Cooperation and Conflict about Children in Difficulties

Organizing Special Interventions in Schools in Denmark

Abstract

The article is based on the doctoral thesis “Cooperation and Conflicts about Children in Difficulties – Organization of Special Education” (2011). The article focuses on cooperation and conflicts about how to understand and handle difficulties in children’s school lives. The theme of the thesis is the collaboration around children in difficulties.

The theoretical theme of the article is the dialectic processes through which understandings and interventions in relation to the difficulties of the children are developed through the ways in which different participants around the children take part in conflictual and contradictory institutional arrangements.

The analyses of the dissertation combine empirical material from participant observations and interviews from mainstream and special educational settings, interdisciplinary meetings and referral meetings as a part of the administration of the municipality.

This movement across different settings has made it possible to gain insight into the ways in which often contradictory institutio- nal conditions and their local meanings influ- ence the conflictual social practices involving both children, parents, professionals and public servants. A point here is to illustrate the ways in which different professional and lay participants act from particular perspectives in relation to specific tasks, viewpoints and interests; while also connected through their different shares of collective responsibility to the overall situation of the child.