Do Teachers Leave Their Ethics at the School Gate? Social Practice Research in a Danish Primary School

Abstract

This study addresses teachers' ethical dilemmas in everyday participation in school structures in a Danish Primary School. It focuses in particular on their relations with 'disturbing children'. The author and four first grade teachers work in a research team, documenting and analysing the teachers’ interactions in the classroom. This paper focuses on the interactions between two of the teachers and one of the students. The research team focuses on the teachers’ struggles with stress and burnout symptoms that they impute to students’ misbehaviour. Through their work together, documenting what happens in the classroom, and then working together in collective biography workshops, the research team reveals the contradictory conditions of teachers’ work. They find that following current guidelines for good classroom management, and accepting without question current discourses on ADHD, places the teachers in a double-bind, with teachers and children in opposition to each other, and both teachers and children being judged and found wanting.  The paper seeks new ways of thinking/doing classroom interaction that challenges some of the binds of current management practices.