The human being may be a conflictive being, but having conflicts does not mean that they come from his humanity, from his human condition. It is a being that is born defenseless, premature, that grows and reaches relative maturity. He learns and develops in society through difficulties, he is enrolled from birth in vital processes that drive him according to models that he assimilates and innovations that he embodies and returns to his environment. But this does not constitute the basis of their conflicts either, but difficulty and conflict would be the same. Sometimes they are taken as synonyms, but a conflict is a dilemma or a crisis rather than a difficulty or a problem. It has to do with the lack of answers or alternatives, in reality with what blocks or stiffens those vital processes.
This brief statement leads us to question a natural coexistence that, due to ignorance or laziness, becomes forced and violent. This is the root of the intersubjective conflict, which leads to the situations of violence seen in educational groups and institutions.
With this writing I intend to introduce some questions about coexistence and its possible ups and downs in the educational field. From my own questions, doubts and concerns I try to sketch a way to approach situations. I do not describe, on this occasion, the methodology to which I adhere or any technique that I consider appropriate, I only limit myself to explaining some theoretical guidelines and justifying their implementation.
Working on violence, operating in groups and institutions to try to provide resources that serve to resolve situations of aggression, harassment or harassment, is to work on coexistence. Difficult and possible tasks…
Introduction
Living together is so natural for the human being that he does not see it as an attitude that is learned or as something that must be taken care of, as a benefit that does to his quality of life. It appears, culturally, as what happens in response to circumstances that are also natural or obvious. Family, school, work and neighborhood function as places that bring people together and impress them with behaviors. Broadly speaking, you are part of a social collective in a static way, satisfying its conditions while satisfying your own interests. But this is a very poor and fallacious interpretation, since, for example, a group of students in a classroom in a school does not have to wait to be accommodated and told what to do to meet their best possibilities, those students do not have than to obey mandates or stereotypes they have not chosen,nor submit to any order that is believed to be natural or obligatory, because otherwise it violates respect, morality or "good customs". This is known, understood, but does it apply entirely? We could affirm that, when progressing on that established and obviated natural order, in this group, the students can feel fulfilled and excited, for having managed, together, to live together solving their differences and facing problems. Unfortunately, the opposite case has violence as its final answer.the students can feel fulfilled and excited, for having managed, together, to live together solving their differences and facing problems. Unfortunately, the opposite case has violence as its final answer.the students can feel fulfilled and excited, for having managed, together, to live together solving their differences and facing problems. Unfortunately, the opposite case has violence as its final answer.
* Professional CPA CONICET (IRICE) - Operator in Social Psychology ([email protected])
Let's take as a reference the definition of violence from Wikipedia, for being the most accessible: “Violence is the type of human interaction that manifests itself in those behaviors or situations that, deliberately, learned or imitated, provoke or threaten to cause serious harm or subjection (physical, sexual, verbal or psychological) to an individual or a community. It affects in such a way that it limits present or future potentialities. It can occur through actions and languages, but also through silences and inactions. It is a complex concept that admits various nuances depending on the point of view from which it is considered… ”.
Bearing this definition in mind, let's try to approach the title "violent school coexistence." Apparently, the term "school violence" only refers to the issue of violence in the educational context, but it could well be related to other manifestations outside or outside the school. Although it gives an idea of a certain configuration or frames certain effects evidenced, based on the interactions between its social actors, its limits could be diffuse.
“Situations of school violence”, like any other situation of violence, present an uncomfortable imprecision or an inevitable difficulty in being specified or framed. That is to say, they are not phenomena that can be isolated or limited with the pretense of discovering their origins and affectations.
On the one hand, it is necessary to resort to delimitations that serve to take into account certain aspects, characteristic of the dynamics of relationships and the links that occur within a community or group. So, in a particular institutional setting and no matter how polycausal its analysis may be, the inferences will always depend on what is observed and the human group where the intervention or inquiry takes place. On the other hand, and in any case, these inquiries can provide insights capable of redefining knowledge and devices. These are specific events and circumstances but not, precisely, isolated. They are also related to effects generated by other problems, situations in smaller or larger environments and conditions arising from other contexts.
