Social representations of school failure in parents and guardians of a school in northern Chile

Abstract

The present research aims to account for the content of the social representation of school failure in parents and guardians of a subsidized private school located in the commune of Iquique in northern Chile. The methodology used was qualitative and consisted of conducting six in-depth interviews during June 2023 with guardians of students who finished the 2019 school year as repeaters. The results of the structural discourse analysis identify a central organizing core that describes school failure as a failure, surrounded by peripheral elements that consider it an unnecessary and replaceable educational policy, whose leading causes are the immaturity of the student and the lack of communication of the parents with their pupil and with the educational institution, and whose main consequence is a positive change in attitude of students and guardians in the following school year. The conclusions address the points of agreement and disagreement between the findings of the study and those of other similar studies that make up state-of-the-art. At the same time, the discussion focuses on the potential of the social representations approach to explore school repetition, allowing for a deeper understanding of its causes, consequences, and meanings.