Documentation of education for teenagers in residential care: a network of blame and critique

Abstract

This article presents analyses of documents from special schools in Sweden for students in the care of social welfare who have been assessed with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The aim is to use actor-network theory to analyse how blame and critique are handled in individual educational plans, and how responsibilities are produced in interactions between human and non-human actors. The documentation can be read as a materialised network that produces a distributed responsibility; the network is stabilised by accepting and recognising differences between actors. The template headings for each actor enable different translations of the network and make it possible for responsibilities to be distributed between students, parents, social service officers and teachers, thereby reducing the risk of conflicts. While the network provides opportunities for students to become learners, it is silent on the topic of adults’ responsibilities.

Keywords:

• Actor-network theory
• social
• emotional and behavioural difficulties
• individual educational plan
• responsibility
• emotions

Notes

1. Teenagers, such as those discussed in this paper, have been ‘taken into care’. In Sweden, this means that they are placed in a residential care (home) with its own school. The officials working in institutions include teachers in the schools and social workers. The facilities described in this article are owned by private companies and paid for through general taxation. In this way they are paid for by, and also responsible to, the local/social authority. In Sweden the same authority works with for example abused children and others with different social problems.

2. These teenagers may have been evaluated by an educational psychologist or diagnosed by a specialist in child psychiatry as having, for example, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder); or, their social, emotional and behavioural problems may have been described in records by child welfare officers as the reasons behind the placement. A diagnosis of ‘conduct disorder’ is infrequently used in Sweden.

3. This is a continuation of my research in education for students in the care of social welfare, which started with an ethnographic study over one year in two HVBs and one special education class. In the present analysis, the material comes from four other HVBs with their own schools.

4. In this article, the word ‘parents’ always refers to ‘birth parents’. The HVB has no ‘foster parents’, only ‘members of staff’.

5. 2013-02-07 (Dnr Ö 1-2013).