Perspectives on Student Behaviour in Schools

Exploring Theory and Developing Practice

Mere Berryman, Ted Glynn, Janice Wearmouth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134259106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The authors of this comprehensive text discuss the root causes of disruptive behaviour, tackle assessment issues and develop effective intervention strategies that will be of practical use to teachers and other educators. Whilst theorising behaviour management from a range of perspectives: psychodynamic, behavioural and socio-cultural, the authors remain firmly focused on practical issues of policy making, assessment and intervention, and address a wide range of related issues, such as:

• policy in relation to behaviour in schools at local authority, national and international level
• cultural concerns, race, gender, school discipline and exclusion
• medical perspectives of topical interest such as ADHD, autism and diet
• assessment at district, community, classroom and individual level, and how these underpin theory.

This book will appeal to anyone for whom behaviour in schools is a key concern, such as student teachers, teacher educators, senior school managers and practising teachers undertaking further study in the field.

Chapter 1
Understanding inclusion and behaviour management

Introduction

Education systems across the world are facing the common challenge of finding ways to provide for the diversity of their student populations. Over the years in many countries there has been a variety of provision for students who display ‘difficult’, ‘disturbed’ or ‘disruptive’ behaviour. Since the beginning of formal schooling, historically, the response to behaviour judged as challenging to the social order in schools has been to assume that the problem lies with the individual young person and to resort to medical and/or psychological approaches to assessment and ‘treatment’ outside the mainstream educational context.

As noted by Cole (2004), in the past, the experience of students identified as difficult to manage within the mainstream system has varied considerably depending on:

• the beliefs of particular professionals;
• the kind of provision that happens to be available;
• whether the behaviour itself is understood as a ‘personality disturbance’ that should be treated like a disease or as a rational reaction to environmental circumstances.

Interventions for these students might be punitive and harsh, rehabilitative or therapeutic. Some of the tensions between notions of good practice stem from differences in theoretical orientation. For example, there are applied behavioural practices associated with understanding of behaviour as being controlled by external events. There are also educational or therapeutic practices related to holistic or humanistic approaches associated with understandings of students as having agency or exercising control over their own behaviour.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, understandings of difficulties in learning and behaviour began to veer towards a view that the source of students’ difficulties in behaviour and learning is not always intrinsic to the learner. Hargreaves (1975), exploring the relationship between the student and the learning environment, noted that any disruption or disturbance is representative of a discordance within the system to which the student belongs. This discordance is indicated by the lack of correspondence between the student and the system where the student–system interaction causes disruption (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). If a student belongs to a specific social system, both the responses of that student to the surroundings and the responses of significant adults and peers to that student have to be taken into account when assessing the significance of individual acts. Fulcher (1989), for example, has noted that disaffection in the form of disruptive behaviour can be provoked by the demand for compliance from unwilling students by those in authority seeking to establish control in the classroom:

Classroom order requires docile bodies . . . Herein lies some of the resistance to integrating those with less docile bodies: . . . larking about . . . absence, verbal abuse, etc., all instance the failure to subordinate bodies to the requirements of classroom docility. The control responses to these forms of disruption include . . . suspension and other sanctioning practices . . . It may therefore be argued that it is the educational apparatus’s failure to provide an inclusive curriculum . . . rather than the problems specific disabilities pose, which constructs the ‘problems’ and politics of integration.

(1989, pp. 53–4)

In the latter half of the twentieth century also, there was a growing international concern for equality of opportunity in the education system and social cohesion in society at large. The practice in recent years of requiring mainstream schools to accept and respond to a wider range of educational needs (particularly from a human rights perspective) and the needs of society, required those schools to become more ‘inclusive’. This requirement is not straightforward, however. Inclusion is a problematic term about which there is a considerable amount of confusing, and confused, rhetoric. The term has lacked clear definition or consensus about what the concept entails. In addition, it is easy to assume that policy-making related to inclusion is a ‘topdown’ process, for example, in the case of education policy, that a national government decides the strategy or plan of action and tells the local education authorities and schools to put it into operation. The practice, however, may have only a tenuous link with what was originally proposed.

In this chapter we look first of all at the notion of inclusion and discuss this concept as it relates to the education system as well as to society generally. We interpret ‘inclusion’ in the field of education as needing to take account of the processes of engaging with learning and the social representation of individuals and groups in society as well as issues of human rights. We go on to discuss the national policy context, issues related to policy-making in the area of problematic behaviour in schools and the tensions and contradictions in policy implementation.

Inclusion

‘Inclusion’ is a term which lacks adequate theorising or consensus about what it means in practice. Commonly it is described as a process, a set of practices or an issue of human rights. One factor that is often missing from much of the debate on inclusion is the situated nature of difficulties in learning and behaviour in schools. Curricular experiences offer students ways of knowing the world. Within an institution, educators and students are defined by that institution’s social practices. The understanding of the individual whose behaviour is seen as challenging is part of that social practice.

