The Tools of the Trade: Educational Psychology, Institutional Dynamics, and Practitioner Intervention in Secondary School Dropout (A Systematization of Educational Experiences and Clinical-Institutional Action Research in Youth and Adult Secondary Education)
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: School dropout in Youth and Adult Education is approached here as a structural, multicausal phenomenon of the modern school dispositif — not as an anomaly confined to a single institution. The paper systematizes a Supervised Professional Practicum in educational psychology, conducted in 2018 in the night shift of a secondary school in Paraná, Argentina, under the province's Youth and Adult Education Modality (Resolución N.º 2158, C.G.E.). Drawing on institutional psychoanalysis, critical pedagogy and instrumental-mediational theory, and following the methodology of Systematization of Educational Experiences articulated with Participatory Action Research, the study reconstructs a five-dimensional practitioner toolkit — professional, institutional, situational-operative, specific-operative and technical-instrumental. Vocational guidance is analyzed as a specific-operative device for working on students' relationship to desire, knowledge and future projection, rather than as a theme unrelated to dropout. Two reflective workshops, held with graduating students and with staff, illustrate the toolkit's operative capacity. The paper argues that a clinical-institutional, community-based orientation offers a viable, situated response to institutional malaise in contexts where the psychologist's post remains formally untypified.
Author: Maria Elena Haydee Ponce
Language: English
Topic: Psychology and Mental Health
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7204861339
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