Young People's Engagement In An Ethnographic Research On Learning: A Discourse Analysis Of The Researchers’ Reports

Author(s):

Raquel Miño-Puigcercós(presenting / submitting)Paulo Padilla-Petry

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

05. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

05 SES 09, Paper Session

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-25

13:30-15:00

Room:

OB-E0.01

Chair:

Benjamin Denecheau

Contribution

Researching youth engagement and disaffection towards school has become an urgent issue in the last 30 years (Appleton, Christenson and Furlong, 2008), not only because it may predict early school leaving, but also because it is considered as directly related to academic motivation and achievement. Even so, young people’s growing disaffection towards school may be found even in students with good grades. Smyth (2006) sustains that disengaged students are not necessarily troublesome, but students for whom the school has “become completely banal, meaningless and without purpose, except as a reasonably pleasant place in which to meet and socialise with one’s friends” (p. 286). Nevertheless, the response to student disengagement in many OECD countries has been to try to change the students, not the system (Zyngier, 2008).

This paper is based on the results of a multi-site ethnographic research project conducted over the last four years by 9 university researchers, one teacher and 39 Secondary School students in five different Catalan secondary schools. While trying to research with and not about young people (Hernández and Padilla-Petry, 2011), we quite unexpectedly stumbled upon the student engagement issue in our own research. We tried to create an alternative space inside school for the young participants of our research, but we found ourselves questioning their engagement in school and in our project as well. The current paper is about the discourses of the 9 university researchers about the young people’s engagement in our ethnographic reports and how they reflect our expectations, frustrations and misconceptions about young people’s engagement in school.

There are different approaches to the notion of student engagement and some controversies as well. Despite the theoretical discrepancies about what counts as student engagement, it is definitely not only about getting good grades and not leaving school and certainly related to the amount of effort, time and motivation dedicated to academic activities (Harris, 2008).

The embedded degree of idealization of the concept is one of the problems as it seems easy to convert the engaged student in the ideal student in the eyes of the teachers, which may mean reducing engagement to school rules’ compliance and good grades. For instance, Newman (1992) claimed that students’ achievement required concentration and work on the mastery of school tasks, asserting that the role of the teacher was to learn how to engage students. He defined engaged students as the students who pursue success and also incorporate the content of the school in their lives.

Many different authors such as McMahon and Portelli (2004) criticize the idea of students’ engagement as something that teachers do to students instead of something that teachers and students generate together. Following the need for complexity in defining student engagement, Yonezawa, Jones and Joselowsky (2009) propose a multidimensional and critical approach, which focus on understanding setting, identity and youth critical voices. As Zyngier (2008), they suggest that, in order to understand students’ engagement, students should have more opportunities to examine and critique their educational system and we should be aware of the difference between how students see themselves and how adults see them. As McInerney (2009), the authors think that young people’s identity shape the way they interact with one another and adults and point out that many researchers and educators have long advocated using students’ background knowledge in classroom to improve learning and engagement. The critical approach moves away from the consideration that students should be engaged in a pre-structured educational system to propose that the youth should be perceived as active and critical participants in the creation of the institutional settings (Yonezawa, Jones and Joselowsky, 2009).

Method

The main goal of the research project “Living and learning with new literacies in and outside school: contributions for reducing school drop-out, truancy and abandonment among youth” (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation - MICINN. EDU2011-24122) was to explore young people’s learning experiences and conceptions in and out of school. From a participative and ethnographic approach, we spent six months in five secondary schools, doing research with a total of 39 young people ageing from 15 to 18. We invited them to investigate their learning experiences in and outside school through a collaborative project. At the end of our work with them, they were supposed to write their own ethnographic reports and present them both at school and at the university. We, as university researchers, also wrote one ethnographic report for each school. Our reports described many aspects of the participant schools, narrated our relationships with the young participants and presented our findings about their learning practices in and outside school. Although student engagement was not one of our main focuses, our reports are full of commentaries about how the young participants of our research were engaged in school and in our project as well. The current paper presents the analysis of the discourse of the five ethnographic reports written by our colleagues and us. Those texts included thick descriptions of the realities studied, theoretical references, and the voices of all the participants (young people, teachers, headmasters and ourselves). We chose to use an adaptation of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) proposed by Van Dijk (2003) to analyse how we, as researchers, talked about the engagement of the young participants of our research in and out of school and, mainly, in the project itself. CDA was chosen due to its special aptitude for analysing power discourses about groups who have less power or control over the discourses that describe them. In our adaptation, we retained from Van Dijk (2003) the following categories: the context of the text, what the text is about and how we speak in the text. The last category comprises: a) macrostructures, b) contextual models, c) events’ models and d) rhetorical resources. We also paid attention to surprises, absences, repetitions and contradictions as proposed by D’Unrug (1974).

