Peer reciprocity and friendship in the classroom: a disabled student's experience

ABSTRACT

This article draws on findings from an ethnographic case study based on the classroom experiences of a learning disabled student as he attended regular schools in New Zealand. The aim is to look at a disabled student’s friendships within his classroom experiences so as to see how peer interactions supported his learning. The research involved making regular visits to an eleven year-old’s classrooms while he was at a two-year middle school. The data, including observation notes and interview transcripts, was analysed using a sociocultural framework to demonstrate how friendship was embodied in patterns of reciprocal and intersubjective activity. This has implications for how we understand concepts like classroom culture and its influence on inclusion, where the literature has often been on teacher-student relationships rather than peer relationships. Lastly, it demonstrates the important role of ethnography in generating knowledge about classroom experience that would be difficult to establish using other methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• schooling
• peer relationships
• friendship
• learning
• sociocultural theory
• ethnographic case study

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund under grant number 02-DBI-001. It was entitled ‘Disabled and non-disabled children’s constructions of identity: The influence of school experiences’, of which this study was a part. The larger study was a collaboration between Dr. Jude MacArthur, Dr. Berni Kelly and Sarah Sharp at the Donald Beasley Institute and myself at the Children’s Issues Centre in Dunedin, New Zealand. I gratefully acknowledge the participation of ‘Jack’ and his parents, peers and teachers. Thanks to Professor Lisette Burrows and the late Emeritus Professor Anne Smith for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Definitions of bullying usually include references to intentionality on the part of the bully and the recognition of the experience of being bullied by the victim (Sullivan 2000). This creates difficulties in the recognition of bullying within observation studies, because intentionality and experience must be inferred if it is not made explicit in other ways.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund [grant number 02-DBI-001].