Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions

Chapter 10: Narrative Understandings of Lives in (and out of) Schools

chapter 10 198 Great variations are also found in the explanations for early school leaving, depending on the political, sociological, or philosophical framework chosen. Current understandings are shaped by the assumptions that it is advantageous for adolescents to be in school rather than out of school, that any education is superior to no education, and that there are explicit social and personal costs to early school leaving. In the mid-1980s, there continued to be a philosophical shift in the understanding of early school leavers, which brought with it recognition that early school leaving comes from a process of disengagement, where early school leavers disengage themselves from the culture of schooling. Educationists generally agree that student engagement (e.g., time-on-task and participation) produces positive outcomes, but they noted that there is disagreement about what counts as engagement (Appleton, Christenson, & Furlong, 2008; Harris, 2008). Disengagement is seen as a non-linear process within a transition to adulthood. This term also pays attention to the relational impact of others and that youth engage with school based on kept or broken promises by others (Tilleczek, 2008). Student engagement or disengagement shows early school leaving to be a complex and often emotional process (Harris, 2008; Langhout & Mitchell, 2008; Tilleczek, 2008). To this date, there is no universally accepted definition of early school leaving. Leavers are typically defined as students who leave school (not including transfers) before they graduate from high school with a regular diploma. Some students leave school before entering ninth grade (Tilleczek, 2008). There is also a general consensus that early school leaving is the result of a long process of disengagement (Archambault et al., 2009) and alienation that may be preceded by less severe types of disengagement such as truancy and grade retention (Tilleczek, 2008). Although it is appealing to use the terms school leaver and dropout interchangeably , many researchers and policy-makers use the terms without paying close attention to the different philosophical and logistical underpinnings of the terms. No one framework has been developed that is able to capture the complexity of early school leaving. In general, students at risk of early school leaving are viewed from either an individual deficit perspective, which elaborates risk factors, or from disengagement perspectives, which take into account wider social inequities (Cassidy & Bates, 2005). Research on risk factors that lead to early school leaving may represent a starting point for understanding the complexity of the dropout process (Lessard et al., 2008). Although individual deficit models continue to be explored, process theories of disengagement have become more common. These theories take into account that disengagement from school is a non-linear, partial, and Narrative Understandings of Lives Lived in (and out of) Schools 199 fragmented process that is often contradictory, complex, filled with subversive forces and tensions, as well as a struggle for most students (Archambault et al., 2009; Tilleczek, 2008; Janosz et al., 2008). Hodgson (2007, p. 1-2) describes school leaving as “having complex historical antecedents that form and grow over time.” Points of disengagement have been referred to as starting points, faltering points, and end points. At times, students “start from scratch,” these are students who have multiple risk factors both at the family, school, and community level while others encounter “primarily protective factors” and, after leaving school early, they still see the possibility of negotiating their way back (Tilleczek, 2008). Dropping out is not just an event but, rather, a process (Bradshaw, O’Brennan, & McNeely, 2008). It is not just a matter of deciding not to come back to school one day. According to Bowlby and McMullen (2002), many youth drop out and return to school several times before deciding to leave school completely. Since we were interested in the lives of the youth who left school early, we framed our study as a narrative inquiry working from the following definition: People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms of these stories. Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful . Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story, then, is first and foremost a way of thinking about experience. (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 375) In our narrative inquiry, our group of 11 researchers worked alongside 19 youth between the ages of 18 and...