Rebuilding attendance practices with youth: the role of social mediation

Abstract

This article highlights the experiences of students and educators from a larger sociocultural study of participation and engagement at a senior alternative high school programme in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on participant observation, active interviews and document analysis, school attendance was remediated as a meaningful social practice as a result of the relationships young people formed with educators and peers, rather than meaningful in and of itself or in relation to academic performance. These findings trouble school attendance policies that locate absenteeism as a problem within individual students and as decontextualised from their lived experiences. Findings also foreground the importance of examining how school attendance may be interpreted by students. For some students, participation in relationships and communities lies behind school attendance, highlighting the necessity of attending to the role of identity and values alongside of the construction of knowledge as central to the work of schools.

Keywords:

• attendance
• sociocultural
• mediation
• high school
• social practices
• identity

Notes

1. The name of this school and the names of all participants are pseudonyms.

2. Zero-tolerance policies that outline mandatory behavioural consequences for infractions have not taken hold in Canada. Since the time of this study, in 2008, the Ontario Human Rights Commission challenged the Ontario school board’s Safe Schools (1999) code of conduct for creating a list of infractions that explicitly led to suspension or expulsion. The list of infractions was divided into (1) infractions that required a mandatory expulsion or suspension and (2) infractions that were left up to the discretion of the principal and included, for example, persistent truancy. Ontario’s newer Safe and Caring Schools Policy (Revised April, 17, 2013), the Provincial Code of Conduct and School Board Codes of Conduct (2012), no longer contains these sections. In BC, the language about attendance was also revised to comply with BC Safe and Caring Schools (2012). Since 2012, the emphasis in policy has been on promoting safe and caring school environments and moving away from policies that focus on behavioural consequences, although variability does exist.