scholarly journals “If He/She Had Been Like the Rest of Us”. How Do Young People Describe Their Schoolmates Who Are Different from Others in the Group?

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Minna Saarinen ◽  
Satu Mattila

The article examines issues related to peer interactions and group joining in upper secondary schools in Finland. The study elaborates on how young people describe students who are left out/excluded or who remain outside the social networks. The study also elucidates on how a student can join the group. The research is motivated by the current educational ethos, which emphasizes inclusion and tolerance. The data were collected from an upper secondary school and vocational and technical institute. The students were asked to recall the prior high school year and write an essay on the topic. A total of 49 students wrote about their memories. The data were analyzed using inductive content analysis, and the study found that students are either excluded or included due to the social skills they possess. Those who do not exhibit the same approach to being in a group will stay on the sidelines. The essays also described factors that connect students, such as hobbies and leisure activities. Similarity in many external factors (e.g., the family’s economic situation) unites students. Contrary to expectations, young people described themselves, and not just others, as outsiders.

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Dovemark ◽  
Inger Erixon Arreman

Sweden has, like most countries, transformed its educational system with the aim of increasing the economic productivity of its citizens. Nowadays, it has one of the world’s most market-oriented school systems, including few hindrances for new free-school actors. Swedish students have thus become commodities in a competitive school market. The aim of the article is to study students’ exchange value in relation to choice of different schools and study paths with a special focus on the introductory programmes within the Swedish upper secondary school. Traditionally, Swedish upper secondary schools offered vocational and academic programmes, channelling young people into skilled jobs or higher education. Introductory programmes are recent innovations, aimed at the 13% of young people who do not qualify for vocational or academic programmes. This group includes those who have failed to complete compulsory school for a variety of reasons, including those who are recent arrivals in the country. Through observations, formal and informal interviews as well as reading of national and local documents and marketing material, we conclude that introductory programme students do not seem to be sufficiently ‘profitable’ to warrant investment by free schools. Public schools are obliged to help this group of students attain additional qualifications, investing heavily in their education so that they may become part of the mainstream school market.


2020 ◽  
pp. 329-341
Author(s):  
Grazia Romanazzi

Freedom, autonomy and responsibility are the ends of every educational process, especially in the modern society: globalized, rapid, in transformation; society in which each one of us is called to make numerous choices. Therefore, it is urgent to educate to choose and educate to the choice, so that young people can emancipate themselves from possible conditionings. To this end, the Montessori method represents a privileged way: child is free to choose his own activity and learns "to do by himself" soon; the teacher prepares the environment and the materials that allow the student to satisfy the educational needs of each period of inner development. Then, Montessori gives importance to adolescence because it is during this period that grows the social man. Consequently, it is important to reform the secondary school in order to acquire the autonomy that each student will apply to the subsequent school grades and to all areas of life


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-108
Author(s):  
Martin Brestovanský ◽  
Janette Gubricová ◽  
Kristína Liberčanová ◽  
Naďa Bizová ◽  
Zuzana Geršicová

AbstractIntroduction: The aim of the study was to find out what is the understanding of relatively new terms coming into the cultures of Middle-European countries – inclusion, diversity, and equality (hereinafter referred to as IDE) – from the point of view of young people (n=30) and youth workers (n=16) in Slovakia.Methods: For data gathering, we used a method of focus groups (4 meetings). Data analysis was based on three criteria: consistency in understanding the terms, an overview of types of obstacles that keep young people from self-realisation and an explicit or implicit expression of understanding the basic principles of inclusion in education. The content of IDE terms was mostly from the area of the social field. The term diversity was closely explained in the psychological-personal fields.Results: The most frequent obstacles for applying IDE approaches were seen in the social, health and religious spheres. From the pedagogical and methodological point of view, the problem is also in the difficulty of preparing the projects based on the principles of IDE while the youth workers proclaim autonomy in solutions and do not trust the possibilities of using general methods because of specific need resulting from the specific context of their work. Also, they proclaim natural applying of the IDE principles and the existence of specific needs in the informal education does not represent any problem for the inclusion of the group members in the activities of the organisation.Limitations: Work with youth is very varied. Performs in different areas of life and also involves working with different groups of young people. The selected research sample consists of youth and youth workers who are only a partial sample of the sample. It is assumed that in a larger group of respondents (both youth workers and youths themselves), respondents' views may differ somewhat in some of the areas studied.Conclusions: This research provides information on understanding, implementation and obstacles to applying the principles of inclusion, equality and diversity in practice. We believe that the information we receive is very valuable as it opens the imaginative door to the specific kitchens of individual youth organizations where these principles are directly implemented. They show their nature of application in practice, they suggest some risks, as well as a certain bias towards the application of the terms emerging (probably?) from theory. As can be seen from the results of our research, the emergence of specific needs in non-formal education in practice does not pose a problem in the inclusion of group members in leisure activities.


