Biological sciences, social sciences and the languages of stress

ABSTRACT

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the ‘more-than-social’ of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education.

KEYWORDS:

• Stress
• assessment
• sociology of education
• bioscience
• biosocial

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude for their participation and openness to the people who participated in the IUE and GAESTA research projects. Thanks also to academic colleagues in analytic chemistry – Jim Reynolds and Matthew Turner, University of Loughborough – and neuroscience – Andrew Bagshaw, Stephane de Brito and Kimron Shapiro, University of Birmingham. Thanks also to the insightful comments from the reviewers this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The body social: synthesising sociology and biology to reconceptualise student identity, British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (award no: MD140037).

2 Getting an Early Start to aspirations: Understanding how to promote educational futures in early childhood (GAESTA, Australian Research Council, FT130101332) and Imagining University Education: The perspectives of young people impacted by low socio-economic status and disengagement from school (IUE) (Australian Research Council, DP140103690) were conducted in Australia and have Human Research Ethics Committee Approval from the University of Wollongong.

3 Pseudonyms are used for names of people and places. See Harwood et al. (2017), for details of the IUE research.

4 Setting aside for now concerns over animal experimentation itself, findings drawn from model animal studies do present challenges for translation to humans. Neither the experimental conditions (neglect, electric shock) nor the data collection method (death and brain dissection) can be reproduced; the complexity of human social forms and environmental conditions and contexts cannot be accounted for; and the possibility that the tissue-specific cells of human organisms may respond quite differently to those of model animals cannot be discounted. Despite the distance between rodent and human, some leading researchers suggest that the conditions created in animal models are good analogue for poverty or neglect in humans (van Ijzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Ebstein, 2011).