Abstract
The world faces a growing youth employment crisis: worldwide, young people are three times as likely to be unemployed as adults; and unemployment in youth leads to social exclusion, poor mental and physical health, social unrest, and a pattern of labor disengagement. Research has shown that young people who are at risk of unsuccessful school-to-work transitions experience school as an adverse context. Work-based education (WBE) is one of the most frequently recommended solutions for engaging young people in school while providing a basis for successful transition into meaningful employment. However, while there have been many practical efforts to implement transition systems for at-risk students in a wide range of contexts, there has been limited theoretical accounts of the mechanisms and structures that facilitate successful transitions for vulnerable students. The purpose of this chapter is to develop a person-in-context model with three overlapping domains―the individual, the social-cultural, and the economic-political―that addresses how WBE can promote a context of resilience for at-risk students. Specifically, WBE is held to provide a protective context that enables young people to navigate and negotiate influential facets within each of these domains as they transition from school-to-work. Our practical goal in developing this model is to address the vexing question: Which WBE programs are most likely to lead at-risk students to successful transitions into meaningful work?
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This chapter is from the Co-operative Education Workplace Learning Group’s research program, “Individual and contextual factors in work-based education programs: Diverting at-risk youth from the path to social exclusion,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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DeLuca, C., Hutchinson, N.L., Versnel, J., Dods, J., Chin, P. (2012). Bridging School and Work: A Person-in-Context Model for Enabling Resilience in At-Risk Youth. In: Billett, S., Johnson, G., Thomas, S., Sim, C., Hay, S., Ryan, J. (eds) Experience of School Transitions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4198-0_3
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