Why Can’t You Hear Me? Youth in Foster Care and Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Adolescents at Risk

Abstract

This interview based study investigates the educational experiences of youth who have been in foster care. The focus of the study is the perspectives of 60 diverse youth and utilises their understandings to explore tensions between the needs of the youth and the expectations of the systems that serve them. Specifically, this study explores how youth characterise culturally appropriate pedagogies, and how they view their status in care as impacting educational attainment. The study found that youth link foster care to how they are treated by teachers and students, that their racial and sexualities further impacted achievement and that there was great tension between the demands placed on them by the child welfare system and that of schooling.

Author

• Lisa W. Loutzenheiser, The University of British Columbia