What Makes Work-Based Education Effective for Keeping At-Risk Youth in School: Views of At-Risk Youth and Their Educators in Two Canadian Provinces

• In Event: Canadian Association for Educational Psychology (CAEP): Supporting At-Risk Learners: Applications of Educational Psychology in Canadian Contexts

Abstract

Work-based education (WBE) is a major part of the strategy of ministries of education across Canada for engaging at-risk youth. The purpose of this paper is to report the perspectives of at-risk youth and their WBE educators in these two provinces on what makes WBE effective for engaging these students and on how WBE could be made more effective. How do the perspectives of the two groups differ and what similarities exist in their understanding of what makes WBE work as well as it does and in their recommendations for improvements?

WBE refers to interventions that facilitate learning by placing youth in supervised practica in workplace contexts for all or part of their educational program (Bailey, Hughes, & Moore, 2004).These learning experiences include workplace mentoring, paid work experience, and cooperative education (Smith & Betts, 2000). School is a context of adversity for many at-risk youth (DeLuca et al., 2010); and the recent global economic crisis has reduced opportunities for at-risk youth in the labor market (Organization for Economic and Cultural Development, 2010). Thus it is increasingly urgent that strategies like WBE are effective for keeping at-risk youth in school and enabling them to continue to learn academic skills while enhancing their workplace readiness.

We interviewed seven youth participating in WBE programs in each of Alberta and Ontario about their experiences in WBE programs, their engagement with school, and their recommendations for improvements. We also conducted two focus groups of seven WBE educators, associated with the same programs as the youth, about their views on what made the programs effective, how they were designed to engage youth, and how the programs could be enhanced.

Our data demonstrate fundamental differences in the approaches to WBE in Ontario and Alberta, reported by both the educators and the students. The Ontario programs used existing cooperative education approaches that had been “adapted” to serve the at-risk population, while the Alberta programs were more specialized and varied. However, teachers in Alberta reported that increasingly their schools were directing students into WBE who were not at-risk and there was little room for the students for whom the programs were intended. The students in Ontario had clearly been at-risk of dropping out of school and described their WBE programs as “turning my life around” and “changing everything,” while the Alberta students valued workplace experience for clarifying their career choices. In both contexts, there were clear differences between the students’ and educators’ views of how the programs could be improved, with the students focusing on small changes that would ease their experiences and the educators considering bigger issues about the role of WBE in a changing society and the need for flexibility and administrative support to adapt programs to student needs. What all agreed on was the important role that WBE programs play in helping schools to meet the needs of students in uncertain economic times―especially at-risk students.

Authors

• Nancy L. Hutchinson, Queen's University

• Connie Elizabeth Taylor, Queen's University

• Jenn deLugt, Queen's University

• Lorraine Godden, Queen's University

• Marcea Ingersoll, Queen's University

• Peter Chin, Queen's University

• Joan Versnel, Dalhousie University