The disagreement of perspectives on school disaffiliation at the Mexican high school level

Abstract

In this work, our general objective is to analyze the different factors that intervene in school disaffiliation which are expressed, comparatively, by teachers and students of the High School of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. From a qualitative paradigm, through focus groups and open questionnaires, we accessed these actors’ perspectives on school disaffiliation. Taking distance from the notions of desertion and dropping out of school, we find, among the main findings, that teachers conceive disaffiliation as a phenomenon whose responsibility falls, mainly, on the students themselves and their families. Teachers, with the positions and perceptions they maintain, contribute to shaping the events that determine the stay of young people in school and that contribute to the beginning of the disaffiliation process. The above is conceived as an effect of the conceptual empire of school dropouts and desertion. We also discovered that the students’ view of the phenomenon is broader and more complex, by locating elements that escape teachers, such as everything institutional that is denied to them, among which are failure, lag, and pregnancies.