Many secondary schools in the Eastern Cape and else where in South African are facing a drop out crisis but a proportion of these dropouts return to school to complete their education. The kind of social experiences that dropouts have as they reenrol and reintegrate in school remains an under-research aspect in the discourse on education access. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that prompted dropouts to reenrol in school and the social life experiences of these learners in school. It was also to explore school leaders‟ reactions towards these experiences, and the implications for school leadership of the dropouts‟ experiences. Using qualitative methodologies, involving a sample of 15 dropouts and two school leaders, the study found multiple motives, associated with individual characteristics of dropouts and the institutional characteristics of their family and the labour market, prompting reenrolment. Institutional characteristics at the school level were not featured. Regarding social life at school, it found that while some participants had positive social experiences, which reinforced their motivation to pursue their education, others experienced the school context as socially hostile. The nature of the social hostility is described, but school leaders seem insensitive to many of the social integration challenges that confront dropouts. Several implications for school leadership have been drawn out, including the view that while there are a variety of leverage points for addressing the social hostility problems, the social development of dropouts who experienced hostility stand to wither if supportive measures are not implemented to help them reintegrate. While the research provides new insights into the experiences of dropouts in school, it had the limitation of being a case study whose findings cannot be generalised.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufh/vital:16165 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Smith, Elizabeth Marrie |
| Publisher | University of Fort Hare, Faculty of Education |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, M Ed |
| Format | 182 leaves; 30 cm, pdf |
| Rights | University of Fort Hare |
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