1974 ◽  
Vol 125 (588) ◽  
pp. 468-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Berg ◽  
Tony Collins

School-phobic youngsters have sometimes been described as wilful and stubborn in the family situation (Hersov, 1960), and this tendency has been invoked to explain the particular occurrence of school phobia in early adolescence (Leventhal and Sills, 1964). The emotional upset shown by these young people when faced with the prospect of going to school (Berg, Nichols and Pritchard, 1969), may occasionally appear to be more in the nature of anger, defiance and temper than either fearfulness or misery (Smith, 1970). The fact that in the general population dislike of school is reflected in actual absence only during the secondary school years (Mitchell and Shepherd, 1967) supports the view that assertiveness, which presumably becomes more effective as the child reaches the teens, plays some part in school refusal.


1972 ◽  
Vol 121 (564) ◽  
pp. 509-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Berg ◽  
Alan Butler ◽  
Ralph McGuire

It has been found that young people suffering from school phobia, particularly those of secondary school age in Britain, tend to be the youngest in their family (Hersov, 1960; Smith, 1970). This paper reports an investigation carried out in an attempt to confirm and extend this observation. A hundred school-phobic youngsters admitted to Highlands, a psychiatric in-patient unit for adolescents, were looked at from the point of view of order in the sibship; in this respect they were compared with 91 non-school-phobic children suffering from neurotic or conduct disorders admitted to the same hospital unit and with 127 randomly selected normal secondary school children stratified for age, sex and social class. The state of excessive dependency which appears to exist between mothers and their children in school phobia, even in early adolescence (Berg and McGuire, 1971) may be partly due to the circumstance of the affected individual being a younger child in the family.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Nataliia Viacheslavivna Shepelieva ◽  
Nataliia Oleksandrivna Maksymovska ◽  
Angela Oleksandrivna Polyanichko

Formation of student youth’s social activity is the leading task of social education, especially under conditions of information society. If psychological and age traits of students as a social group are to be taken into account, the beneficial means of harmonizing this process is leisure activities. Based on interdisciplinary and integrated approaches, a system of social-pedagogical leisure activities was developed to form social activity of student youth. The aim of this article is to analyze the implementation of the social-pedagogical leisure activities system of student youth’s social activity formation. The task of this article is to study the levels of student youth’s social activity before and after implementing the social-pedagogical leisure activities system and to analyze its effectiveness using the corresponding methods. According to outlined tasks, the following methods and indices were selected and used: relative indices method, grouping method, quantitative and qualitative analysis method, Student’s t-test, graphical method. Thanks to systematic approach to experimental part of the research, it was established that the level of students’ social activity formation has improved: the specific share of young people with low level has decreased significantly, while of those with high level has increased. Group curators have noted the tendencies of young people to organize leisure activities, while students themselves were becoming involved in useful leisure practices that were new to them. Effectiveness of the new system was confirmed using statistical methods.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Mette Bunting ◽  
Geir Moshuus

