Educational psychologists’ report-writing: acts of justice?

ABSTRACT

One of the major tasks of educational psychologists is the writing of reports. Often, all involvement, assessment and intervention culminate in the production of a report. This paper explores critically the tensions involved in writing reports which are closed down in their conformity to requirements of different bodies, while looking for possibilities of openings in this closure. We acknowledge that report-writing is caught in the economies of exchange and the impossibility of gift-giving, based on the writing of Jacques Derrida. This paper will draw upon a small qualitative study of seven experienced school psychologists, and using a Derridian framework, it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar [Biesta, G., J. Allan, and R. Edwards. 2011. “The Theory Question in Research Capacity Building in Education: Towards an Agenda for Research and Practice.” British Journal of Educational Studies, 59 (3): 225–239.] on the process of report-writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Education psychologist
• report-writing
• gifts and exchanges
• justices and ethics

Notes on Contributors

Sunaina Attard is a practising Educational Psychologist. She lectures in psychology both at post-secondary level as well as at the University of Malta.

Dr. Daniela Mercieca is a practicing educational psychologist and senior lecturer within the Department of Education Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interest is in problematising the assumptions which underpin educational practice with children and deconstructing situations in which decisions are made concerning children's well-being in schools.

Dr. Duncan P Mercieca is a senior lecturer of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education Studies at the University of Malta. His research draws upon French post-structuralist philosophers to think through educational issues.

Notes

1. Derrida does not write about a future ‘yet to come' as the ‘yet’ can give an indication of a particular expected coming, therefore, already caught within a particular economy.

2. This possible impossibility as the gift has been the tension of various thinkers. For Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, economy comes to stand for the masculine, while ‘the gift stands for the rebellious feminine departure from this phallic economy that has excluded women and attempts to inscribe the different rationality of women' (Grau 2002, 363). Genevieve Vaughan argues that mothering is this impossible gift, and says that if Derrida had recognised this it would have resolved his paradox (see Vaughan and Estola, 2007, 248). Jean-Luc Marion focuses on the assumption of causality and argues for thinking about gifts that go beyond causality. This will reconsider the nature of the giver and receiver in non-economical terms (see Derrida and Marion, 1991). While we recognise the importance of these ideas, for the purpose of this paper we intend to stay within a Derridian framework as we espouse the creativity and productivity of the aporia of the gift as argued by Derrida. We do not want to imply that these thinkers are doing away with aporia, but sometimes in our reading of these authors we find ‘the push[ing] against the limits, to transgress this boundary as far as possible, or (im)possible, to make a passage to the limits, to embrace their impossibility, to try to do the im-possible, which is not a logical contradiction' (Caputo, 1997, 144) is watered down or lost. The gift as impossible does not admit of the subjectivity of the experience.