Of course, these considerations make sense if the aim is to achieve knowledge that serves to operate on the total quality of life, that is, both in specific and general aspects and in the short or long term. With the aim of offering concrete solutions and prevention.
Any attempt demands an intelligent and astute look, as if it were an archaeological work that seeks explanations through a few data and many relationships. In any case, it is essential to always start from a suitable conception or approach, which allows situations to be explored from various facets or points of view. Then you are likely to get good results. In this case, as in many others that have coexistence as an axis, through a "psychosocial framework" (as I explained in a previous text, "About the investigation of situations around school coexistence"), they leave outlining diagnoses, practices and systematizations.
In a 2010 paper published by the National Ministry of Education: "On violence in schools", it is specified: "So there cannot be an absolute concept of violence, but it assumes different forms according to the paradigms of thought in which it arises."
In this sense, the Undersecretariat for Equity and Educational Quality of the Federal Council of Education establishes some criteria: the “totally subjective burden” of violence, the adoption of a relational approach (“we are moving away from one centered on the individual”), coercive relationships or where a certain power is exercised and the distinction of violence typical of the institution ("as a sounding board for the social context in which it is inserted"). Keeping the focus on the links or roles between students, teachers and administrators.
What is bullying?
Bullying is the name given to the phenomenon of bullying or harassment between peers. From the English "bull", toro, can be translated as "torear". It is a type of violence that occurs, generally, between adolescents in a neighborhood or school. So, from this name, the violent situation refers to ramming, hitting, dodging, outwitting, ridiculing, hurting, exhausting, torturing or killing. "Harassment" is defined as "persecution without respite or rest" and "harassment" as "harassment to which a person is subjected through actions or minor but continuous attacks, causing her concern and burden, with the intention of annoying or pressuring her."
The name that is made of this type of violence is not so important, but how the students in a classroom or group in an establishment where it occurs are characterized. But these images about bullying give us ways of thinking about the phenomenon. On the one hand, taking into account the habitual use of digital technologies by adolescents and the mass media, one might think that such a thing would be working as a stereotype. That is, to act or reproduce bullying as a "fashion" or alternative, in the face of conflicts or difficulties in putting into words what happens during school life. On the other hand, recognizing that school ties are traversed by conditioning from all other social spheres,It could also be happening that these actions in these peer groups are a reaction or a reflection of problematic situations experienced as dilemmas or nonsense, either due to low containment, insufficient education or lack of solid references.
Attributing the facts to discrimination, intolerance of differences or social status is to stay with the “tip of the iceberg”. Beyond the obvious and the simple everyday, there are situations to be investigated, only afterwards can the strategies or the quality of the interventions be validated.
Legal support
In September 2013, the law on school bullying was enacted, however it has not yet been regulated. Regulation consists of establishing the parameters and tools for the law to be applied. It supposes the allocation of a budget and the implementation of the mechanisms that justice needs to execute it.
As mentioned in another work (Approach to “school coexistence”), the National School Coexistence Program (PNCE) deals with policies and specialized teams, emphasizing respect for differences, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and dialogue for the exercise of citizenship. In any case, there are controversies between the State and the jurisdictions, making the production of operational and transferable knowledge even more difficult, along the lines outlined and widely shared.
Psychosocial look
The look at some young people going through experiences, living together and developing in an educational institution, it better be a look supported by an integrating vision.
They are "situated subjects" who participate in situations and not in isolated events. They become linked or establish social ties, their lives are conditioned by innumerable factors. Each one has its "particular and shared history."
There are moments when conflicts appear that are experienced with a certain intensity, sometimes the situation is lived passively as a mere spectator and other times assuming roles such as that of aggressor or victim.
Let's say there are "unconscious fantasies" that confront real social structures. The subject is immersed in contexts where such confrontation can be negative, contrary to situations of peaceful or harmonious coexistence. Then there is no more fluid and comforting communication, learning fails and mood suffers. Instead of providing support and enthusiasm, the group turns into something aggressive or repulsive. At the same time, due to its institutional or mandatory and representational nature, it can be a place where there is no escape or alternatives. If such "disengaging" situations persist, that is, if the same forms of violence are repeated between the same actors, their final outcome will have serious consequences since we are witnessing a disintegration (such as rupture or fracture) of a subjective sphere.In other words, what is at risk is the future of its protagonists and the institutional well-being.
