Session Information
05 SES 10 A, Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education
Paper Session
Contribution
School dropout (23.6% in Spain – see ET Monitor 2014) is one of the most important problems of the Spanish education system. This fact is mainly concentrated in disadvantaged urban areas such the outskirts of big cities, where these figures might even double the average.
Therefore, a contradiction arises with deep impact: education should be a powerful tool to boost the social promotion of children at risk who are living in these neighbourhoods; however, education becomes one of the factors which reinforce their social exclusion.
One of the reasons for that is the disconnection between homes and schools. There’s no proper transition between both microsystems, and the mesosystem is not a source of opportunities but of confusion and disaffection.
Our research is based on the general assumption that when the interaction system between families and teachers qualitatively improve, the school achievement of children increase in all aspects (Martinez & Albaigés, 2012). A successful transition between homes and schools does not exclusively depend on the unilateral change of parents and relatives but on the interactive new parental involvement that families and professionals create together.
Both the scientific literature and our own recent research prove that the main factors to improve the interaction system between homes and schools for a better school achievement are: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and community collaboration (Epstein, 2010; Van Houtte, 2004 and 2012; Collet & Tort, 2011; Hornby & Lafaele, 2011; MEC, 2011).
This improvement must be framed within a transformed educational context that we may define through two dimensions: community education and inclusive education.
- Why community education? The relationship between the school and its community has not been much developed. If school leaders reach out to community stakeholders sometimes, it is rather to legitimate their policy and to gain the requisite support of the various stakeholders for the interventions being made (Mourshed, M, Chijioke, C. & Barber, M., 2011). A community approach on education avoids this restricted perspective and opens up the chance to promote parental involvement and better home-school transitions.
- Why inclusive education? Inclusion can be considered as the latest education paradigm that explains how to get over barriers of inequality. Through this paradigm, educational environments become a broader tool of socialization: “inclusive education is an on-going process aimed at offering quality education for all while respecting diversity and the different needs and abilities, characteristics and learning expectations of the students and communities, elimination all forms of discrimination” (UNESCO, 2008). Through inclusion, all participants build up inclusion experiences based on community experiences where participants take the lead of their own learning processes. This perspective benefits all pupils in general, and especially those from disadvantaged areas. Pupils can improve their school achievement while reducing school dropout (INCLUD-ED, EU Sixth Framework Programme research project on inclusion and social cohesion from education).
Our research on transitions between home-school and parental involvement was concerning these two dimensions (community and inclusive education), and it involved the following actors between May 2012 and July 2014:
- 4 pre-primary and primary schools (pupils aged 3-12 years old): ESC Elisenda de Montcada, ESC Ciutat Comtal, ESC Mestre Morera and ESC Ferrer i Guàrdia. This represented a community of 1.000 pupils, 56 teachers and approximately 700 families.
- 1 lower secondary school (pupils aged 12-16 years old): INS Pablo Ruiz Picasso. This represented a community of 400 pupils, 35 teachers and approximately 250 families.
Our main research question was to identify the pre-conditions as well as the available conditions to support an effective development of better interactions between parents and teachers in order to improve school achievement of children at risk.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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