Our paper is presenting a combined historical and sociological approach for the study of Danish special intervention programs. Our focus is on programs aimed at vulnerable youth in transitory learning spaces - which we name youth education at a watershed. During the last 50 years these programs have on the one hand represented an alternative to regular strands of education and on the other they have provided interventions to facilitate the transition into continued training and youth education. Such programs constitute trading spaces where different practices of inclusion are formed (Werner & Zimmermann, 2006). Thus they can be seen as contexts for and products of the structures of society and the educational systems at specific times. Our purpose is to critically explore the inclusive effects of the Danish special intervention programmes through times by combining subjective and objective notions, and interactional and structural levels. This entails viewing the youth in question in a wider context, which requires a sociological perspective, where subjectivity and context are mutually constitutive and relationally embedded (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001). This is to avoid the pitfalls of viewing human behaviour as the product of purely autonomous individuals making rational choices, or seeing society as completely pre-structured and imposing itself on objectified individuals. To combine elements of structuralism and interactionism and pursue interactive and complementary methodological strands, we propose a case study design including - Quantitative methods, examining the extent of the phenomenon of counter-dropout measurements and inclusive interventions, and providing statistics on the socio-economic resources of participants attending the selected programmes; and - Qualitative methods, observing the pedagogic practices set up to include and constitute ‘education at a watershed’ and listening to the professionals and not least the youth participants to understand what has happened during their school life and in their present education and training, and how they perceive and make sense of education in their lives. This design draws its main inspiration from the tradition of educational ethnography (esp. Walford, 2009; Delamont, 2008; Jeffrey, 2006), but adds an innovative approach to this by addressing the structural level and the quantitative aspects, which otherwise appear as ‘blind-spots’ in educational ethnography worldwide (Beach, 2010).

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