The roles are "awarded and assumed", for convenience, resonance, indefiniteness or other issue that affects from the "referential schemes" of the subjects. They are ways of obtaining or solving something, they mark complementary or supplementary relationships, they refer to ways of behaving before certain facts. It is a subjective mechanism, that is to say, traversed by fantasies rather than by objectifiable rationalities, and yet it is fully functional, affects people and structures their social environment.
Someone, moved by the conditions and events of the environment, plays a role that he believes corresponds to or agrees with his way of being. Between the actors, the scene is armed establishing such a “play” of roles.
Crises occur when these models or configurations of actions cease to be functional or promoters of the best that each subject can give. Because, from another point of view, roles are also a way to resolve intrapsychic and psychosocial conflicts. Without it being something very obvious, someone pretends, without realizing it, that there is someone else out there capable of giving him that affection or thing that he was deprived of, for "x cause" or the "vicissitudes of life", so he looks for who Assume it, another who also "unintentionally wants" to assign a certain role and thus not walk the paths of life alone.
Of course, all this is an interpretation or a way of understanding what is happening, there will be others, but I find it very useful for the purposes of understanding violence in schools.
If we make the corresponding analogy between mobile, dynamic or creative roles and healthy and stable bonds, then the value that this represents for the integrity of people and democratic social life is understood. In contrast, dysfunctional roles tend to the disappearance of the bond and the group as a structure. In these social groups there is only a sum of individualities or, where once the permanence of a group was tried (focused on a task), only a forced coexistence was reached.
Groups and communities
If it was understood that the subject is of a social nature, that people are not isolated individuals or that society is much more than the sum of parts, then it is worth one more understanding or at least one more saying: “society is made up of groups ”. Understanding the group as the "minimum" integration "between people or social agents. A "human team", a functional or operational structure where the important thing is not how to call it or categorize it, but rather that the dynamics of what we call a "group" does not "freeze". And the question is not that "each individual" contributes with their "grain of sand", but that, from the transit through the groups that we constitute throughout life, we have enough learning to enjoy such a network of linking. To make the social networks, through which we flow,networks that expand us instead of trapping us and holding us down. Because the subject of modernity no longer has to be that subject fixed to a rigid structure, such as “globalized culture”, because it is capable or has the opportunity to experience cultural diversity and creatively face the tasks that its local environment brings..
Groups are not formed by “placing people in a room”, nor can a group be maintained by forcing its members to interact according to expectations or expected achievements. It will be necessary to motivate and provide the minimum necessary means, objective and subjective, material and spiritual or formal and informal.
The formal part of the norms or those concerning rights and obligations is not enough for these subjective and social structures to prosper or to be installed in the institutional space. Let's say that all students can see themselves as “affiliated” with the school, enrolled or included, but they also have to feel that they belong to the groups that the institution has prepared or assigned to them. Partner or co-actor, even at the level of the community or larger environment.
The sustainability of relationships would be given by the deployment of the possibilities that favor collaboration and the "circulation of the word" in public spaces in the educational field. In the same way, there is no other choice, conflicts and harassment situations are workable from this perspective.
In addition to compliance with the rules or issues related to discipline, issues around coexistence are added. That is, instead of adding problems, understanding that "living together" a situation for a few hours and periodically means finding "humanizing or vivifying responses instead of aggressive or violent." Of course, it is equivalent to accepting a challenge, that of creating the appropriate conditions so that the links are established and the groups work. In reality, more than a challenge, it is something logical, but it implies abandoning ideas and customs related to control, hierarchy, the sequential and chronological or the certification of knowledge and authority.
Any school has adaptable teaching tools or teaching plans capable of guiding efforts. In educational terms or in relation to the desired learning, not even the most arduous list of disciplinary rules guarantees the tranquility of teachers and students. On the contrary, when coexistence is better, the regulations and other school institutes are not transgressed because, if they were widely agreed upon, they remain at the base of the structure. But they remain on the surface as a pretext for complaint and violence.
