From Dropout to Pushout

Students’ Perspectives on School Absence

Abstract

In this paper I examine school absence and early school leaving from a student perspective. Student voiced research – voices that are often silenced – enables us to understand intricate social mechanisms within the school context that otherwise would remain invisible. The empirical data is collected over a period of one and a half years, and includes six students aged 10-22 years, and their embodied school experiences made in intermediate stage, lower and upper secondary school respectively. The main argument of the paper is, that if we really want more young people to stay in school, we need to listen to those who find school least convincing. Prevailing discourses tend to individualize phenomena such as school absence and early school leaving. In doing so, structures, ideologies and practices that may systematically exclude these students are left unaddressed. To challenge these individualizing discourses, Butler’s concept of viable lives (2004) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2005) concepts of striated / smooth space are introduced as part of the analyzes of the paper. I underline how listening to students in their everyday lives enables us to examine underlying processes of bullying, exclusion and discrimination; processes, that make school absence and/or early school leaving a matter of pushout rather than dropout.