Disengagement with school: classroom inVestigations as a possible solution
Journal Title: Problems of Education in the 21st Century - Year 2009, Vol 13, Issue 6
Abstract
We live in a highly complex society that presents its citizens with many challenges and problems. In order to respond it, by making informed decisions, citizens have to appropriate certain key competencies, for instance, reasoning, communication, life long learning, among others. So education has never been seen such a central issue to promote individual growth as nowadays, and also a central issue to enact societal and economical growth. Despite education playing a central role in the international agenda, the failure of the school systems to teach all the students has never been so visible. Nowadays, one of the greatest challenges is to provide an answer to those students who have dropped out of school, or to those who have disengaged from it. Several actions have been developed, some of which concern pedagogic actions. Activities based on investigations in science classes are seen nowadays as a way to enact key competencies, but also to involve students with their own learning. But, what make these activities so successful in getting to all students and, even more, to those who have disengaged from the school system? In this paper, we will discuss the impact of activities based on investigation in secondary students’ involvement with school. Its effcacy seems to be related to identity issues. By changing classroom practices and relationships, not only among teachers and students, but also between students and school knowledge, this kind of activity allows the students to reconstruct new identities, where they can envisage new future paths.
Authors and Affiliations
Sofa Freire, Mónica Baptista, Carolina Carvalho, Ana Freire, Teresa Oliveira, Mário Azevedo
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP34666
- DOI -
- Views 314
- Downloads 0
DEVELOPMENT OF CLASSIFICATION FOR CLOSED TEST TASKS
The expediency of inclusion in one test of various types of test tasks (TT’s) that adequate to the content of the studied materials and to the purposes of testing in the best way is often marked. However, developers of t...
EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHING PREPARATIONS ON MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT: THE CASE OF KENYA
Despite playing a central role in peoples’ daily life, the average Kenyan secondary school students’ mathematics score in national examinations has consistently averaged below 40%. The contribution of teachers’ lesson...
THE “SCHOOL. MY CHANCE!” PROJECT – A CASE STUDY FOR PREVENTING PUPILS’ SCHOOL DROPOUT IN ROMANIA
Pupils’ school dropout could be defined as an early and final abandonment of school before graduation, which prevents the pupil from registering in the following stage of education, losing in this way the possibility o...
SCHOOL AUTONOMY AND SCHOOL LEADERSHIP: CASE STUDY OF SCHOOL OPERATION IN SLOVAKIA
During as near as three decades after the political changes in Slovakia its system of education has undergone many reforms. As an integral part of them have been changes regarding school autonomy as it influences quality...
CONSTRUCTIVISTIC PATHS IN TEACHING PHYSICS: FROM INTERACTIVE EXPERIMENTS TO STEP-BY-STEP TEXTBOOKS
Teaching Physics, in-between theory and technical applications is nowadays a tedious task. Apparent abundance of web resources makes access to information easy, but its use by pupils is quite unclear. These diffculties...