(I sit there trying to keep my posture, continue my notes, not looking at him and ..... part of learning rather than objects of control (Davies & Laws, 2011).
Reference: Zsuzsa Millei & Eva Bendix Petersen (2014) Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’ Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2014.947097 TITLE Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’ AUTHORS Zsuzsa Millei and Eva Bendix Petersen School of Education, University of Newcastle (Australia) ABSTRACT When educators consider ‘student behaviour’ they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out-‐of-‐control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian poststructuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex; as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.
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“The topic of how to manage student behavior (i.e., a clearly defined and observable act) in schools has been around as long as there have been schools. Behavior management has been and still is the chief concern of educators across the country (Dunlap, Iovannone, Wilson, Kincaid, & Strain, 2010; Westling, 2010). When students misbehave, they learn less and keep their peers from learning. Classroom behavior problems take up teachers’ time and disrupt the classroom and school. In fact, difficulty managing student behavior is cited as a factor associated with teacher burnout and dissatisfaction. For example, “50 percent of urban teachers leave the profession within the first five years of their career, citing behavior problems and management as factors influencing their decision to leave” (McKinney, Campbell-‐Whately, & Kea, 2005, p. 16). More should be done to create effective classroom environments through the use of better classroom management approaches (McKinney et al., 2005; Westling, 2010).” (Martella, Nelson, Marchand-‐Martella & O’Reilly, 2012, p. 3)
Introduction Discipline, according to Branson and Miller (1991), emerged as a distinct educational concern in the process that subdivided ‘Western intellectual activity’ into smaller and smaller specialist areas during the twentieth century. These micro-‐areas, such as school teaching and pre-‐service training, have subsequently gained scientific legitimacy, built their body of expertise and trained their new experts. While discipline in the first decades of twentieth aimed at morally moulding children “towards righteousness” (Belding, 1928, p. 498), evolving teaching practices shifted its aim to ensure an environment for teaching. Discipline appeared as a significant knowledge area in the further subdivided field of teaching practice. It became “a method for student control” in isolation from other aspects of schooling or broader socio-‐political changes (Branson & Miller, 1991, p. 175). The developing expert knowledge of discipline received its first strong impetus after the Second World War. Troubled with people’s lack of resistance towards autocratic control during the War and reasoned as the product of children ‘s autocratic control in schools, democratic forms of discipline took shape (Slee, 1995, Millei, 2010). Subsequently, during the 1980s with legislations that outlawed corporeal punishment in schools, expert knowledges on discipline have received further incentives, moved into the field of education psychology and fused particularly with child development knowledges, learning theory and counselling (Millei, Griffiths & Parkes, 2010). The purpose and key importance of discipline to the professional work of teachers has changed little until today (Gore & Parkes, 2008; Blakely Keat, 2008). Parallel with this significance, problems associated with disruption and defiance in the classroom are still perceived as difficult to solve. Moreover, it is argued that discipline problems often lead to teacher burnout and considered as indicative of a lack of teacher competence (Clunies-‐Ross, Little and Kienhuis, 2008). To aid teachers’ work, the field of mainstream educational psychology produces a constant stream of novel behaviour management theories, strategies and evaluations. These are based on behavioural, cognitive, psychotherepautic and socio-‐cultural orientations and use statistical and qualitative assessments1. Easy step-‐by-‐step guides to behaviour management that are illustrated with case 1
For a review and Foucauldian critique of these theories see Millei (2010).
