Inclusion and School
Deviance: the challenge of
‘EBD’
Gwynedd Lloyd
University of Edinburgh
[email protected]
ISEC 2005
Paper based on range of
research in Scotland
• Life after school -young women with
(S)EBD
• School Exclusion
• Multi-agency working and school
exclusion
• Travellers and school exclusion
• The social history of ADHD
• Reintegration to mainstream
The paper
• Argues for a complex multi-dimensional
understanding of ‘EBD’
• Critiques psycho-medical approaches
• Explores ideas of inclusion
Psycho-medical approaches
• Fail to recognise the social construction
of labels like EBD, ADHD
• Deny agency
• Pupils determined by their disorder
Writers on inclusion’s views of
deviant pupils
• Sometimes hero resister
• More often victim of self interested
professionals
• Institutional need for order is
transformed to a child’s emotional need
(Thomas & Loxley 2001)
What gets lost in both
accounts
• The possibility that young people may
have individual troubles
• The enmeshing of the individual and the
social
‘EBD’
Not clear
Refers to diverse range of pupils
Gives no indication of how they may be likely to act
Definition tells us about a judgement
EBD
Concerns about a child /young person
Judgements about the ‘normality’ of their actions in
comparison with others
An official label
An indication that someone needs help- pupil and /or teacher
Access to resources /provision
Young people with ‘EBD’may
Be loud, angry, disruptive
Be quiet, anxious
Be both sometimes
May have friends or be friendless
May have troubles in or out of school or both
Recognition of both structure
and agency
The model needs to recognise that:
• The concept of EBD in practice is
relational, not reflecting a fixed objective
or measurable condition.
• Childen and young people are
constructed and labelled as deviant or
with 'EBD' in shifting professional
discourses
• Understanding the processes of
construction and labelling requires a
complex, multidimensional model
incorporating the movements of power
on and between the different but related
levels of the social world
• Young people are subject to disciplinary
processes but also resistant to those
processes They exert their own power in
school
• Disciplinary processes are gendered, classed
and racialised
• They are affected by wider structural
inequalities and by a range of dominant and
minority cultures
Professionals need an
awareness of
• the relevance of competing policy
interests, of professional expert
discourses, of financial and funding
pressures, of commercial promotion
• the operations of power in the
micropolitics of schooling.
• for an understanding of ‘problem'
pupils’ it is necessary to perceive all
these factors in an enmeshed and
dynamic relationship with each other
and with the individual choices and
responses of the young people
• Young people respond to these processes
with individual human feelings, and these
have to be included in the model. A
complex multidimensional approach
includes the acknowledgement that
individual children have their own
subjectivities and may have personal
troubles.
•
Understanding personal troubles
should begin with the biographies and
voices of the boys/girls and young
women/men, acknowledging the many
dimensions of their lives in and out of
school
Conclusion
– The way in which these troubles are expressed and
described reflects the enmeshing of the individual
understanding with the complex range of social factors.
Both are necessary for an adequate account.
– A diverse range of factors are involved in the
construction and professional labelling of educational
deviance demonstrating the inadequacy of the dominant
psycho-medical models.
Implications for practice
•
•
•
•
No one answer
Diverse mix of practice/range of strategies
Not necessarily complex
Helpful if seen as based in equitable, nonjudgemental, genuine relationships
• Rooted in understanding of individual
biographies and of the social and institutional
context
Practice
• Reject medical models of therapy
• Reclaim idea of therapeutic process
where children/young people involved in
saying who, what might help them feel
better, safer, more in control…
• Sometime one person
• The right help at the right time
The experts
• Children, young people and their
families as the experts on their own
lives
A social justice based approach to educational
inclusion could assert the right of all pupils to be
valued as human beings of worth in a school
system:
that reflects diversity but tries to reduce the
inequalities of difference
that tries to model human relationships of warmth
and develops a reconstructed approach to pastoral
care based on the concerns of children and young
people,
that understands the pressures of their lives.