Mye forskning om skoleavbrudd i videregående opplæring ser på risikofaktorer, som sosio-økonomisk bakgrunn, grunnskolepoeng og kjønn, og kan derfor sies å fokusere på individuelle og strukturelle faktorer. Artikkelen argumenterer for heller å se på skoleavbrudd som et samspill eller møte mellom individet og systemet, det individuelle og strukturelle. Forskningen baseres på data fra en longitudinell kvalitativ studie i sitt fjerde år. Informantene er ungdom i NAV-systemet som har sluttet på videregående skole, men som fortsatt har skolerett. Gjennom den indirekte metoden, en intervjumetode basert på etnografiske intervjuer, søkes det å legge til rette for at ungdommene kan fortelle sine historier med egne ord og på sin måte. Disse fortellingene belyser avbruddsprosessene, og beskriver opplevelser forut for avbruddet. Funnene viser at selv om ungdommene sier dette skjer på grunn av enkelthendelser, belyser fortellingene deres at dette er komplekse prosesser som ligger til grunn, gjerne år tilbake. Artikkelen konkluderer med at sosialt medierte prosesser også utenfor skole, må vektlegges for å kunne forstå skoleavbrudd.Nøkkelord: frafall, kvalitativ longitudinell studie, livshistorier, etnografisk intervju, ungdom, videregående skoleAbstractResearch on dropout from upper secondary school usually focuses on risk factors such as socioeconomic background, previous academic results and gender—that is, on individual and structural factors. The present article argues for a shift of focus, looking at dropping out as an interaction between the person and the system—between the individual and the structural. This research draws on interview data from a longitudinal qualitative study (now in its fourth year) of young people both in and out of school. The informants were young dropouts currently in the welfare system. Using the indirect method (developed from ethnographic interviews), the interviewer sought to establish an environment in which these young people could use their own words when sharing their stories. Those stories provide an insight into the processes and experiences prior to the event of dropping out. The findings show that although young people describe dropping out as a singular event, their stories indicate complex preceding processes, often from some years before. The article concludes that socially mediated interactions between the individual and the structural, both inside school and out of school, must be considered when seeking to understand why young people drop out.Keywords: dropout, qualitative longitudinal study, life stories, ethnographic interview, youth, upper secondary school


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-55
Author(s):  
Ahmed Palic ◽  
Tarik Bazdalic

Mathematics as a school subject in primary and secondary school is a significant problem for quite a number of students. Additional classes that are organized and conducted within schools reduce this problem, but not significantly. In supplementary classes, the same is done with large groups, but not individually, and the same teachers teach in the same way that did not give satisfactory results, and similar. For that reason, many resort to the so-called “instructions”, in other words to the extracurricular supplementary lessons of mathematics. The aim of the research is to examine, determine, analyze and present the representation of extracurricular supplementary teaching in mathematics in secondary (high school) education depending on gender, grade, socio-economic status of the family and grade point average in the past school year


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Váradi ◽  
Ildikó Barna ◽  
Renáta Németh

Ethnic prejudice can lead to exclusion and hinder social integration. Prejudices are formed throughout socialization, and social norms inform individuals about the acceptability of prejudice against certain outgroups. Adolescence is a crucial period for the development of intergroup attitudes, and young people are especially prone to follow the norms they perceive in their reference groups. At the same time, the effect of perceived norms on prejudice in school classes has been rarely studied. In Hungary, where prejudice against the Roma is widespread and there is no clear social norm proscribing prejudiced manifestations, this topic is especially relevant. In the present paper, based on multi-level analyses of panel data from Hungarian ninth-graders, we find that adolescents adjust their attitudes to those they perceive to be dominant among their classmates and that classmates serve as more important reference groups than teachers do. More contact with Roma is found to be associated with less prejudice against them. Looking at school classes, we find that at the beginning of the school year, many students underestimate the rejection of prejudiced expressions in their classes. By the end of the year, many students are found to adjust their own attitudes to the falsely perceived class norm. Based on our findings, we argue that school classes should be treated as important normative contexts for the socialization of intergroup attitudes and should receive special attention from both scholars and practitioners working in the fields of prejudice research and reduction. Furthermore, we suggest that teachers can most successfully hinder prejudices by working on a common, visible, shared class norm rather than “teaching” students that prejudices are not acceptable.


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