Slik elevene ser det. En kvalitativ undersøkelse av hvordan noen frafallselever opplevde lærer-elevrelasjonen på videregående skole

Summary The topic of this master thesis is relationships between teachers and students who dropped out of upper secondary school. The research question is: “How did students who dropped out of school experience their relationship with the teacher?” There are several reasons for choosing this subject. Around 30 % of the students in upper secondary school have not completed after five years (Markussen, Frøseth, Lødding, & Sandberg, 2008). We also find that the problems are worst in vocational studies where only 40 % of the students complete at the stipulated time (Hernes, 2010). At the same time there has been an increasing focus on the importance of student-teacher relationship related to student outcome. On the other hand, this dimension has met little attention in research concerning dropout (Cornelius-White, 2007). This study aims to examine how some students who dropped out of school experienced the relationship between the teacher and themselves. Both international and national research on dropout will be presented and discussed (Markussen et al. 2008; Lamb, Markussen, Teese, Sandberg & Polesel, 2011). The theoretical framework will present the teacher-student relationship as a dyadic system (Pianta, 2006), before important components such as communication, trust, recognition, power, didactics, classroom management and motivation will be presented. The data is collected through qualitative interviews with research subjects. A total of eight former students from four different schools were interviewed. Trough this work it has been important to get at deeper understanding of the subjects experiences, and to interpret the meaning of their stories. The findings indicate that several of my informants have experienced difficult periods in their lives, but that former relationship experiences didn’t affect their experiences of the relationship with the teacher in upper secondary school. The informants viewed themselves as young adults who wanted to achieve this role, but at the same time they needed teachers who took responsibility for their needs. Few of the informants had conversations with their teacher concerning their wish to drop out of school either before or after they did. This can be related to the fact that several of them found it difficult to communicate with their teacher. Finally my findings indicate that the informants experienced that the teachers classroom management skills wasn’t sufficient enough, while the teaching was characterized by un