School and Vulnerable Families
| Autor: | Stephan Sting, Alenka Kobolt, Nada Turnšek |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Center for Educational Policy Studies Journal, Vol 6, Iss 4 (2016) Scopus-Elsevier |
| ISSN: | 2232-2647 1855-9719 |
| Popis: | In many ways, a person's educational path depends on their family background. Families' living conditions and current living situation affect the educational opportunities of children and young people, whose lives are influenced by the problems, inequalities or privileges that stem from their origins.For example, there are differences in families' educational aspirations, i.e., their expectations and demands regarding the children and young people's success in school, and this undoubtedly affects their educational path. In the same way, parents have very different opportunities and a varying capacity for helping their children with school matters. Finally, the sociocultural and habituated dispositions resulting from the way families live their everyday lives are highly relevant to access to education. The family and the school are thus profoundly interdependent.Within every family, a "family-specific habitus" develops, which depends on how families are involved in their milieu and extends beyond socialisation processes to produce a kind of "basic education", comprising of specific capabilities for action, preferences and adopted lifestyles (Brake & Buchner, 2011; Ecarius 2013; Grundmann et al., 2010). These family-related adopted lifestyles correspond to the behavioural expectations of schools in varying degrees. The expectations include factors such as students' rationality, cognitive approach, diligence, forward planning and capacity for considered communication. Depending on their milieu, families may meet these behavioural expectations to various extents, leading some students to have problems fitting into the school system (Lange & Xylander 2011, 23; Sting 2016, 128). At the same time, families' habituated dispositions meet with varying levels of social acceptance, greater or lesser degrees of social recognition and prestige. Bourdieu's studies on the socially differentiating function of the habitus showed that family lifestyles are one element of a hierarchical set of social positions that produce unequal educational opportunities (Bourdieu, 1994). For the acquisition of legitimate education, an unequal background in terms of habitus goes hand in hand with an unequal socioeconomic background, which considerably limits the opportunities of low social status families to attain advanced levels of education.Recent international educational studies have all shown a connection between family background and scholastic success. In the countries these studies investigate, links can be seen between the social status of children and young people's families and their educational opportunities. Although these links vary in extent, one thing is clear: education and social support systems manage to reduce background-related educational inequalities to varying degrees (c.f., for example, Hartas, 2011; OECD, 2016, 74-89; OECD, 2016a, 63-78). One group that is the focus of particular attention is vulnerable families.This special edition of the CEPS Journal, dedicated to vulnerability, clearly reflects the needs of our time: it comes at a point when the state is shirking its responsibility towards the vulnerable and underprivileged, when discourse on shouldering personal responsibility for one's own fate has intensified, and when responsibility for vulnerable families has shifted onto non-governmental, volunteer and philanthropic organisations.Vulnerable families usually suffer from two levels of disadvantage: firstly, they mostly have a low social status, and secondly, they are affected by acute or chronic problems or crises that impact their involvement in and willingness to deal with school requirements. The contributions in this edition address the pressing need for collective responsibility and the concerted action of all experts and institutions in the fields of education, social care and health.Contemporary work on vulnerability is currently facing a number of contradictions. Even though the understanding that priority should be given to policies and approaches that address the needs of the vulnerable in a holistic manner has been widely accepted, the various services and organisations very rarely communicate with one another, and infrequently share their experiences and findings or discuss the challenges and dilemmas that they encounter; they seldom establish common, intersecting areas of work or interdisciplinary response practices. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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