Worldwide, there is a common-sense acceptance that young people should have equal access and voice to their educational needs. In Norway recent and alarming findings in the “Children and Young people strategy 21” (Norwegian Research Council 2021), concludes that young people contribute too little in the research decisions that concerns them. These findings are considered when the research council now focuses on new research centres and grants for more inclusive research, underlining the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in education, research, and the field as well as listening to the voices of children and youth in vulnerable life situation to solve the challenges in the field. These changes are also implemented from the first of August in Norway through a new education Act, where students will have ensured the right to actively express their opinions and be listened in all matters that concern them, and schools accordingly will have the duty to facilitate students’ empowerment (Education Act, 2023, § 10-2). However, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment found that empowering students through for instance teaching methods in class may be more effective for some students than for others, creating inequality (OECD, 2012). Nonetheless, its operationalisation can become a key aspect for professional development and improving students’ school experiences (Weinberger & Libman, 2018). The act of empowerment is defined as bringing into a state of belief one's capacity to act effectively, emphasising the critical importance of effective relationships between teachers and students; thus empowerment is the ability to influence one’s environment, but it is complex and multidimensional and can affect students differently according to their background  (Broom, 2015; Duhon-Haynes, 1996; Freire, 1970). To enact policy demands of empowerment, more research should address its complex, multidimensional characteristics. Therefore, in our study we ask how vocational teachers empower young people in their school environment through “Equality Literacy Framework” (EQL).

In this study we draw on Stuart’s et al. (2021) EQL, a practice and research framework to study all the factors that contribute to empowering learning environments. The framework is rooted in a bio-ecological, systemic view and captures relationships between the individual student and the different contexts at micro and macro level. The EQL Framework considers the concept of equity in relation to equitable chance of success (Chapman and West-Burnham, 2010). This framework is used for both the young people and educators to understand what influences the students in their learning, and what can be done to improve the learning environment for the disadvantaged students. Some commentators point out that it is the education system itself that has quit children, pushed children out and not been fit for young people (Fine, 2018). 

At the same time, schools and teachers can pull in young people through for instance relations that are empowering and liberating. With inspiration from Freire, and the Pedagogy of the oppressed, we explore how teachers empower young people in the school and through a critical and dialogue-based relationship. According to Freire (1970), liberating pedagogy aims at empowerment. Belief in and regard for the individual's worth and integrity stems from a humanistic vision of humankind, which values equality, love, hope, mutual respect, and the desire to improve (Freire, 1970). Empowerment is linked to the recognition of the two dimensions of dialogue: reflection and action, which are mutually dependent on each other. For Freire, increasing awareness is the process of engaging individuals in discussion to examine and analyse reality based on such life-like topics.This critical attitude will be able to free the individual and his inherent resources and powers (Lindvig & Mousavi, 2017).

The need for a methodological approach to understand the experiences put forward by marginalized young people is critical. The Indirect Approach (Moshuus & Eide, 2016) draws on an ethnographic biographical framework that evoke notions of methodological approaches like the unstructured interview (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014). The Indirect Approach reflects that all social phenomena take place within contextual frames produced within a contested ground shaping both the lives of our participants and our inquiries. A key element in the approach is the researcher’s indirect way of approaching the life world of the participant, making sure not to introduce ideas, concepts or notions into the conversation that was not first presented by the participant. Reading something into the conservation or introducing the researchers own concepts would be polluting the conversation, making it too direct. This places the method within the qualitative approaches in the social sciences that are thought of as explorative; discovering something that we did not already know (Moshuus, 2018). The research situation should make the participant a storyteller, making whatever he/she emphasise guide the conversation. This opens the research to a wide variation of interpretative efforts. Often vulnerable students’ experiences are set within a limited normative framework dictated and predefined by our understanding. With the Indirect Approach the spontaneous ideas of the participant opens research up to a rich explorative field and true, empowering dialogue where student’s reality may be discovered, not being defined by normative views. A key element is the introduction of the happenstance. It is our claim that the indirect approach allows for and embraces the occurrence of unforeseen events. Happenstances distinguish themselves from these by revealing something we otherwise would not have discovered. The happenstance allows us to reposition from our initial open and often probing queries to a position of becoming an audience to a story unfolding in our presence. The storytelling is a rich interpretative ground for our explorative efforts into student’s experience. Parallel to this, we have made use of students’ drawings of their school history as another way of open up for their storytelling. To get closer to the student`s s own school stories, EQL sheds light on their educational trajectories, lived experiences, privileges, disadvantage and all the «ups» and «downs». All in all we look for the students’ own experience in education – without exactly asking for it, for use in co-research and working with vocational and vulnerable students.

The preliminary findings of our study show that through the use of EQL practices young students' increase everyday awareness about challenges regarding central life themes. The students' and teachers in the study take into consideration the fundamental socio-cultural mechanisms that impede people and groups from participating equally in education and social life. A teaching characterized by such a dialogue, with its reflection and action-oriented aspect, can precisely contribute to revealing and changing oppressive structures. Such awareness-raising effort requires that the participants in the learning process acknowledge and evaluate one another as equal conversational partners with the shared objective of altering oppressive structures. According to the young voices of our study teachers are changing their practices as students perceive to contribute more to the decision-making dialogue that occurs in the classroom. Interestingly, by adopting an EQL approach teachers experience increased confidence about the qualified choices on how to differentiate instruction and empower students.

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