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studies drawn from classrooms are published in large volumes. They all aspire to give an efficient and hands-‐on treatment to problems of defiance and disruption and to provide teachers with a much-‐welcomed ‘sigh of relief’, but problems with children’s behaviour persist. Stifled by this quest that focuses on ‘fixing’ problems with ‘behaviour in children’, since the problem seems to be located there, locks the field in an impasse. While numerous inventions have brought novel ways in dealing with inappropriate behaviour, the field remains remarkably untouched by a growing body of critique that address discourses of behaviour management (e.g. Slee, 1995; Hunt, 2000; Laws and Davies, 2000; Millei, 2005; Gore & Parkes, 2008; Raby, 2008) and its overly narrow focus on the individual or the local school environment rather than placing discipline in the field of social thought and wider societal changes (Branson & Miller, 1991; Millei, Griffiths & Parkes, 2010), and troubles and re-‐ conceptualises the taken-‐for-‐granted assumptions embedded in its discursive constitutions and operations (e.g. Laws and Davies, 2000; Billington, 2000; Araújo, 2005; Graham, 2007; Millei, 2010, 2012) There are two aspects common to all behaviour management approaches. First, they keep to the well-‐entrenched thinking that considers student behaviour in need of teacher control (Millei, 2005). In this discourse the child appears as a humanist rational subject, who can make a choice between acting in line with dominant discourses of being ‘good’ and ‘behaving appropriately’ or going against these. Consequently, the ‘competent’ child is the one who makes the right choice (Hunt, 2000). If a student exhibits ‘unreasonable’ behaviour, the teacher’s role is to manage or control this behaviour to keep it within the ‘reasonable’ limits. The second common aspect to all behaviour management approaches is their association with “discursive frame[s] that grants meaning and duration to a child’s conduct. Within this frame, individual actions come to be read as ‘signs’ of a more enduring problem“ (MacLure and Jones, 2008, p. 3). These frames are, for example, associated with a child’s ethnic or class background (e.g. as critiqued by Araujo, 2005), the medicalization of students (e.g. as explored by Graham, 2007), the personal characteristics of the child, such as being manipulative or attention seeking (e.g. as discussed by MacLure and Jones, 2008), or developmental discourses that construct misbehaviour as exuberance ‘naturally’ associated with their young age or stage of development, or part of an ‘abnormal’ developmental course (e.g. as theorised and critiqued by Burman, 2008). In sum, the origin, cause and treatment of misbehaviour is located in children. In mainstream behaviour management discourses, such as those exemplified with the opening quote, ordered children and classrooms create foundations for learning to take place and are considered critical in achieving learning outcomes (e.g. Oliver & Reschly, 2007; Martella et. al, 2012). The voluminous behaviour management literature (comprehensively summarised by Keat, 2008) offer many strategies that pre-‐empt misbehaviour or defiance to occur in classrooms. For instance, they suggest having child development knowledge to offer Developmentally Appropriate Practices (Bredekamp, 1987) that are ‘suitable’ for children’s age, using tasks that engage each student or designing positive and supportive environments. The key assumptions are therefore that maintaining a ‘controlled’ classroom and/or preventing disruption and defiance allow teachers to teach and, as a consequence, children to learn. In other words, ‘right’ behaviour (order and control)
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comes before, or is a necessary prerequisite for, learning. Others argue that the ‘right’ pedagogy results in ‘right’ behaviour, that is, by developing a stimulating and engaging curriculum that motivates children to focus on tasks and using various developmentally appropriate learning strategies, good behaviour (and teacher control) will follow (e.g. Porter, 2007; Gore and Parkes, 2008). In other words, effective teaching engages students and therefore they will not misbehave. In both cases it seems that learning and behaviour are conceptualised as somewhat separate. The ‘observed behaviour’ is rarely seen as part of learning except when children learn to control their behaviour, when they follow teacher instruction to use their ‘listening ears’ better, for example. As Porter (2007, p. 3) argues in the opening sentences of her theoretical book on discipline, “[t]teaching young people self-‐discipline is not a diversion from ‘real’ teaching but is integral to it”. In all instances, though, having a controlled classroom constitutes teachers as ‘in control’ of their work and is regarded a strong indicator of their competency (Millei, 2005). In her review of four decades of textbook and research literature recommendations of behaviour management, Keat (2008, p. 155) identifies three common themes entrenched in the ‘unsolvable problem’ of defiant and challenging behaviour that teachers find “less comfortable embracing: control, power, and anger”. She claims that teachers are “unwilling to use strategies that seem to give over control [and power] to young children; instead, many teachers assume that they must tighten their control over the defiant child as a way of helping all the children” (Keat, 2008, p. 159). This understanding of ‘power’, that teachers should and could share, locates power with teachers and teachers therefore are positioned as ‘in control’ or ‘not in control’ and act as ‘traders of power’ (willingly or less willingly) to maintain control in their classrooms. Teacher ‘power’ over students understood in this sense is a central problem of behaviour management that has triggered the continuous development of theories and approaches since the 1950s. Replacing autocratic methods of classroom discipline, democratic or ‘egalitarian’ theories aim to share power, such as contemporary guidance theories or positive approaches to student behaviour (Porter, 2007). They (ostensibly) pass on the power to students to regulate their own behaviour, to regain their ‘autonomy’ and become ‘self-‐governed’ (Grolnick, 2003). However, if power is understood as relational and as something that exists between rather than in subjects, as proposed by Foucault (1980), the possibility of ‘trading’ power as a commodity is questioned. As such poststructuralist thought in the field of ‘behaviour management’ attempts to trouble the taken-‐for-‐granted assumptions that in some sense seem to keep the field hostage, and it also offers new ways of seeing, feeling and acting. In the following we will first present our Foucault-‐inspired ways of thinking about behaviour and learning, and after that put these conceptualisations (and affects) to use in the analysis of two scenarios involving pre-‐school aged children to illustrate our theoretical proposal. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the shift from understanding behaviour as separate from learning to ‘behaviour-‐as-‐learning’ and the possibilities that poststructural readings of children’s learning this way presents for teachers. Shifting the gaze from behaviour or learning to behaviour-‐as-‐learning
