Dropouts: One is Too Many
The “Dropouts: One is Too Many” coalition is bringing awareness & exploring solutions with communities & leaders for dropout prevention in Michigan. Learn More
Recent Cause Activity
Please see the dissertation Creating Hopeful Learning Environments: Collisions in Practice. The idea of a Hopeful Learning Environment (HLE) encompasses the things that students need to stay engaged in educational institutions. It embraces the environement as a learning site rather than the traditional school setting that sometimes marginalizes certain students. In this study, I collaborated with six high school educators, who used photographs to stimulate a dialog about creating hopeful learning environments, defining them, and describing things that get in the way of creating them.
While the study doesn't address dropout prevention directly, it speaks to the idea indirectly in two ways. Way one: collisions in practice describe the obstacles that prevent creating HLE's, which include the things that kids bring with them to school and the institutionalized system and how it marginalizes disadvantaged kids. Secondly, it gives a rich description of the kinds of things that educators can do to create hopeful learning environments. The premise would be that if educational institutions can provide hope for students, that might be enough to keep them engaged in the process of education despite factors that get in their way of being engaged.
I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think! It's physically housed at the Michigan State University library.
The next Voices of Michigan Education radio program (http://www.mea.org/radio), which will air on 3/10, is addressing child homelessness. As we are gearing up for the show, we are compiling a package of resources and stories regarding homelessness in Michigan and how it is affecting education and communities.
Do you have any resources to share? Stories?
Check out the fan page for Bully Safe Schools...http://tinyurl.com/m3uxht A great resource!