56. årgang, nr. 2 Tema: Konflikter om børns skoleliv – april 2019

School psychologists work with children’s conditions – When “longing for order” silences the ‘corridor-casework’
By Maja Røn Larsen, Associate Professor & Charlotte Højholt, Professor, Roskilde University
This article investigates the social complexity and conflictuality of which the work of being a school psychologist is a part of. Based on a research project about the practice of school psychologists, the article points to the necessity of exploring and working with children’s social reasons and conditions for participating in different settings in their everyday life. It highlights how this vital work often happens in the ‘spaces between’ more formal meetings and tasks – in collaborative processes of ‘corridor-casework’. Here psychologists collaborate with the many different parties in order to develop relevant solutions to different problems in school – on the basis of concrete knowledge about the wider collaborative and conflictual processes in and around the class. How the psychologists navigate in the “corridor-casework” is often crucial to how difficulties in school are understood and handled. Therefore,such work holds excellent opportunities for development. However, a general administrative ‘longing for order’ and standardised organisation models tend to silence the corridor-casework – leaving it up to the psychologists to maintain such possibilities through continuous work with their own conditions and positions within the complex field of school.

Current organisational dilemmas in school management – what the bottleneck
points to
By Peter Busch-Jensen, M.A. & Ph.D., Roskilde University
Collaboration is a cornerstone in the everyday practices of our public primary schools. However, the processes of collaboration are inherently conflictual, since school professionals must constantly integrate diversified agendas, as well as coordinate different perspectives, contributions and interests. This fundamental condition means that school management is mainly about enabling collaboration across contexts and different partial insights into the task at hand. However, it also means that the work conditions of school managers are shaped by the arrangements
of collaboration between government, municipality, teachers, parents, etc. This article examines what these arrangements currently look like from a managerial perspective.
Furthermore, it examines what opportunities, dilemmas and challenges school managers are currently grappling with in relation to these arrangements. There are high expectations towards school management, and more and better management is often described as the answer to almost any problem at primary schools. However, if such expectations are to be meaningful, they must be informed by knowledge of school managers real options for action. This article sets out to explore and describe the current work conditions for school management. What does the
everyday life of school management look like? In what ways do current policy strategies affect the school as an organisation and influence management strategies in Danish primary schools? Also, what dilemmas and risks do the aforementioned strategies and organisational forms pose for school managers in particular and for primary schools in general?

Development of conditions for learning and participation in school – approached and discussed as a teaching issue
By Tilde Mardahl-Hansen, cand.comm., Ph.d., Roskilde University
This article aims to show how various understandings of teaching guide us differently when we want to understand challenges in primary and secondary schools and develop interventions, and to show how these discussions are relevant to the work of PPR. The article presents a theoretical practice perspective on teaching and suggests that in order to teach, teachers continually coordinate, integrate and prioritise a variety of points, considerations and conflicting needs in everyday school life in collaboration with – primarily – the students. On this theoretical and analytical background, it is argued that it is necessary to expand the understanding of school problems and solutions through knowledge from teachers everyday work with both the academic and social aspects of school life.

School difficulties seen from parents’ perspectives – is organising parental collaboration a task for the school psychologist?
By Dorte Kousholt, lectore, associale professor, Aarhus University
Based on parents’ narratives, this article analyses the course of events when two boys who come into difficulties at school and where PPR becomes involved. Both courses of events are characterised by the psychologist’s collaboration with the parents ending up in isolation concerning the parent-child relationship or the relationship between a teacher and a child. The article highlights how social dynamics in the school class and the collaboration among the parents has an influence, how the parents understand their children’s difficulties and how they participate in collaboration with the school. The article argues for an understanding of collaboration as conflictual, in the sense that collaboration must handle different perspectives on, interests in and different knowledge of the issues involved in the collaboration. In the analyses, conflicts in the collaboration, between the school and parents, as well as among the parents themselves, appear to be related to that differences in how children, teachers and parents experience the class are not investigated, and the different perspectives appear to be in an entrenched opposition. The article aims to discuss how schools can involve PPR in relation to organising collaboration that supports the parents’ community in relation to the school class, e.g. that parents together
can handle dilemmas and difficulties in the children’s school life, for example, how children handle the diverse requirements of the school and the changing conditions in the school class differently.

The social development history of problems in school
By Ida Schwartz, Lektor, cand.psych., ph.d., University College Lillebælt
This article explores how an understanding of “the social development history of problems” can help maintain the perspective that difficulties in school must be understood as being related to conflicting normal conditions that the school’s participants act in, and in different ways contribute to creating. I argue that many parties contribute to creating conditions for how difficulties in everyday life at school develop into serious problems, but when professionals intervene, it is often in relation to individual students. In other words, school problems have a history created in social development processes at the school. Often the cause of problems is narrowed down to the individual student or family background, and so it drifts out of sight how the school, which is a particular context for children’s everyday life and learning, creates different developmental conditions for different children. Through the perspectives of parents, pupils and a teacher, I explore how exclusion and personal suffering develops as part of general social developmental processes at school.