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In this paper we explore what it means to bring Foucauldian thought to teachers’ understanding of ‘student behaviour’, both in terms of the understanding and the practices that it evokes. As Foucault (1977, np.) reminds us, thought is never ‘just’ theoretical. He writes: As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action – a perilous act. In that way the very way that we think about ‘behaviour’ is already a particular form of action, even a political act. Despite mainstream psychology’s continuing claims to descriptive objectivism, the notions of behaviour it offers are normative, disciplinary and prescriptive, and should be regarded as such, even before specific directives regarding correct management are laid out. As various poststructuralist researchers in Education have argued (Harwood, 2006; Millei, 2005; Laws and Davies, 2000), viewing behaviour through a Foucauldian lens entails not only troubling taken-‐for-‐granted notions of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ behaviour by asking how forms of conduct, understood as actions, desires, thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. (Rose, 1999) appear as (un)desirable and (non)commendable in particular times and places, and interrogating the rationalities or regimes of truth that they carry and promote, but also seeing how student conduct is tied up with the formation of subjects and subjectivity. The implications hereof are many and varied. One implication is that we have to understand the concept of behaviour itself differently. Not, as in the most narrow sense, a response brought on by a stimulus, or as an observable exploit that an individual is responsible for, or even as a necessarily conscious choice, but as something rather different. In a Foucauldian perspective student conduct is embodied action governed by available discourses, and conduct needs to be understood as actions within/against these discourses. Further, conduct is always already ‘read’, that is, interpreted through or, rather, constituted by operative discourses. Therefore, when things happen in classrooms, canteens, assembly halls, toilets and playgrounds the place to start is to interrogate the discursive formations that make those spaces and that govern movement, thought, feeling and being within/against those spaces. As is well known, Foucault’s (1972) concept of discourse is broader than common usage of the term would have it, as discourse here is understood as social-‐material-‐historical-‐ linguistic practices that constitute the objects of which they speak. Discourses carry and are carried by ‘regimes of truth’, that is, formations that stipulate what can and cannot be thought, known, said, felt and done. They denote the limits of acceptable speech and action (Butler, 1997a). Consequently, rather than considering behaviour as congruent or incongruent, for example, with some developmental norm or with a student’s innate personality – which is the kind of teacher assessments often heard – Foucauldian thought does not assume ‘a doer behind the deed’, so to speak. The notion that students come to us as already formed individuals within certain fixed
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personality traits, intelligences, behaviours or whatever it might be, is problematised. Rather, students are viewed as formed precisely through the constitutive work they are subject to, that is, what teachers, parents, peers and others might say that they are (and act upon them as if they are), what the material-‐spatial formations they are subject to stipulate that they are, and also, of course, through the ‘selving-‐work’ students undertake themselves to become ‘somebody’ or even a particular kind of somebody (Davies, et al. 2001; Kofoed, 2008). In this the concept of subjectification becomes important. The poststructuralist concept of subject formation or, rather, ‘subjectification’ entails that subjects, ‘individuals’, come to be through a double movement of power. As Butler explains, As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates it, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are […] Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency” (1997b:1-‐2). Therefore, in the process of becoming somebody on terms never chosen, the student becomes somebody who can act within and against the world and the constitutive work he or she encounters. The formation of subjectivity, understood both as the process of becoming a culturally intelligible and acceptable subject and becoming a particular kind of ‘individual’ (which is a particularly pervasive contemporary requirement), is an on-‐going accomplishment for children as well as adults. If we understand, then, that children are faced with working out what the limits of intelligibility and acceptability are, in ways both similar and different to adults, then it becomes compelling to shift the focus from behaviour as separate from learning to behaviour-‐as-‐learning. Seeing behaviour as separate from learning, from subject formation and from the reproduction of power/knowledge relations, immediately places the teacher in a position of judgement, whether the behaviour is normal/praiseworthy, etc., whereas seeing behaviour-‐as-‐learning instantly invites the teacher to ask analytical questions about what the student might be attempting to figure out, or might be exploring, how this exploration relates to their on-‐going selving-‐work and how it relates to the formation of them as a particular kind of person by others. Rather than seeing ‘behaviour’ the shift entails seeing learner subjectivity in process; a becoming-‐other. There are very few readily available explicit poststructural definitions of learning. The field of learning theory in Education continues to be dominated by cognitive and/or information-‐processing theories, and social learning theory and cultural-‐historical theory to account for the ‘social’ aspect of learning. A poststructural learning theorisation, however, would have to begin by problematising the
