Out of the Mouths of Babes: Voices of At-Risk Adolescents

Abstract

rofessional educators and public figures have had much to say in an attempt to educate us in dynamics of family systems, addiction, and abuse and their impact on group identified as The media has been quite graphic in its depiction of children who rear themselves when parents fail them. Newspapers, television, and radio outlets are frequently consumed with stories of crime, disease, poverty, loss of hope, and absence of heroes. In past, dropout theory has linked dropping out with student's background. Over time, concept of dropping out has evolved into concept of at-risk, which focuses on potential for dropping out. Dropping out is an event in a long series of life stresses. All students are at risk, but for some students, at a certain point, risk becomes simply too high. In addition to being confronted with background obstacles, students experience negative forces in schools themselves. Those forces or impediments include lack of intrinsic rewards, teacher obsession with covering curriculum, technical definitions of knowledge, mechanical perceptions of success, and a lack of variety in teaching styles. Nearly everyone, from politicians to teaching professionals, has had something to say about how to help those students walk across the bridge to twenty-first century, but voice that has consistently been missing from dialogue is that of adolescents. An in-depth ethnographic study of eleven at-risk young women, aged 15 to 17, was recently conducted at a high school in a middle…