Lecture room: Oddi – 106. Click for a map.
Working institution
DISPUK, Denmark
Abstract
During the last couple of years, we have been contacted by teachers and parents about school classes that have been affected by problems like teasing and bullying. This has led to children becoming disturbed, some not wanting to go to school and a general bad mood has emerged. Teachers and parents told us that they thought they had tried everything and did not know what to do.
We will present a process of three meetings that we facilitated with pupils, teachers and parents in a 4th grade class in a Danish school that was afflicted by such problems. We will present some of our considerations before and during the facilitation as well as the specific practices we introduced.
Often, the adults had been caught in a logic telling them to solve the problems by instructing other parties (pupils and other adults) how they should (and should not) think and act: “you have to say never mind”, “you have to talk nicely to each other”, “here in school we don’t solve problems with violence”, “you have to put in extra ressources” etc.
Unfortunately, this logic didn’t seem to create meetings in the middle. On the contrary the effect seemed to have been that the different parties had ended up in each their own private camp.
This workshop will provide a different path. In the process of exploring that path we have been inspired by ideas from New Zealand where serious efforts have been made to develop practices to handle problems in schools based on narrative ideas and the experience that the chance of creating preferred changes increases markedly when people in positions of authority do something with the other participants instead of trying to do something about them or to them.