Current definitions

Booth et al. (2000, p. 12) describe ‘inclusion’ as a process, one that involves ‘increasing the participation of students’ in local schools. The Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education (CSIE) also adopts a position on inclusion from its implications in practice:

Inclusion in education involves:

• Valuing all students and staff equally.
• Increasing the participation of students in, and reducing their exclusion from, the cultures, curricula and communities of local schools.
• Restructuring the cultures, policies and practices in schools so that they respond to the diversity of students in the locality.
• Reducing barriers to learning and participation for all students, not only those with impairments or those who are categorised as ‘having special educational needs’.
• Learning from attempts to overcome barriers to the access and participation of particular students to make changes for the benefit of students more widely.
• Viewing the difference between students as resources to support learning, rather than as problems to be overcome.
• Acknowledging the right of students to an education in their locality.
• Improving schools for staff as well as for students.
• Emphasising the role of schools in building community and developing values, as well as in increasing achievement.
• Fostering mutually [respectful and] sustaining relationships between schools and communities.
• Recognising that inclusion in education is one aspect of inclusion in society.

(http://inclusion.uwe.ac.uk/csie/csiefaqs.htm#RighttoBelong)

Many teachers might well feel that a number of these points are rarely seen in operation in schools (Open University, 2004). Although there has been a clear move towards mainstreaming generally across the world, there has been an uneven degree of integration of students perceived as experiencing difficulties of different kinds. Education in mainstream schools is still generally organised on the basis of group instruction and not on the basis of meeting the diversity of students’ learning needs. The accommodation of individual differences within mainstream schools challenges the very basis of both the social and political purposes of mainstream public schooling and hence the implied notion of social justice. The notion of average, normal or typical ability and hence learning potential or capacity determines the traditional system, organisation and resourcing of mainstream public schools.

CSIE goes on to justify inclusion on three grounds: human rights, good education and social sense.

Regarding human rights, CSIE claims that:

1 All children have the right to learn together.

2 Children should not be devalued or discriminated against by being excluded or sent away because of their disability or learning difficulty.

3 Disabled adults, describing themselves as special school survivors, are demanding an end to segregation.

4 There are no legitimate reasons to separate children for their education. Children belong together – with advantages and benefits for everyone. They do not need to be protected from each other.

Regarding good education, CSIE claims that:

5 Research shows children do better, academically and socially, in integrated settings.

6 There is no teaching or care in a segregated school which cannot take place in an ordinary school.

7 Given commitment and support, inclusive education is a more efficient use of educational resources.

Regarding social sense, CSIE also claims that:

8 Segregation teaches children to be fearful, ignorant and breeds prejudice.

9 All children need an education that will help them develop relationships and prepare them for life in the mainstream.

10 Only inclusion has the potential to reduce fear and to build friendship, respect and understanding.

(http://inclusion.uwe.ac.uk/csie/10rsns.htm)

Mittler (2000, p. 10) also assumes a human rights view in describing ‘inclusion’ as ‘based on a value system that welcomes and celebrates diversity arising from gender, nationality, race, language of origin, social background, level of achievement or disability’. We discuss the issue of human rights further below.

Critical views

In England, as in many other countries, education for all in mainstream schools is the government’s stated intention, and moves in this direction have existed for some 30 years. Not all researchers are totally supportive of this policy, however. Inherent in the argument for inclusion is a social, ecological or environmental model for understanding and responding to behavioural difficulties which emphasises the factors in the environment, for example, the home, the school and the community, including other people’s stereotypes and preconceptions; that is, factors outside the student.

Lindsay (2004) claims that the increasing influence of the social model has been a welcome development from a previously predominant emphasis on a ‘medical’ or functional deficit model in which ‘within child factors’, learners’ individual and unique capacities, interests and learning needs were overemphasised. Lindsay argues that the ‘social model’ of learning difficulties has been increasingly influential in the past 30 years but may now have diverted too much attention away from ‘within child’ factors and in particular the interaction between ‘within child’ factors and environmental factors which themselves can change over time. He further argues that the learning needs of children and their educational progress, once placed in mainstream settings, tend to be overlooked by researchers because inclusion itself has become a matter of rights and not evidence.

However, Lindsay recognises that inclusion is the current policy framework (Lloyd, 2000) in which responses to learning needs have to be made. Hence his distinction between rights and efficacy: producing the desired effects. In his view, prevailing notions of inclusion and associated research do not take sufficient account of the interpretation and implementation of inclusion in practice. Research should take account of the strengths of effects and their relevant impact on different children within inclusive settings:

it is simply not good enough to ignore the question of within-child factors or the research evidence pertaining to all aspects of inclusion, including classroom practice, school organisation, LEA systems and government policies.

