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Challenging Control:

Inclusive Teachers’ and Teaching Assistants’ Discourses on Students with “Challenging Behavior” Fernanda Orsati

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“Challenging behavior”

• Terms not examined routinely used in schools – students with disabilities • Given to children with disabilities are the first ones to be excluded from general education: • Time spent in Gen. Ed. : 29% students with autism, 32% students with emotional disturbances and 12% the students with cognitive disabilities vs. 88% students with language impairments and 51% students with specific learning disabilities (US Department of Education, 2006).

• Behaviors located in the child, not taking the environment into consideration , who needs to be able to control it.

• Exclusion, restraint vs. humanistic approach

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Discourse Analysis

• System of representation, understanding language and it’s functions in society • Power and knowledge directly related to discourses-teachers roles • Practices in schools (apparatuses) determined by discourses Studying discourse is a way of understanding the language people use in everyday relations, how that influences and constructs meaning of the world around them, and clarify the orderly practices and their implications for the conduct of the social life (Wetherell, 2000). • Critical Discourse Analysis: how discourses reproduce inequalities and how to understand and maybe promote change

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Methods

 Transcriptions of eleven semi-structured interviews    Three gen. education teachers, 2 sp. education teachers, and 6 teaching assistants Three suburban and one urban school in the Northeast of the US Experience ranging from 5 to 20 years of teaching

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Analysis

 Dialectical-Relational Approach: Fairclough (2001) tackles injustice, inequality, and lack of freedom by “analyzing sources and causes, resistance to them and possibilities of overcoming them” (p. 163). The author’s methodology provides “essential parts” to address what he calls social “wrongs.” His dialectical-relational approach implies critique, analysis and explanation of the ways in which dominant ideas and dynamics can be tested, challenged and disrupted. 1) Focus upon a social wrong, in its semiotic aspect; 2) Identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong; 3) Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong; 4) Identify possible ways past the obstacles.

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Social wrong: use of terms to describe students, not behaviors

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Not all of them, a couple … are just need some extra help, and you know, you got to make sure you pay attention to them because they really aren’t a problem, but you know they need help, and you know… But the others you just, it’s defiance, that’s what it is, it’s

defiance. (TA- from a suburban school) – Comparison with “regular students” 

A lot of children come here with dysfunctional family lives, and they depend on other students, their teachers to encourage them and give them maybe some things that are lacking in their home life, as much as you can, you know, without overstepping the

mother/father boundaries. (TA – Suburban School) – Family background

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Social wrong

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There was a self-contained classroom that was most made up of kids that people didn’t know what to do with. It was like, there were kids with MR, kids with Downs, kids with autism there were actually couple of LD kids too, which were just behavior problems, they weren’t willing to deal with them so they just

stuck them in there. (Special Education Teacher – Suburban School)

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Obstacles: the description of students define strategies used to manage their behavior in the classroom

Family background + Cause of behavior placed on the individual + Standards of “regular kids” + Order maintenance = Natural/necessary exclusion  “

He needed to be removed” (TA – Suburban School) – Nathan example

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Obstacles- ultimate resource: school exclusion

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He can be disrespectful he’s more hum, aggressive and disrespectful to the teachers and teaching assistants when he’s being removed from a classroom, escorted, than he may kick or spit or call names. But not to the students, no, he’s usually good to the students…. I would like to see that [him with a TA assigned 1:1 next year] if he does not go into a behavior

program next year. (TA – Suburban School)

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Relation between social order and the social wrong: school a space of behavior control

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They can’t just go ahead they need to, you know, they get comfortable in school and think they can do it on their own.

The students are

rules and so I would like um, I’d like them to follow the teacher.

Challenging Control in

You never know from day to day you’re to some pins and

the classroom

know? (Special Education Teacher – Urban School) 

The behaviors that are huge problem are his refusal to work, and the minute you ask him to work hum, it becomes a power

struggle. (Teacher – Suburban School)

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Passing the obstacles: developing relationship with students

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You have to love the kids for who they are you can’t put labels on them as much, so I think some people, some teachers and some teaching assistants just kinda they get frustrated with the behaviors, they don’t really see that maybe they are causing some of it, and they don’t get time to get to know the children and, they all have wonderful personalities, they all have a great sense of humor, um and they all have gifts that they offer and I think you have to realize that and then deal with challenging

behavior as it comes. (TA – Suburban School)

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Men and woman are beings ‘programmed to learn’ and as a consequence to teach, to acquire knowledge, and to intervene, what makes me understand the educational practice as a constant exercise to privileging production and development of the autonomy of educators and students. I never understood a strict humanly practice [as education] being done as a cold, soulless experience, in which feelings and emotions, desires, and dreams should be reprimanded for a rational dictatorship

Freire, 1996, Pedagogy of the Autonomy, p. 146.

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Future Directions

 Use participant observations to see the language and practices used in the classroom: Practice and Discourse  Intersection with race, gender and social economic status  The Alliance to Prevent Restraint, Aversive Interventions and Seclusion (APRAIS)- TASH: http://tash.org/advocacy issues/restraint-and-seclusion-aprais/

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Thank you!

 Fernanda Orsati: [email protected]