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taken-‐for-‐granted mainstream divisions between the cognitive, the neurological, the somatic, the emotional, and the social, and ask how these historically contingent formations (and separations) came about and came to make sense. We would have to ask what gets recognised as what by whom and when and to what effect. In that sense, poststructuralist theorising is less about advocating a ‘holistic’ approach than questioning what the effects are of dividing being into distinct (disciplinary) realms, but also questioning whether we ever have unmediated access to any of these realms outside of the discourses that are available to us. Can we know the cognitive outside of the social; can we know the affective or the emotional outside of the discursive? On all accounts, when observing an incident in any educational context, the poststructually informed observer would therefore not immediately classify this incident, for example, as an instance of a preoperational child displaying the typical characteristics of egocentrism, rigidity of thought, limited social cognition and so on. We would not assume the child to be an incomplete adult, on a pre-‐set developmental journal to becoming this complete adult, and we would not assume learning to be instances of ‘cognitive leaps’ towards a more correct way of understanding phenomena. Learning, rather, is a process of exploring the operative rules and mores, the texture and limits of available discourses and subject positions, and of finding a place within/against these, of becoming a subject and becoming a person, again and again, in the process (Davies, et al. 2001). In some strands of post/anti-‐developmental psychology infused with ideas of the sociology of childhood, it is asserted that the child is (already) ‘competent’ in the meaning that the child is not so different to the adult as previously considered. However, this notion of the child still maintains psychology’s focus on its traditional liberal humanist subject, that is, the child, his or her behaviour, mind, mental life and so on (Forrester, 1999). In light of the poststructural theorising we offer here, competence however takes on a specific meaning. It is not so much that an already competent-‐ understood-‐as-‐finished/already-‐adult child-‐subject enters the scene, but it is certainly a child who is a part and parcel of operative discursive practices. This child is already experienced with working out what goes with what and what doesn’t go with what, and so on (Davies, 1989), and it is a subject who, like anyone else, is in the process of changing, practicing, expanding, refining, or troubling their discursive repertoires and competencies in regard to what it means to be a subject here and now; what it means to be a knowing subject, a feeling subject, an acting subject. What, for instance, might it feel like to be ‘a child excited by his birthday coming up’ (well-‐meaning adults asking ‘are you excited about your birthday tomorrow?’); what is the appropriate way to feel, what is the appropriate way to display this kind of feeling, or how does one express that one does not know how to feel about it, or even express dismay that one is required to feel in a particular way? In this it becomes clear that emotionality itself is a historically contingent performativity. Furthermore, as feminist poststructuralists remind us (e.g. MacNaughton, 1995), this self-‐work around subjectivity are also always intersected by the work of social categories – how does one feel about this as a boy/girl/black/white/Australian/Chinese etc subject? In that way learning is a process of self-‐ (trans)formation. Our perspective aligns quite closely with a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ as suggested by Yates and Hiles (2010). They write:
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We seek here, then, to identify the manner in which people actively relate to themselves as beings with certain identities, and to their environment; the ways they are incited to constitute themselves as beings with certain rights, responsibilities, obligation, needs, and so on; how they act upon themselves and shape their own lives and their own conduct; and the rationalities according to which they do so. This involves highlighting the forms of knowledge, the discourses, which people draw upon in recognizing themselves as certain types of being, in referring to themselves as individuals, and through which they recognize ideals by which they direct their own conduct and assign a moral force to their lives and their actions (p. 66). In the next section we will apply the perspective briefly outlined here and put it to use as an analytical strategy. The hope is to illustrate how shifting the gaze from ‘fixing behaviour’ to analysing what is going on in terms of the constitution of (learner) subjectivities has the potential to change teachers’ (and students’) ‘business-‐as-‐usual’ modes of thought and action, and in that open up new possibilities for becoming and being for both the adults and children involved. Classroom observation The following is an observation, which Zsuzsa recorded as part of extended fieldwork during 2003-‐ 2004 in a Western Australian preschool. The preschool room included a Teacher, an Assistant and 20 five-‐year old children. The children have finished their rest time where they were lying on separate mattresses and quietly listened to some music. Rest time is followed by activities set on tables. The children and teachers are getting organised for that and begin to occupy seats around tables. Teacher: Let’s see which is going to be the first group ready. [She goes to the boy called Calum and asks him, leaning towards him] What do you have to do darling? What did I say? Put your … [waits two seconds, as if waiting for an answer] mat away [slowly articulating each syllable]. Chelsie, what did I asked you to do? [Children are busily packing away their pillows] [10 sec] Which group is going to be ready? It’s going to beeeeee … wellllll … I think the orange group is nearly ready. (I am sitting at one of the tables set-‐up for children’s activities with a small microphone before me. I am busy making notes. Calum comes up to me and talks right into the microphone by holding it in his hand) Calum: Don’t believe my ling along (not sure what he is saying) (He acts as if he wants to look straight into my eyes by leaning forward but I am still focused and looking down to continue my note taking. He continues talking into the microphone). Calum: no, nou, nouou. Teacher: Rosie we are waiting for you too. We are waiting for… Let’s see who is ready? I think the orange group is ready. [The teacher looks around waiting and observing children getting to their tables and seats]. Teacher: Let’s see who is ready?
