L’abandon scolaire en milieu rural marocain : une analyse interactionniste du point de vue des familles

This research addresses the phenomenon of school dropout in Moroccan rural areas by prioritizing the families’ point of view. School dropout is a major issue in developing countries, as mentioned in several UNESCO reports (2005, 2008, 2009, 2011, etc.). Different factors contribute to student dropout: poverty, repetition, academic failure, gender-related cultural effects, schools and instructional quality, child labour, opportunity cost, parents’ illiteracy, etc. (Ananga, 2011; Chedati, 2004; Diagne, 2007; El Aoufi Gouzi, 2006; Naseer et al, 2011;Sabates, Hossain and Lewin, 2010a). The literature review reveals various social and economic consequences, such as increasing rates of illiteracy, non achievement of universal primary education, and high unemployment rates. Most of the studies that have examined this phenomenon mainly resort to an economic approach, thus neglecting the families’ point of view, even the latter are the first stakeholders in their child’s dropout. In addition, these studies are primarily quantitative; they reveal the importance of risk factors but fail to provide an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. To contribute to such understanding, I resorted to the theory of social representations developed by Moscovici (1989), which sheds light on ongoing relations between actors or social groups with respect to social objects such as education. This theory is supplemented by Charlot’s concepts of "relation to school" and "relation to knowledge" (1992) that examine how students and their families are positioned vis-à-vis the process of schooling. The present study was thus guided by the following questions: what are the representations of rural families on Moroccan school, that would participate in the process leading to their child(ren) dropping out? How do they relate to school?  To answer this question, I conducted comprehensive biographical interviews with six families in the rural area of Tidili. I met them separately and they expressed their views on one of their children’s dropout. The verbatim of the interviews were content analyzed using Bardin’s approach (in Negura, 2006). This led us to the identification of two analytical registers, as proposed by Morrissette (2010). The first register is grounded in a descriptive and restitutive logic; it reports the views of families according to two categories: the relation to school and the relation to society. This first register revealed the importance of the relationship between families and teachers in the phenomenon of school dropout. The second register is more conceptualizing, building on an interactionist perspective (Becker, 1982), which allows one to take a cross-cutting look at the results of the first register. It offers a new perspective on the families’ point of view, shedding light on social negotiations that lead to a child dropping out of school; they take the form of "interaction modes" between families and school and social conventions between families and society. These two levels of interaction shed light on the evolutionary dynamics leading to dropout.

Keyphrases: Dropout school, "Relation to school" / "relation to knowledge", Social representations, Interactionist perspective, Interaction modes, Social conventions