With the continual decline of high school graduation rates in South Carolina, there is a need for high schools to look at alternative pathways to graduation. Many of the current alternatives offered to students remove them from the high school setting or interactions with the student body. This study focused on an alternative pathway to…

Parental choice remains a central theme in education policy in England. Parents have the right to choose how their children are educated. For some families this choice is surrendered, with volition and intention, to their local authority which allocates school places after parents, statutory guardians and families have made their decisions. Where…

Centering the experiences and expertise of students who have gone through non-degree programs and pathways is critical to developing policy that effectively and equitably promotes credential attainment and economic mobility. Students can provide important insights into gaps and barriers created by existing public policies and how policymakers can…

Understanding how farmers prefer to learn is critical for the development and delivery of successful extension programming. Therefore, Michigan State University Extension specialists conducted an interactive hands-on demonstration workshop (Potato University) addressing pressing issues to Michigan potato production at the Michigan Winter Potato…

Contextual definitions of success are situated within specific schools and informal learning environments and, within those situated contexts, impact the identities that youth develop. This article explores what it means to be successful outside of mainstream education and the resources youth use to reorient to alternative definitions of success,…

In this multilevel meta-analysis the outcomes of adolescents with complex problems at risk for school drop-out attending nonresidential alternative educational facilities were examined. Ten studies (87 effect sizes), examining outcomes on social-emotional functioning, academic achievement, academic attitude, externalizing and internalizing…

The American School Counselor Association calls upon school counselors to address the needs of all students; this includes students once served in DAEPs. However, the experiences and perspectives of school counselors working with students re-entering school after a mandatory DAEP placement is not widely understood. Employing a qualitative design,…

This study explores the relationship between teacher caring, teacher job satisfaction, and burnout in Kentucky alternative school teachers. The methodology was a cross-sectional, correlational web-based survey. Instrumentation included the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI), Teven's Teacher Self-Report of Caring Survey, and the Teacher Job…

We define community education as organized lifelong learning through voluntary participation in collective efforts to critically address both individual and community needs. Community education has roots in European folk schools, United States participatory democracy, and Latin American "popular education." Community education developed…

Alternative education (AE) settings support students with significant social-emotional and behavioral needs. Such settings often implement individualized programming; however, this presents challenges with staffing resources and training. Application of systems to address behavior on a schoolwide level could simplify training, increase staffing…

Utilizing the Symbolic Cultural Theory as espoused by Deal and Kennedy (1982), Deal and Peterson (1999, 2016), Bolman and Deal (2003, 2013) and Harris (2005, 2015), this qualitative study explored how cultural symbols support academic and social needs of at-risk students in a selected alternative education setting. The study focused on the…

Today the hope for education goes well beyond a reductionist and modernist approach of knowledge transfer. This research suggests that the experience of being immersed in natural environments can lead to embodied ways of learning and being beyond the Anthropocene and can shape children's innate relationship with nature. We bring together two…

The purpose of this quantitative ex post facto study was to examine if there is a significant difference in mean moral judgment levels of first year undergraduate students after participating in a character development program at a non-traditional program in a university in the southwestern United States. This study included new non-traditional…

There is quite a bit of research on alternative school practices based on those working in the system of those campuses but not enough research has been done from the point of view of the student to determine whether these theoretical practices have merit in producing successful outcomes for students. The literature reports outcomes that…

Many mathematics students require support for learning challenges, such as those invoked by mathematics anxiety. Support for these learning challenges is imparted through personal interactions between the student and the instructor, support staff or their peers. The online delivery of mathematics classes and support meetings reduced the quality of…