Schools Overlook Individual Students, Treating Them as Interchangeable Group Members
A study of school-age care staff conversations reveals that educators rarely discuss children as individuals—instead lumping them into generic groups based on behavior or demographics. Only students who act out get singled out for individual attention, raising concerns about personalized learning and how institutional practices may disadvantage conforming students.
Originaltitel: Is There an “I” in “We?”: Children as Individuals or Group Subjects in School-Age Educare Staff’s Collegial Conversations
<p>The aim of this study is to gain knowledge of how School-Age EduCare (SAEC) staff in andthrough collegial conversations construe a child/children. Collegial conversations with two SAECstaff teams were analyzed using the theoretical concepts from the fields of discourse analysis andsystemic functional grammar. The results show that children were repeatedly construed as a groupsubject by the staff and more rarely as individual subjects. The SAEC staff construed the children asgroup subjects in four different ways: as general groups, as pre-determined groups, as quantity-relatedgroups, and as behavior-related groups. The children who were construed as individual subjectswere mainly the ones who diverged from the group, often in negative ways.</p>