Abandoning certain ideas costs, implies changing the way of assuming and assigning roles. Although there are things that are perceived as damaging in the relationships and the objectives set, the situation will change only after hard work “inside and outside”.
If no one feels subdued or inhibited by the "system", if subjectivity is not trapped in alienating fantasies, if there are no subjects that reflect or reproduce violent ways of relating, if classrooms are not "cages" for "animals", " dungeons ”for“ inmates ”, nor“ vacant ”patios and halls for“ wandering around ”nor offices and other facilities“ enclosures for the mentally ill ”or“ shelters for tense and stressed people ”, but all that is thought of as“ good heart ”, then one learns in and from living together. Because “coexistence agreements” are just that, agreements, but they are not “coexistence”. Like the norms, which are a guide for the institution but do not synthesize it, they help its organization but, as such, it is the people who make it up, with their various features and vicissitudes.
Operability as a criterion
After the investigation and the diagnosis, if what follows is the intervention or the testing of the knowledge obtained to improve it, other strategies will have to be deployed. This is where the "psychosocial framework" becomes stricter, as it functions as a regulatory framework and facilitator of professional tasks.
It is not operated, as already explained, individually. Nor does the individual disappear or hide in the group. Relationship traits are taken, the character of the relationships evidenced is analyzed, conceptions and attitudes, common phrases and anything else that emerges from the group and denotes something about the violence manifested are taken into account. Then it is tried that such an aspect or emerging is contemplated and analyzed by the members. To operate is to try that the subjects can say, at least, a little more about the situation lived or acted. Such a "return" is timely at a time when anxieties have subsided and a genuine interest in overcoming the conflict is emerging. If there is knowledge at stake, personal and collective, it will first have to be at the service of improving relationships. So, the usual or planned processes,as well as any project, they will have their continuity or development.
In general, a symbolic expression and elaboration of the conflict is used. Based on this, the situation is taken to a stage or space where it can be worked on. It is always a very good resource to transfer something real, physical and concrete, to a symbolic setting, so that it can be approached or elaborated through the word. In this sense, in the face of difficulties, any expressive means (writing a story, acting out a fiction, taking photos on a subject, drawing, etc.) is useful. Some material has to be produced about which things can be said, meaningful things that allow an approach to the conflict, that help to overcome anxieties and find solutions.
This operation is based on the experience that, especially during conflicts, an “isolated or impoverished subject” cannot overcome their difficulties and even less their anguish or disintegration. You need containment, the encouragement of your companions and a friendly environment, that is, a little light to enter your "dark corners", and not die in those attempts… Nothing can change, no matter how much you reason, meditate or reflect on violence, if it is pretended that "nothing is happening" or that "everything is fine." Sometimes it is believed that "everything is wrong" and that is also why "nothing happens"…
In short, this violence happens at school and the conflict is intersubjective (between students, teachers and other members of the educational community). No one is the owner of violence or carries it in their genes, neither are conflicts exclusive to a social actor (subject, institution or community).
Overcoming situations of violence takes time, although there are cases that require rapid intervention, it is a process with different stages and small achievements. Many times they refer to sufferings that were terrible for the subject or evoke injustices and deep crises. Putting words to these sufferings, injustices and crises can be an almost impossible task. But, taking into account that they are facts already suffered or acts with a certain logic that must be found or discerned, then the only thing that remains is to re-signify them by removing their negative charge, even if they are not fully aware or memory of them. That is why we proceed with such criteria, trying to bring tools to unblock, rebuild or direct processes of personal growth and social development.
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violencia
portal.educacion.gov.ar/elministerio/files/2013/07/ONE2010.pdf
Gladys Adamson, Harassment in the school environment (http://www.infopsicosocial.com.ar/node/1177).
Laura Gutman describes suffering as the result of a certain helplessness, during childhood and adolescence. In hers book "The Human Biography" she explains how, generation after generation, negottive and repressive bonding forms of human virtues are being configured. The same, from another perspective, is reflected in the writings of Mario Rodríguez Cobos (Silo), where it is recommended to work on resentments and for human liberation.
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