Beyond a psychology of student behaviour

Abstract

This article considers developments in conceptualising and responding to student disruption and disaffection. Commencing with the educational sociologist John Furlong's attempt to fuse psychology and sociology to better understand disaffected students, this essay also engages with a recent attempt at transdisciplinary considerations of student disaffection. It is argued that the biopsychosocial model as advocated by Paul Cooper promises to extend the analysis of student disaffection and disruption. The biopsychosocial model as postulated by Cooper is weighted towards the biopsycho and is limited by scant consideration of the biopolitics of the increasing prevalence of behaviour disorders. Nikolas Rose's examination of the development of medical knowledge is enlisted to suggest broader possibilities for transdisciplinary lines of inquiry. The transdisciplinarity of Cooper's suggested model is important and points to the potential of the responses from across fields of knowledge to assist in building more nuanced understandings of social organisation and behaviour. IntroductionArranged into four sections, this article first describes John Furlong's contribution to applying a transdisciplinary analysis to the problem of student disaffection and disruption in schools. His was an attempt to broaden the analytic acuity of both sociology and psychology in the consideration of disaffected students. Following this, the article observes profound changes in the discourse of student behaviour and behaviour management from references to maladjustment or problems in socialisation on the one hand and class resistance on the other to a discourse of impaired pathology. The finer calibration of differences within student cohorts and the assignation of disruptive and disaffected students to categories of pathological defects, indeed, reflects not uncontested advances in medical knowledge (Rose 2005; Whitaker 2010) and has delivered different understandings of children's learning. The rise in the treatment of attention disorders simultaneously has the capacity to sweep up expanding numbers of students and deflect from other factors at play in the complex structural, cultural and behavioural interactions in schooling. The application of defectology has also become both an explanatory trope and a management technology (Slee 1994;Rose 1990;Rose and Ali-Rached 2013).I will then consider Cooper's (2008) attempt to build a multidisciplinary analysis of student disengagement and behaviour problems through what he calls a biopsychosocial approach. Although this analytic framework does bring more information to the table, notably advances in understandings of attention disorders, it is attenuated by not adequately interrogating the relationship between the social and the bio within his frames of

The Datafication of Education

“…This is despite a strong body of research demonstrating that rewards undermine intrinsic motivation and the development of self-regulation (Deci, Koestner, and Ryan 1999), questioning their use as a strategy to achieve long-lasting behaviour change. Such behaviour control strategies offer teachers practical means to produce obedient students, but ignore the lessons of educational research on effective approaches to discipline (Slee 2014).…”