based on the previous studies, we then produce a research-based model that can be applied to the development work of vocational education. The model will help structure developmental plans that will increase awareness of the multidimensionality of the results and interventions of the previous studies to all stakeholders including students and their parents.
