Recuiting experiences from the UK;
Students in the UK were recruited from youth work organisations and schools; they were all working in professional practice. Invitations were extended across youth work organisations and schools in the North West of England and ten people responded. Many of the practitioners had experiences of marginalization themselves, but they were not selected for this reason. This did, however, motivate many of them to join the project. The students from the UK were all registered into an MA module.
Recuiting experiences from Norway
MaCE builds upon USN’s ongoing project, UngSA, which focuses on dropout and completion in upper secondary school, and a project that has had master students contributing for five years. Based on previous experience, we were confident that we had developed satisfactory routines for recruiting and supporting master students. We were slightly unsure about how the BA-students would react to factors like the project’s vocabulary, workload, expectations of participation and so on.
MaCE had access to three bachelor programmes and two master programs at USN. Representatives from the MaCE attended an arrangement of one of the master programmes where several research projects informed the student group about their research, and invited interested students to join in. Other programmes allowed MaCE half an hour of scheduled teaching time to inform and invite students to the project. MaCE received a significant response from the BA-students, and initially, it appeared that nearly 15 students wanted to join. Eventually, some changed their mind for various reasons, and we ended up with eight BA-students. Seven master students wanted to join the project as well, leaving us with a total of 15 co-researchers. This was a greater number of students than what we had expected.
Recuiting experiences from Denmark
Students in Denmark were recruited from the Social Educators Programme at VIA University College and from the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University . The students from VIA University College are BA students and the students from Aarhus University are MA students. Invitations were sent to all Social Educator Programmes in VIA University Colleges, but for the students it proved difficult to balance being a part of the MaCE project and doing their mandatory internships in Denmark. In the first year we recruited 3 BA students and 2 MA students. Evaluations from the 5 enrolled students show that they all benefited both socially, culturally and academically from participating in the MaCE project