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(In the meantime Calum still stands in front of me with the microphone in his hand and while looking at me says): Calum: No be quiet! Put the pencils down! And take all your clothes off! Even your pants, even your bras, even you daims (?) even your knickies! (I sit there trying to keep my posture, continue my notes, not looking at him and seemingly not paying attention as a non-‐participant observer is supposed to do. Children are still getting organised around their activity table (30 seconds pass). The teacher notices Calum holding my microphone and comes up to us and grabs him by his arm). Calum: No, Nou [shouts]. I’m sorry, you have to sit in the yellow chair. (The yellow chair is for ‘time-‐ out’ and is located at the back of the class next to where the teacher assistant has her space and table set up). Teacher: Uhm, Mrs. K. (assistant), I am going to put Caleb in the yellow chair. Assistant: Calum. [The Teacher leads him by his hand to the back of the class to the yellow chair while saying] Teacher: I am very sorry to do this. You need a bit of slowing down and you have to sit in the yellow chair. OK. Good boy. Calum: No [shouts] [He tries to get his hand out of the teacher’s hand. The Teacher carries Calum to the yellow chair by holding her arms around him. He strongly resists by struggling to get out of her hold. The Assistant comes over, grabs Calum’s arm and pulls him toward the chair]. Assistant: Sit down, sit down please, sit down, sit down. [The Assistant forces him to sit by holding his shoulders and pushing them down. As soon as the Assistant leaves, Calum stands up and leaves the chair, walks toward the front of the class and then, when he notices that the Assistant is observing him, he sits down at his group’s table. The assistant takes no action but says:] Assistant: Sit down at your group’s table. A reading of this scenario informed by mainstream behaviour management theory would have us see a child who is not behaving appropriately in the transition between rest time and activity time. He is not getting into the teacher’s game of ‘who is first’. We might also see an attention and power-‐ seeking child, who acts in inappropriate ways towards the visiting observing adult, by playing with her microphone, attempting to manipulate the direction of her gaze and then by telling her what to do. In other words, we see a child making inappropriate choices. We would probably also see a defiant child, who refuses to comply with the teacher’s demand to go to and sit down on the yellow chair, and then, who disobeys both the adult authorities in the room by not staying in the chair but getting up and joining his table as if nothing had happened. The mainstream reading would also likely lead to a conclusion that this is an example of unsuccessful behaviour management. A child was out of control and control was only momentarily established only to be lost again (despite an attempt at recuperating it by reinforcing what the child had already chosen to do himself). The child won over the teachers, the teachers lost face, and the child (and possibly all the children there) probably learned a (unhelpful) lesson about what he can get away with in this classroom.
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Immediately, we would begin to identify the various things the teachers should have known and have done to prevent the situation from happening in the first place and/or how they should have acted in the situation, and/or how they ought to manage this kind of situation in future. Reading the scenario through the poststructuralist framework provided earlier we would attempt to rid ourselves of, or at least to question, the various ‘business-‐as-‐usual’ assumptions and affects that we can find ourselves trapped in. We could, for example, begin with a simple displacement in gaze2. The usual reading would have us focus on Calum in the first instance, or the teachers, but what happens if we start by analysing the observer and the discourses this position mobilizes as a catalyst for self-‐(trans)formation? As she notes, the observer is taking up as her own discourses around what it means to be the ideal non-‐participant observer doing fieldwork in relation to a scholarly study. This particular embodiment involves ignoring Calum when he turns up, ignoring his questions and actions, and continuing with the note taking, and not catching his eye3. Pretending as if Calum is not happening. In that way she is playing a particular role following a particular script as it is laid out in the typical subject position of non-‐participating researcher. While she accomplish herself on those terms, Calum, perhaps confronted with this adult subject position for the first time, could be seen to explore the texture and limits of that subject position and its impact on him and the subject positions (as child, as boy, as pupil, etc) that he has previously taken up as his own, and that adults have responded to in their take-‐ups of other, perhaps more familiar, adult subject positions. Who or what is this adult that does not respond to him? In the exploration, Calum demonstrates that he knows the usual scripts played by adults in this context – the commands about what to do (be quiet, put your pencils down (he can even predict that the yellow chair will be put to use before the teacher has declared it)), and he mixes this with an interesting further demand, likely sourced from elsewhere, of the observer to take off her clothes, including her bra and knickers. In this he could be exploring the limits of the disengaged observer position (when will this adult react?), the limits of the adult-‐child relationship (who can tell who what to do, who can control the microphone?), and scripts around gender and heterosexuality (I am a boy who knows women wear bras and knickers). 2
This displacement is of course limited by the data we have access to, which already compels a particular focus. The observation could have, for instance, focussed on what the other children were doing at the time or how the room was laid out, or other kinds of foci. 3
Looking at the scenario from the point of emotions another layer appears. Calum might have felt that he was unfairly treated. He felt probably embarrassed, because the yellow chair obviously had some significance in the classroom and he did not desire (the humiliation) of being made to sit there while many of his classmates observed him being forcefully moved there. His arm was probably hurting. The teacher and assistant had gone to lengths to discipline him so they might have felt frustrated. The way they dealt with the situation was probably not their first choice and they probably felt guilty about imposing such autocratic and physical methods to move him to the position on the yellow chair. At the same time Zsuzsa, the observer, tried to remain indifferent throughout the whole exchange but later regretted somewhat this position. If she had responded to Calum’s earlier questions, he might not have gotten singled out by the teacher and subsequently disciplined. She felt guilty and disappointed with her own behaviour and thought that in a way it is her fault that Calum was punished.
