Conference Agenda

Across the European Union, countries are reporting alarming levels of “education poverty”, and many education systems have become less successful in ensuring that all students acquire all the skills that they need to thrive in the 21^st century economies (Herrera-Sosa et al., 2018). At the individual level, relational educational poverty manifests as a lack of formal qualifications, which severely restricts participation in a number of areas of social life (Glaesser, 2022). When discussing young people’s skills development and learning outcomes in the context of formal education, school engagement is a centrally important concept.

Generally speaking, school engagement refers to the quality of students’ connection or involvement with schooling (Skinner et al., 2009). In scholarly literature, school engagement is treated as a multi-dimensional concept consisting of cognitive (e.g., investment in learning), emotional (e.g. sense of belonging and positive feelings), and behavioural (e.g., participation in class) aspects (e.g., Blondal & Adalbjarnardottir, 2012) each influencing the others (Virtanen, 2016). School engagement is essential to learning: it correlates with higher achievement and reduces the likelihood of dropping out of school (Fredricks et al., 2004). Higher level of school engagement is associated with better academic competence and performance, staying in school longer and participating in further education, fewer problem behaviours, psychological and social difficulties. Thus, it is highly important for learning outcomes and educational pathways, but also for more general wellbeing (e.g. Virtanen 2016). Moreover, student engagement is associated with a lack of adjustment problems, such as low levels of delinquency involvement, depression, and substance abuse (e.g., Li & Lerner, 2011).

One persistent research finding regarding school engagement – as well as achievement – is the gender difference with girls on average displaying higher levels of school engagement and scoring better than boys (Van Houtte, 2020). However, much less is known about whether the mechanisms of school engagement work the same way for both genders; for instance, whether family’s socioeconomic background (the effects of which on engagement have also been established in several studies; e.g., Linnakylä & Malinen, 2008) is associated in the same way with boys and girls’ engagement, or whether the level of engagement contributes in the same way to their achievement levels.

In this paper, the focus is on the school engagement of Finnish lower secondary school students, particularly on whether there are differences in the associations of school engagement with family socioeconomic status and parental education as well as academic achievement and educational aspirations based on students’ gender. In other words, the study aimed to answer the following three research questions:

1) Is the association of family background with school engagement mediated through parents’ investment in child’s schooling and their aspirations for child’s future education among lower secondary school students?

2) Does school engagement predict students’ academic achievement and educational aspirations?

3) Are there gender differences in the ways in which family background is associated with students’ school engagement or in the ways school engagement predicts students’ academic achievement and educational aspirations?

As school engagement is argued to be more malleable than educational achievement (Virtanen, 2016), it has the potential to narrow the gap between low- and high-achieving students (Woolley & Bowen, 2007) and even to lessen socio-economic disparities in education (Abbott-Chapman et al., 2014; Gorard & See, 2011). Thus, the better we understand the factors contributing to and stemming from school engagement among different groups of students in different educational contexts, the better are our chances to reach these goals of narrowing achievement gaps and socio-economic disparities in Europe and beyond by promoting students’ engagement in schooling – which highlights also the significance of this study.

Peer and gender violence in educational spaces is a worrying reality (1). Specifically, high schools are unsafe spaces for many students and members of the community, especially for vulnerable people, such as women or LGBTI+ youth, who suffer violence in very different forms. For instance, 25% of young women experienced digital violence in the past five years (2); and most LGBT cannot express themselves freely because they suffer more harassment (3). Ending this violence is a European and international priority, as the Fundamental Rights Agency and the Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 4 state.

For decades, a line of research on the eradication of gender-based violence has analysed three ideal models of masculinity. The first two belong to a traditional model: first, there are boys and men of Traditional Dominant Masculinities (DTM) attitudes and behaviours of disdain, taunt, dominance, superiority; among these DTM there are all those who perpetrate violence; second, and in a complementary way, there are those non-violent boys who nonetheless lack self-confidence and strength to step up to violence, following a model of Oppressed Traditional Masculinity (OTM). Research has found that there is a social dominant coercive discourse (4) that passes on the idea that dominant boys and men who follow a DTM model are exciting and fun, while, in parallel, pressures people so that egalitarian men are seen as boring. However, research also recognises the existence of a third model, New Alternative Masculinities (NAM): these are egalitarian, courageous, strong, confident and attractive boys and men, who have a transformative role in the prevention and eradication of gender-based violence because they are brave to stand up against injustice and besides desire and therefore create free, safe, and exciting relationships wherever they go (5).

