Educational Equity for Homeless Students: Examining Street Schools Through the Lens of Rightful Presence

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Examining School Contexts and Student Experiences (Table 38)

Abstract

Homeless youth experience similar exclusionary tendencies in the German mainstream school system as in the society at-large. These negative schooling experiences are pushing many homeless youths out of school, leading to graduation gaps. Street schools have responded to these inequalities, offering homeless youth more humanizing alternatives. Drawing upon a Rightful Presence framework and dialogic interviews with 14 educators and 10 school leaders, we sought to understand how street schools foster equitable educational opportunities for their students. Analysis focused on how street schools’ educators and leaders engage in on-going political struggle to support their students’ educational rights. Findings reveal that street schools not only criticize existing structures of the educational system, but also consciously reject them – despite financial consequences.

Authors

• Matthias Fischer, Staatliches Seminar für Didaktik und Lehrerbildung Heidelberg

• Angela Calabrese, University of Michigan