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In short, we could see this as a learning process where both the observing adult and the child are busy working out requirements and expectations of themselves and the other. The teacher and the assistant react to the situation in familiar ways. Calum is apprehended, physically but with an apology (I am sorry to do this…) and a ‘reasonable reason’ (but you have to slow down), followed up by a positive reinforcement (Good boy). New behaviour management theory has it that it is superior to the ways of the autocratic old precisely in that, whilst it too uses physical force, it is done with regret (physical force is bad and should be apologised for), with respect for the person (respect shown through the apology and through the giving of a ‘good’ reason (contrary to physical force without good reason)) and through encouragement and positivity (rewarding cooperation rather than demeaning the child). The objective of the exercise is to get Calum to comply and join in in the stipulated learning activities – not pursue the learning process that he himself had instigated. In their response, Calum is negated as a competent child (due to the lack of compliance and making ‘unreasonable’ choices) and as someone who is further developing his competencies and subjectivities. Of course, as the teacher reads and responds to a child’s ‘behaviour’, the teacher is enmeshed in a discursive field that is dominated by particular psychology-‐based discourses of behaviour management (much as the observer is enmeshed in discourses of ‘scientificity’). According to one of these discourses, the teacher could shape her understanding of the situation, which is obviously adopted by the teacher and assistant, and work within a reward and punishment behaviourist framework. According to discursive framework however the assistant failed to ensure that Calum ‘suffers’ through the punishment by sitting in isolation without anything to do for an extended period of time. The teacher could also draw upon child development discourses, such as lacking competency in following rules or not yet reaching moral development milestones, described in Piaget and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and understanding rules that routine activities, such as transitions build upon. Understanding the scenario from this discursive framework, Calum is unable to grasp the rules of the group/activity at hand and to help that the teacher could repeat the series of actions composing this transition. The teacher perhaps could complement this with some moralizing about the virtues of collaboration and helping each other so the work is done quickly and everyone is happy. The teacher could also draw on neuroscientific discourses that support the need of rest time to decrease cortisol levels in children correlated with stress and upholds children having short attention spans. Working within this discursive construction, the teacher could remind some children frequently what they need to do, perhaps introduce a healthy diet or ban particular children from watching TV since those are also correlated to short attention span in this discourse. If drawing on medical discourses, the teacher could conclude that Calum has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder. In this case, punishment will fail offering the required result and perhaps Ritalin becomes the solution. As it is demonstrated in this example, Calum’s body, no matter which discursive framework the teacher engages with, will endure particular disciplinary effects, such as his arm
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hurting and sitting on a chair and feeling shame. Undergoing moral teaching Calum’s soul will be disciplined to act in morally right ways and will feel valueless to the group. Governed by neuroscience discourses Calum’s body will endure a healthy diet regime and he will be regulated not to watch TV. Psychotic drugs will further regulate his body, according to the medical discourse, and will potentially reshape his personality. Being ‘trapped’ in these available discourses, the teacher is compelled to view a scenario and act on the above described terms and to understand her role to be one of ‘managing it’ in order to maintain control of the classroom. The teaching-‐as-‐usual scripts lay out possible responses in circumscribed ways, yet as we will discuss below it is possible to exceed the discourses that hold us as teachers (Laws and Davies, 2000). A home observation The following is an observation made by Zsuzsa of an incident that took place at home when her daughter, whom we have called Miriam here, was three years old. Miriam often goes into her room and closes her door after forcefully stressing ‘No one should disturb me’. Once a crayon drawing appeared on the wall. As she was asked about those drawings she said: M: ‘George did those drawings. He is very naughty. You should tell him off’. She says all this with a straight face. George is an adult family friend who sometimes looks after Miriam and her sister and on those occasions he slept in Miriam’s room and Miriam slept in her sister’s room. When George came next to visit, Miriam confronted him: M: ‘Why did you draw on my wall? It is not nice, you know’. George, knowing he did no such thing, started to laugh and but didn’t protest. Miriam seemed content with this outcome. A mainstream response to this scenario would likely have us alarmed at this three year old’s behaviour – first, that she possibly drew with crayons on the wall in her room and secondly that she blamed someone else for her transgression. In other words, would have us read the scenario in terms of deceit and manipulation, and likely engage in speculation as to why the child has a need to act this way – does she not get enough attention, is there some other basic need which has not been met, etc.? Miriam obviously waited for a particular reaction from George. She perhaps wanted George to deny that he drew on the walls and react to her claim with surprise or annoyance. Instead George did not take the ‘bait’ and laughed Miriam’s accusation off. Miriam perhaps was on the one hand somewhat disappointed, because she missed the arguments that could have followed. On the other hand she was probably happy because in a way her narrative worked out. A poststructuralist reading focussed on behaviour-‐as-‐learning would invite a reading of this child as playfully and quite competently exploring the rules around transgression and the subject positions
