Resisting playing the dropout: Girl narratives and performances on staying in school

• In Event: Highlighted session: Unlearning gendered lessons: examining curriculum, teaching, measurement, and girls’ and boys’ narratives on schooling

Proposal

The term dropout suggests that young people have dropped out of school on their own volition, and that they are deficient in a fair system. The term pushout proposes that young people leave school because of a myriad of family, school, community, and systemic forces (Fine, 1992; M. Morris, 2016). The majority of young women and men in this study in Zanzibar, Tanzania did not drop out of school, they were pushed out. The reasons that young women and men left school were highly nuanced and highly gendered. Most young women left school after they failed their qualifying exams. Boys largely left because they either felt pressure to get work or they failed their exams.

In this ten-year mixed-methods research, youth are followed over the course of their entire schooling (first grade to secondary). Longitudinal and quantitative data with more than 1,200 youth revealed gendered trends in when and why youth leave school. The popular theater approach, the central methodology, then created a stage for youth to tell their own stories of schooling and their aspirations for their futures. During two-week theater workshops, and six subsequent sessions, a group of 41 males and females from two different school sites wrote individual and collective narratives about their experiences in school. Their narratives were then formulated into an hour-long play performed for their peers. Using narrative inquiry, these stories and theater scripts were analyzed along with interviews with the youth themselves, their parents, and their teachers.

This paper focuses on girls’ narratives and how young women in Zanzibar are pushed and pulled out of school, but also how they have struggled hard to become graduates including taking on sexual harassment. It also looks at their resistance to performing the girl who drops out to get married, or who becomes pregnant, and instead choosing to their collective agency. The young women show how education is not only a means to a job or income, but critical to their own and families’ wellbeing and aspirations; self-concept in their personal, familial, and community lives; faith and religious beliefs; and their futures.

The findings from this empirical study grapple with a number of factors influencing whether young people complete their basic education. These include: family economic needs and situations; proficiency in language of instruction; personal and familial health and wellbeing; peer pressure; sexual harassment; learning disabilities and special needs; and how notions of masculinities and femininities and education are projected around them. At the same time youth dramatize gendered reasons for being pushed and pulled out of school, they also perform collective agency in navigating obstacles and in resisting the pathologizing girlhood and boyhood narratives written about them. Front and center stage, these young give compelling performances of their struggles, but most importantly their confidence in themselves and their futures.

Author

• Emily Morris, University of Minnesota/Independent Researcher