Latina/o Ninth-Grade Leavers: Reconceptualizing "Risk" for School Noncompletion

• In Event: Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Working With/in and for Communities: Participatory and Community-Based Action Research

Abstract

Using interview data from a participatory action research (PAR) project, this paper focuses on the schooling experiences of twenty-five Latina/o young adults in a mid-sized city in the Northeast who left high school in the 9th grade. It examines how they experienced 9th grade, the transition from 8th grade, and the circumstances under which they left school. The study takes a constructionist perspective of risk as a phenomenon that is socially constructed through social interactions, as influenced by structural and institutional conditions within particular contexts (Renn, 1992a). Using this framework, the paper illuminates how the interplay between school structures, culture, and policies and individual actions produced uncertainties around school completion among the participants, which resulted in their leaving school.

Authors

• Tara Marie Brown, University of Maryland - College Park

• Alice LaRue Joy Cook, University of Maryland - College Park

• Jesus Santos, Brandeis University