School students’ sit-ins as a form of unconventional political demonstration: empirical approach in Lyceums (ISCED 3) of central Macedonia in Greece
Abstract
This paper presents a postdoc research that was carried out in autumn 2015 by school of Politics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki about the students’ sit-ins at secondary education schools. Intheintroduction, the notion of politicalsocializationisexplained and it is associated with the students’ option to sit-in their schools as a form of unconventional political demonstration. Also, the legitimacy of sit-ins is questioned according to the laws that recently were voted by the Greek parliament. The purpose of this research was to examine the factors that influence students to occupy schools every autumn and to describe the profile of the students that act in this way. At the same time, other reasons that may influence these actions were examined, such as the students’ gender, grade and the educational level of their parents. Thesampleconsistedof 991 seniorhighschoolpupilsthatwerecollectedfromschoolsofcentralMacedonia. A questionnaire was used which was completed by senior high school students from the prefectures of Katerini and Thessaloniki. Three causes were analysed which hypothetically are connected with school sit-ins: petitions about the improvement of their everyday life, political and ideological reasons and reasons that are not related with school life. The most important finding of this research is the fact that sit-ins are not ignited by ideological motives. They represent a students’ effort to motivate and sensitize the public about their everyday problems in school. Also, differentiations were observed between the sexes: the girls are presented more politically aware than the boys. The findings of this research stress the fact that most students are in a state of confusion as far as the sit-ins are concerned. Even though younger students have more ideological motives and believe in the political aspect of sit-ins, senior students believe that sit-ins are a habit that gives them a chance to rest and to study at home without being distracted by subjects in which they are not interested.
Article Details
- How to Cite
-
Papaeconomou, A. (2016). School students’ sit-ins as a form of unconventional political demonstration: empirical approach in Lyceums (ISCED 3) of central Macedonia in Greece. Dialogoi! Theory and Praxis in Education, 2, 140–155. https://doi.org/10.12681/dial.10419
- Issue
- Vol. 2 (2016)
- Section
- New researchers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (preferably in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
