Interactional resources used in resistance- and disciplinary work between pupils with PMID and teams in the everyday life in training school

The thesis should be regarded as a contribution to the development of knowledge about the social actions taking place in the educational setting for pupils with PMID in Sweden (the training school) and the contextual and interactional conditions that characterizes this educational setting. The study's overall purpose is to analyze the participation and interaction within the framework of the training school's contextual conditions.  Participation in this study refers to how the teams and students jointly create interaction in classrooms, the patterns produced by the interaction and how participants interact with each other and tries to achieve coordinated and joint actions and joint intersubjectivity. A special focus is placed on patterns of interaction and organization of interaction in the classroom.

This paper tries to explore interactional resources used by teams (teachers and assistants) and pupils with PMID in everyday life situations in classrooms with a focus of their use of interactional resources in resistance- and disciplinary work.  

The study draws on a theoretical framework that is influenced by ethnometodological work and from the dramaturgical framework by Goffman, where the participant’s social actions and methodical ways of making sense in a social setting are in focus. The design of the data collection t is inspired by an ethnographic approach and is constructed as a classroom study. The empirical material was collected by classroom observations and by video recordings. The data presented in this paper derive from video recordings that were made during spring 2009 and spring 2010 in five training school classes and all together eight pupils (age 6-19, eleven boys and nine girls) and 27 members from the teams (nine special teachers,  two music teachers,  one psychical education teacher and 16 assistants) participated in the study.

In this paper a small selection of the total video recordings (about 40 hours) is transcribed and analyzed. The analytic approach is inspired by Goffmans dramaturgical framework and by an ethnometodological perspective and provides detailed analysis of the use of interactional resources used by pupils doing resistance and the team's work with disciplining the pupils in everyday life situations. The results in this study are supposed to be of relevance for the understanding of the pedagogical praxis in the training schools and by studying interaction between pupils and teams within this context this paper also intend to explore patterns in the interaction and bring new perspectives on the on pupils and teams doing resistance- and disciplining the pupils. The study is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of the pedagogical praxis in the training School and the pupils’ possibilities to be agents within the processes of interaction, participation and learning.