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Abstract
This paper discusses how student identities are constituted through social categories and how this affects students’ educational trajectories. Dropout is often described as a sudden event but this paper demonstrates how dropping out is a long-term process involving social interactions between the students. It is based on a field study in which the author was enrolled as a student at the car mechanic program at a vocational education and training school. The various social categories emerge in contrast with each other and have fundamental influences in defining the students’ scope of action. Divisions between the students were based on discourses of ethnicity and seriousness. Four portraits of individual students, each belonging to a different peer group, are presented to describe the individual level of the peer-related dropout processes. The discussion calls for awareness of reproducing effects of taken-for-granted logics and discriminatory practices and for including identity-related perspectives on peer relations, when studying dropout.
Notes
13. The competence assessment consisted of a combination of tests and observations during the first two weeks and was intended to give the students an understanding of their prerequisites and track them into basic courses of differing lengths.
14. Students who cannot find an apprenticeship are offered school apprenticeships (in Danish: skolepraktik), if they meet the EMMA criteria (in Danish: Egnet, Mobil fagligt, Mobil geografisk, Aktiv praktikplads-søgende, i.e. Suitable, motivated, geographically mobile and actively seeking an apprenticeship).
15. The production schools are open to youth under the age of 25, who have not yet completed a youth education and the purpose of their stay is to clarify their future choices of either job or education.