Abstract
The present doctoral thesis explores primary education teachers’ and students’ discourses on their participation in the implementation of a mental health promotion program focusing on children’s interpersolan relationships. This program is part of a broader Health Promotion field and is perceived as a model of the approach that institutional agents and policy makers use in order to study children’s social relationships and to introduce prevention/intervention programs. The study’s theoretical and methodological background lies on the principles of the constructivism theory and on the new sociology of childhood. The study aims at identifying teachers’ and children’s: a) views on the implementation of mental health promotion programs in their school setting, b) discussions on children’s social relationships, c) mutual or distinct perceptions and understandings on the implementation of the program and, d) constructions on childhood that emerge from their discourses, as they discuss on the ...
The present doctoral thesis explores primary education teachers’ and students’ discourses on their participation in the implementation of a mental health promotion program focusing on children’s interpersolan relationships. This program is part of a broader Health Promotion field and is perceived as a model of the approach that institutional agents and policy makers use in order to study children’s social relationships and to introduce prevention/intervention programs. The study’s theoretical and methodological background lies on the principles of the constructivism theory and on the new sociology of childhood. The study aims at identifying teachers’ and children’s: a) views on the implementation of mental health promotion programs in their school setting, b) discussions on children’s social relationships, c) mutual or distinct perceptions and understandings on the implementation of the program and, d) constructions on childhood that emerge from their discourses, as they discuss on their participation in the program. Sixty-six Primary Education teachers in 14 focus groups and 107 students in 14 focus groups participated in the research. All participants had participated in the implementation of the Health Promotion program in their school classes. The conversations between the researcher and the participants were built upon certain core features regarding the content and activities of the program, as well as childrenteachers co-operation in its realization. Moreover, in teachers’ focus groups, issues like teacher and education role in the implementation of such programs were discussed. The transcripts were analysed according to the principles of discourse analysis. We tried to identify interpretive repertoires, subject positions and ideological dilemmas that participants used and negotiated as they described their experience of participating in such a program. Teachers underline their need to adopt a psycho-pedagogical role and criticize formal education that obstructs and limits such an effort. Teachers’ comments on the co-operation with experts, colleagues and parents demonstrate their unfamiliarity with co-operative reasoning and relevant practices, as such practices are undertaken incidentally during the program and are not included in their every day praxis. Teachers and children draw on socialization, regulation, and normalization discourses, in order to describe the content of the program. In these discourses, children are positioned as ‘deficient’ in their social and moral development, according to specific developmental models and always in contrast with ‘competent’ adults. Children refer to the program as a setting where they wish to construct or reconstruct their relations with their peers, thus forming a sort of community. Teachers, as well as children, consider school as a field where unequal forces of power, control and regulation are exercised on children. They agree that children’s voice is absent from the main places where they live and act. In that way, they coconstruct the program as counterbalance to this absence. All the participants draw on child-centered discourses; teachers in order to criticize the limitations that traditional education system imposes regarding this absence of children’s voice and children in order to support their social competence and active agency. Teachers, nevertheless, retain for themselves the exclusive role of actors during the implementation of the program, balancing between practices that enhance children’s autonomy and practices that aim at controlling them.
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