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involved herein. She demonstrates that she absolutely knows that drawing with crayons on the wall is ‘naughty’, as she immediately knows how to name the culprit. She also demonstrates that she knows that in order to successfully blame someone else she needs to be able to keep a straight face (not let on that she is lying). She also shows that she knows that in order for her story to hold, the culprit needs to be someone who has, in fact, had the opportunity. Further, she appears to also know that this kind of transgression requires some form of confrontation, which she carries out next time she sees her chosen culprit. As such she manages to create a credible story and to follow up on it, which is a complex task. As Davies (2002) notes, young children are faced with the complex task of figuring out when ‘pretend stories’ are acceptable (to adults) and when they are not, and if they get it wrong to bear the consequences of being called a liar, deceitful, manipulative and so on – and it could become part of the constitutive work adults around them would undertake, recognising them and acting upon them on those terms. Yet, considered a skill one would have to accept that enacting pretend stories like other skills would require practice and would not warrant making it an identity marker. ‘Creative power’ of the teacher subject As mentioned earlier behaviour management discourses are vested with sovereign power that constitute teachers (and parents) as being in ‘control’ or ‘not in control’ and authorise particular conducts in relation to children (Millei, 2010). They also constitute learning and competency in limiting ways, such as learning and becoming competent in exhibiting ‘appropriate’ behaviours that precede or follow academic learning. To move beyond interpretations that position children as rational respondents to norms and rules, discourse analysis needs to be a critical part in our understanding of student behaviour. With the change in gaze the hope is that teachers get better at exploring with their students usual and unusual subject positions and their scripts and make those a part of learning rather than objects of control (Davies & Laws, 2011). By shifting to discourse analysis from behaviour management, the implications of these subject positions and scripts for relationships, including naming how issues around ‘control’ and ‘compliance’ play in, radically shift what teaching is about. According to Yates and Hiles’ (2010) reading of Foucault, there are three domains in the ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ that are important to examine in relation to how teachers form themselves as subjects of ‘behaviour management’ discourses. The first domain is the domain of truth that includes the available discourses of behaviour management and the object and subject of behaviour management, such as the ‘the unruly child’ and the ‘managing teacher’. The second domain is power, through which ‘the teacher’ is constituted as acting and acted upon by others through technologies of subjectivity, such as discourses of ‘the teacher in control’ or ‘not in control’. The third element of this truth game is ethics or ‘individual conduct’, through which ‘the teacher’ understands/constitutes its self as a particular type of subject. Through technologies of subjectivity the teacher is offered subject positions, while through technologies of the self the teacher understands her or himself by ‘taking up discourses as one’s own’. In other words, through technologies of the self the teacher experiences her or himself in a truth game or recognises himself
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or herself as a subject of that. What is useful for us in our discussion is the gap that exists between technologies of subjectivity and technologies of self that offers a degree of freedom to the self “against the background of the systems of thought and the technologies of subjectivity” (Yates and Hiles, 2010, p. 61). The gap allows for the potential of creative powers, for the teacher to decide what discourses to take up as their own and constitute their selves, and for students to become otherwise. We have theorised behaviour-‐as-‐learning, to trouble ‘truth’ or dominant readings associated with ‘indiscipline’. Behaviour-‐as-‐learning decentres the object of behaviour management (behaviour in children) and shifts the focus onto the discursive constitution of social practices and subjectivities. In this way, discourses of behaviour management let loose the hold they have on the subject (the controlling teacher) and opened ways for alternative positionings and to think, act, and indeed feel otherwise. The discourse analytic method we employed makes the subjects of discourses less knowable and power relations more agonistic that allow for creative resistance (Simons, 1995 in Yates and Hiles, 2010). The ‘creative powers of subjects’ dislodged them from mainstream educational psychology discursive frameworks -‐ together with that from ‘controlling’ children to enable learning to take place -‐, and shifted them to discursive terrains that understood children’s conduct as learning. Teachers engaged in reading discourses have little to do with giving students ‘choice’ or more freedom in a sense used by behaviour management approaches. In other words, it is not about choosing between a series of preconceived alternatives offered by the teacher depending on the approach to behaviour management used. For example, behaviourist approaches constitute children’s freedom as choosing between behaving ‘appropriately’ to avoid punishment or receive rewards. Guidance approaches constitute children’s freedom in a particular limited autonomy by calling upon children’s self-‐regulation through self-‐reflection, flexibility, cooperation, interpersonal and decision-‐making skills in line with prescribed morals and the utilisation of social skills. Teachers and children engaged in reading discourses and knowingly taking up positions associated with those discourses engage in what Foucault calls ‘a practice of freedom’. This includes the analysis of ‘regimes of truth’, subject positions (and associated scripts) and the way they work, not to escape or equalise power (which is never possible in a Foucauldian perspective) but to loosen, or exceed the hold power has, and the relationships that power-‐as-‐usual creates and sustains. By offering this new kind of literacy, and participating in and involving students in the reading and interpretation of conduct and discourses, teachers’ competence will shift away from being defined in competence of controlling their classroom. This new literacy also acknowledges students’ competence in reading scripts and conduct, and reading the teacher as a subject of those discourses, and acknowledge students’ and teachers’ place in determining how scripts should be played out. It is about foregrounding learning-‐as-‐behaviour/behaviour-‐as-‐learning rather than separating them out. Concluding thoughts
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While there have been moves towards using “Foucauldian” notions of discourse in critical psychology, notably by Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, and Walkerdine (1994) and Parker (e.g., 1999), and in the field of critical educational psychology and behaviour management (discipline) by authors discussed in the introduction, the professional field remains resistant to these ideas. We guess it is so due, partly, to the nature of this critique that questions the truth, techniques and procedures of science, its epistemological security and desired effectiveness. Further, the conceptual gap that Foucault’s ideas open between behaviour management and discourse analysis leaves more questions than straight advice about how to act for teachers, and as noted before the ‘will to act’ is very strong as the need for action is felt as immediate and pressing. However, as Laws and Davies’ (2000, 2011) work so beautifully illustrates, there is much to be gained from putting poststructuralist thought to work in practice, even if one is not placed in an ‘end of the line’ correctional school as Laws was. However, as we have tried to show, it will take courage to leave the desire for control behind and genuinely engage in ‘a practice of freedom’. So what would this shift mean for teacher training? This is a substantial question and not one we can cover comprehensively here. Meanwhile, to sketch a few ideas, firstly and to reconnect with the start of our paper where we discussed the historical emergence of discipline, teaching pre-‐services teachers would need to be based on alternative epistemologies. This shift could potentially highlight education’s “unwitting support of ideological and epistemological processes” (Branson and Miller, 1991, p.174) and potentially unsettle its dependence on dominant scientific discourses and analytical methods and its individualist notion of ‘change management’. Secondly, teacher educators would need to model and facilitate the same ‘practice of freedom’ that teachers would be expected to enact with students in schools. Teacher educators would engage their students in a critical analysis of the discourses that continue to hold the profession captive. This shift would require that teacher educators invite students to undertake ‘a history of the present’; a thorough historisation and problematisation of prevailing discourses, such as recommended by Ryan and Grieshaber (2005) in relation to child development discourses and early childhood teacher education. In order to do so, and to return to our opening remarks, teacher educators would need to draw on the imaginations developed within the social sciences and humanities with their emphasis on understanding contemporary concerns and practices historically, philosophically and politically. Furthermore, this type of teacher education would stipulate, as our Foucault quote indicated earlier, that a theory-‐ practice binary is false and that practice and technique is always already theory – theory that conceptualises adults, children, learning, behaviour and so on, whether explicit or not, and that nothing in that sense therefore is innocent, objective or common sense. References Araújo, M. 2005. Disruptive or disrupted? A qualitative study on the construction of indiscipline. International Journal of Inclusive Education 9(3): 241–268. Belding, A. (1928) The Road. Journal of Education, 107(17), 498-‐498. Billington, T. 2000. Separating, Losing and Excluding Children: Narratives of Difference. London: Routledge Falmer.
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