Publications

School reintegration and educational alliance: toward an integration school and community approaches
« Accrochage scolaire et alliances éducatives : vers une intégration des approches scolaires et communautaires »

Catherine Blaya (University of Burgundy), Ghislain Plunus (University of Liège), Jean-Luc Gilles (Haute école pédagogique du canton de Vaud), Chantal Tièche Christinat (Haute école pédagogique du canton de Vaud).

ERUDIT – Virtual scientific magazine “Education et Francophonie”

Montreal (Canada) – autumn 2011

Newspaper / Magazine article

French

English

Identification of students’ at risk

In this article, the authors develop an analysis to integrate school and community approaches of early school leaving.

Firstly, they describe the “the school approach”.
If the school can generate exclusion, it can also cultivate protection factors: support relations, empathy, individual assistance … that can make school reintegration of students at risk easier.
The authors illustrate this approach describing structures that make it possible for students in difficulty to go out (for more or less short periods) of a school environment with which they have problematic relations, in order to bring them to get themselves back together in places that offer possibilities of new emotional and cognitive commitment.
The authors then develop “the community approach”.
The multidimensional aspect of early school leaving highlights the importance of factors external to school. From this perspective, the authors describe the interest of initiatives involving “educational alliances” that go beyond the school in a community framework.
This approach has been developed for around fifteen years. It mobilises a large numbers of protagonists from all the areas of society.
The authors illustrate this approach through a survey conducted in French-speaking Belgium, aiming to set up an cross-sector consultation strategy against early school leaving (presented in the “Stay@School” project: http://schoolinclusion.pixel-online.org/document.php?id_doc=321&doc_lang=French&str_search)

At the end of the article, the authors make several suggestions for a “quality approach” in the implementation, analysis and regulation of new educational alliances including the school and community approaches.

According to the authors, the phenomenon of early school leaving has various factors, which each corresponds to a category of protagonist that should be called up in collaboration with other agents, case by case, depending on the characteristics of the student’s situation.

This type of community reintegration involves educational alliances between many agents from various areas such as justice, health, social work, corporations and school. This approach is particularly developed in the United States and Canada, especially in Quebec where its positive impact on the decrease of early school leaving has been demonstrated.

According to the authors, through the analysis of educational alliances in a community approach integrating the school approach, the conditions for success should eventually emerge as well as the modalities of an efficient and systemic prevention of early school leaving.

Website Erudit: http://www.erudit.org/revue/ef/2011/v39/n2/1007736ar.html?vue=resume&mode=restriction

Julien Keutgen

Inforef

Translator – project assistant