These NAM boys and egalitarian boys and people in general are promoted in dialogic educational spaces (6), where the type of person who is valued are those who help others and show solidarity. Dialogic gatherings is a Successful Educational Action identified by the INCLUD-ED project of the 6th European Framework program which consists in the previous reading of a text by each participant with the aim of sharing at least one paragraph with the group explaining why they have chosen it, after which an open dialogue is collectively created. Some impacts of dialogic gatherings include improvement in relationships or in academic results (7, 8). Among the different types of dialogic gatherings, the feminist or scientific dialogic gatherings differ in that the text provided needs to show scientific rigour (9, 10).

Within this framework, the present research arose from the question: what impact can dialogic gatherings on New Alternative Masculinities and overcoming violence have on a group of boys and their environment? We found a gap in the literature about this educational action, which has never been investigated worldwide.

To this end, a high school teacher, along with a researcher, decided to start a voluntary dialogic gathering in a high school of Valencia, Spain, in which boys from Secondary Education (from 12 to 17 years old) participate. The moderator of the discussion group is this teacher, who is close to them and with scientific knowledge about dialogic gatherings, NAM, and preventive socialisation of gender violence. This group has met over two periods for the last year every 2-3 weeks to debate different texts related to NAM and the prevention of gender-based violence extracted from The Feminist Diary (El Diario Feminista) (11), whose articles always have a rigorous and scientific evaluation.

The research we present assumes that we are living at a global level an agonistic moment (Mouffle, 2013) for the dispute to establish the meanings that will be considered hegemonic (Gramsci, 1995), where gender and feminist discourses are being central.

While the feminist project (Walby, 2011) and its desire to change everything (Gago, 2019), during the last decade, have been central in the restructuring of social relations that advocate for a democratic transformation in a way that produces effects on state public policies, the reactionary ghosts of the past have once again taken on materiality through increasingly sophisticated devices that produce and reproduce neopatriarchal and neocapitalist subjectivities and discourses (Brown, 2019).

According to Mark Fisher (2014) the overlapping of past eras is now so pervasive that we do not even notice it. The politics of nostalgia (Tanner, 2021) seek to renew the old through the disguise of the ecstasy of novelty. In this context, the slow cancellation of the future (Fisher, 2014) solidifies the distribution of social inequalities.

Education and educational organisations interest us as contexts of transmission of the social world we live in (Arendt, 1996), allowing us to understand how the macro level intervenes in the micro, and vice versa. Among the different educational organisations, the context of Vocational Training and, specifically, the professional family of Vehicle Transport and Maintenance in Valencia (Spain) is chosen in order to understand the ways in which society distributes, classifies and orders that knowledge, physical and symbolic, which it considers valuable, in a way that generates different social groups (Bernstein, 1990).

The vocational family of Vehicle Transport and Maintenance, historically and culturally associated with working-class masculinities, has been used to analyse the characteristics of gender and social class relations The main research question is: what and how are the ideals and representations of gender held by young people studying Vocational Training in Transport and Vehicle Maintenance in Valencia (Spain)?

Out theory is based on gender as a regulatory apparatus of society that operates within social practices by defining the parameters by which some subjects are considered intelligible and others unintelligible in a given context (Butler, 1990). Masculinities are one of the possibilities of performativising gender, being linked to the history of institutions and economic structures. Following Raewyn Connell (1993), they are a social position, a place in gender relations, which has effects on social practices, culture, bodies and subjectivities.

We understand that those who access Vocational Training in Vehicle Transport and Maintenance are learning to be - or to performativise - a certain social position that involves not only learning manual and technological skills, but also a pedagogical form of cultural assimilation and a form of self-representation (Rajan-Rankin, 2017) that materialises in the social life and bodies of young people at the liminal moment of transition to the world of work in the automotive industry in a historical context of deindustrialisation (Nayak, 2003) and crisis in the sector.

Under the neoformulations of patriarchal capitalism and in the face of the loss of control over the production of existence, many young people are left with only the neoliberal fantasy of a future projection where they have access to material and symbolic goods, while at the same time they are wary of being lucky enough to find a paid job. In the words of Michael Kimmel (2019, p. 111):

"(...) in a way, their bloated expectations may be a response to the very different economic climate in which they're coming of age (...) they know that corporations are no longer loyal to their employees (...) So why should they be loyal to the company?"