Session Information
04 SES 04 B, Didactics
Paper Session
Contribution
The central question that this paper addresses is: How do ‘alternative’ schools meet the needs of young people disengaged from the mainstream schooling sector? The concept of alternative education has a long history located within a progressive tradition in education (Dewey, 1966). However, the term has become a slippery one and is currently used to denote a multitude of practices and sites (see te Riele 2007). It is used for instance to describe schools located within the democratic schooling movement and to describe behaviour management units designed to modify students’ (mis)behaviours so that they are better suited to mainstream schools (see for example, te Riele 2006, Thomson & Russell, 2009). This paper is concerned with those alternative schools that seek to cater to the needs of young people who are unlikely to return to the mainstream sector for various reasons. Such schools contrast with various systemic schools set up to cater to young people suspended and expelled from their former schools that have as their purpose ‘disciplining’ the young person into being a ‘normal’ student. Thus, the focus of this research is on schools that are not so much concerned with changing the student, but instead focus on changing the kinds of teaching and learning that young people engage in. Such schools are an important feature of the educational landscape in many countries (see for example, Ross & Gray, 2005). However, whilst these schools meet the needs of some of the most marginalised young people in society and some of those who have had a traumatic relationship with mainstream schooling, there are also other young people still in mainstream schools who are disengaged from the learning process and have very little connection to their school. It will be argued here that there is much that mainstream schools can learn from ‘successful’ alternative schools in order to provide an education that caters to a wide range of students.
There are multiple reasons why some students disengage from mainstream schooling (Mosen-Lowe, Vidovich & Chapman, 2009).These include the rigidity of schools which do not recognise the complex lives led by many young people, the authority structures within schools, and often, to these students, irrelevant and meaningless curricula and pedagogical practices. This disengagement can have serious consequences for young people who already come from some of the most marginalised sectors of society (Savelsberg & Martin-Giles, 2008). In this paper we draw on data collected from a diverse group of alternative schools in the Australian State of Queensland to identify some of the practices within these schools that have engaged marginalised young people. Striking within these schools are the large numbers of students who despite having rejected mainstream schooling are prepared to make significant efforts to attend their ‘alternative’ school. The commitment to attending these schools that many students demonstrate leads us to conclude, as one participant in the study indicated, that there need to be more schools like these.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press. Mosen-Lowe, L., Vidovich, L. and Chapman, A. (2009). Students ‘at-risk’ policy: competing social and economic discourses. Journal of Education Policy, 24 (4), 461-476. Ross, S. and Gray, J. (2005). Transitions and Re-engagement through Second Chance Education. The Australian Educational Researcher, 32 (3), 103-140. Savelsberg, H. and Martin-Giles, B. (2008). Young people on the margins: Australian studies of social exclusion. Journal of Youth Studies, 11 (1), 17-31. Te-Riele, K. (2006). Youth ‘at risk’: further marginalizing the marginalized? Journal of Education Policy, 21 (2), 129-145. Te-Riele, K. (2007). Educational Alternatives for Marginalized Youth. The Australian Educational Researcher, 34 (3), 53-68. Thomson, P. and Russell, L. (2009). Data, data everywhere – but not all the numbers that count? Mapping alternative provisions for students excluded from school. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 13 (4), 423-438.
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