Expected Outcomes

The analysis of the five ethnographic reports revealed similarities and differences among our discourses as researchers. In all our reports the contextual models indicate that our expectations regarding the young participants engagement in our project were relatively high. We all assumed that they would be more engaged in our research project than they were at their schools. Such expectations were accompanied by a supposition that with us they would have more control over the decision making process and their own learning. We basically assumed that our project activities would be more democratic than the school activities. Engagement in our project was highly desirable as well as agency and autonomy and we expected a change of mind, not only doing research tasks. In order to explain the young participants’ engagement, we considered the possibility of following their own interests, informality, closeness and new rules, but also the appeal of working in a research with university teachers. Whenever it happened, the lack of engagement in our project clearly challenged our expectations and conceptions about young people’s engagement as we found ourselves using traditional explanations such as attributing it to the amount of hard work or the deadlines. Finally, as we considered that teachers and students should generate engagement together, we highlighted the relationship we established with the young participants and the impact attributed to this relationship in their engagement. As university researchers, we expected to have a relationship with the youth that would be quite different from the one that schoolteachers usually have, but our discourses reveal that the distance and the difference between the young participants and us were quite thought-provoking.

References

Appleton, J. J., Christenson, S. L., & Furlong, M. J. (2008). Student engagement with school: critical conceptual and methodological issues of the construct. Psychology in the Schools, 45(5), 369-386. Harris, L. R. (2008). A Phenomenographic Investigation of Teacher Conceptions of Student Engagement in Learning. The Australian Educational Researcher, 35(1), 57-79. Hernández, F., & Padilla-Petry, P. (2011). De investigar sobre jóvenes a investigar con jóvenes: Relato de un proceso. Jornadas Investigar Con Los Jóvenes: Cuestiones Temáticas, Metodológicas, Éticas y Educativas. Barcelona: Herweijer. McInerney, P. (2009). Toward a critical pedagogy of engagement for alienated youth: insights from Freire and school-based research. Critical Studies in Education, 50:1, 23-35. McMahon, B. & Portelli, J. P. (2004). Engagement for what? Beyond popular discourses of student engagement. Leadership and Policy in School, 3(1), 59-76. Newman, F. M. (1992). Student engagement and achievement in American secondary schools. New York: Teachers College. Smyth, J. (2006). ‘When students have power’: student engagement, student voice, and the possibilities for school reform around ‘dropping out’ of school. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 9(4), 285-298. Unrug, M.C. d'. (1974). Analyse de contenu. París: Éditions Universitaries. Van Dijk, T. A. (2003). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen & H.E. Hamilton (Eds.) The handbook of discourse analysis. Blackwell: Oxford. pp. 352-371 Yazzie-Mintz, E. (2006). Voices of students on engagement. A report on the 2016 high school survey of student engagement. Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, Indiana University. Yonezawa, S., Jones, M & Joselowsky, F. (2009). Youth engagement in high schools: Developing a multidimensional, critical approach to improving engagement for all students. Journal of Educational Change, 10, 191-209. Zyngier, D. (2008). (Re)conceptualising student engagement: doing education not doing time. Teaching and teacher education, 24(7), 1765-1776.

Author Information

Raquel Miño-Puigcercós (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona, Spain

Paulo Padilla-Petry