(Lindsay, 2004, p. 278)

Lloyd (2000) argues that inclusion has been seen as the means to equality of educational opportunity:

Since the Warnock report (DES 1978), education policy in the UK for children identified as having special educational needs (SEN) has been based on the assumption that the means to ensuring equality of educational opportunity is the mainstream school.

(Lloyd, 2000, p. 133)

Inclusion, per se, tends to be perceived as increasing educational opportunity and removing barriers to progress. However, inclusion of itself does not ensure equity. Social and economic disadvantage, cultural diversity, and so on are factors known to be associated with access, or lack of access, to educational entitlement. Similarly, Lindsay, while recognising that inclusion is the policy context, claims that the human rights argument for inclusion ignores concern for the quality of the education provided for individual needs and the progress learners make in ‘inclusive’ settings.

In the context of the education system in the United States, Gerber (2004) notes an early period in American public education when compulsory schooling for all children was perceived as educational opportunity. Failure for individual students was seen as their unwillingness to make the most of that opportunity. Early reform, recognising individual differences, encouraged schools to accept responsibility for the success or otherwise of students’ learning but threatened existing school systems, organisation and distribution of resources based on the notion of the average student. Gerber argues that substantive ‘educational opportunity’ is not guaranteed for children with disabilities either by access to similar educational resources or by participation in a common and universal curriculum, the very conditions which created special education. Educational equity requires an educational strategy which responds to individual differences to promote at least satisfactory levels of development and achievement.

Gerber claims that special education has always been concerned with individual differences and with changing institutions to accommodate these differences. Hence special education always imposes a demand for additional resources and institutional change from educational administration and school management. For administrators and for the institutions, the concern is how these differences might be accommodated without substantial cost and structural change. At one time, Gerber argues, segregated special classes met these requirements.

Schools attempting to accommodate to a vague inclusion policy find themselves recreating the pressures from which they are always trying to escape: redistribution of resources and the increased demands on teachers of included students. Gerber’s claim is for a different curriculum, responsive to individual differences and needs, with different intentions or outcomes. Differential deployment of resources including training and support for teachers is inevitable. Equity that accepts the need for differential resources to reach similar outcomes for students requires the acceptance of differential resources for different but equally valid outcomes.

Gerber points out that the challenge by special education to mainstream schools to respond to real individual differences, threatens existing measures of school effectiveness which are based on average attainment and take no account of the fact that schools produce a range of individual students. Instead, these measures encourage schools to treat diverse students as alike in learning characteristics and alike in response to given curriculum or teaching strategy. He claims that if schools changed to respond to individual differences, then they would be effective when their poorest performing students demonstrate significant achievement gains.

Conceptualisation of learning and behaviour

Current moves towards inclusive approaches for all students of statutory school age require a re-conceptualisation of both learning and behaviour as situated, dynamic and interactive between students and the learning environment. If this is to occur, teachers need to be able to reflect critically on notions of ‘behaviour difficulties’, inclusion and the values associated with them. Consequently, emphasis in teacher education and professional development should be given to reflective practice (Schön, 1983, 1987) no less than to training in competencies and the ‘tools’ of the trade. As we discuss later in Chapter 6, learning occurs through engagement in society. Pedagogy therefore needs to be interactive and ‘intersubjective’ to take account of individual meaning-making. Schools play a critical part in shaping students’ beliefs in their sense of self-efficacy that is their ability, responsibility and skill in initiating and completing actions and tasks. The way schools mediate success and failure is crucial to the development of a sense of personal agency (Bruner, 1996). Teachers should therefore reflect continuously on the impact of school processes and practices on young people’s sense of agency and ability. Student learning in schools takes place within an educational community. The sense of belonging to, or marginalisation from, that community affects every aspect of participation and, therefore, learning within it, and necessarily affects a student’s behaviour and self-perception. ‘Inclusion’, therefore, can be interpreted as the extent to which students are able to participate in the school community. Failing to support the development of students’ understanding and ability to act in a social context risks marginalising and alienating young people and limiting their autonomy. It is not an easy task to engage with students whose behaviour in schools is experienced as challenging or otherwise worrying. Nevertheless these students have the same basic needs as any other students.

The current national policy context

In many countries, current government policies in relation to young people whose behaviour is seen as challenging in schools, need to take into account that:

• research that continues to demonstrate the relationship between exclusion or non-attendance at school and diminished future life chances, including later imprisonment;
• pressure at government level towards inclusion in mainstream schools as a matter of ‘human rights’;
• a sense that the behaviour of the young is deteriorating, as exemplified by a number of stories occurring in the media.

Research evidence

Research from a number of countries has repeatedly shown the detrimental effects of school exclusion to the welfare and future life chances of young people. In the...