‘He failed to find his place in this school’ – re-examining the role of teachers in bullying in a Finnish comprehensive school

ABSTRACT

Bullying has been conceptualised as a phenomenon that focuses mainly on individuals and individual behaviour. We seek to broaden the discussion on bullying by describing and defining how teachers participate in and/or enable bullying, and to thus expand the notion of bullying as individual behaviour to include actors, norms and processes. This study is based on ethnographic observation and interview data that were gathered in 2013–2016 in one high school in the metropolitan area of Finland. We found that teachers ignored and excluded a student who was labelled ‘not-normal’. We use the concept of recognition and redefine it according to the context of bullying, and state that the individual in our study was not recognised as a student because he broke the norms of the school and was thus excluded. We suggest that bullying should be seen as a structural issue and should not be limited to individuals’ behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullying
• normality
• recognition
• ethnography
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ina Juva http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7403-8122

Notes

1 During the study, Sasu was in the eighth and ninth grade in upper comprehensive school. When he came to school in the eighth grade, he was 14 years old, and when he left, at the end of the ninth grade, he was 15.

2 One of the key factors of behaviour that is categorised as ‘normal,’ is being able to recognise the limits of acceptable behaviour. Students need to know how loudly they can speak or when being shy is labelled as not-normal. Students who, for some reason, do not recognise these limits are ‘punished’ by bullying or exclusion. In this way, students also participate in the processes of normalisation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland 2013–2016 (project # 1264654); Justice Through Education – JustEd 2016–2018; and Kulttuurin ja Yhteiskunnan Tutkimuksen Toimikunta.