High school dropouts as a challenge for counselling and student welfare

I describe a Ph.D. research in the works whose objective is to understand the socio-cultural phenomenon of “high school dropouts”, especially the situations in which a student ends up leaving the school without any kind of counselling. The first viewpoint is adults’ experience: how teachers, student counsellors, school psychologists, school social workers and out-reach youth workers describe these drop-out-situations. The second part consists of experiences of youth, both high school students and dropouts. The third part is about developing new practices in student counselling and student welfare in order to develop the high school a better place to study and the high school community easier to fit in. The theoretical framework comes from critical and subject-scientific psychology. Methodologically this research is an action research; as a researcher, I also work as a guidance counsellor in a high school.