Rethinking conflict: An investigation of how emerging conflicts can be utilized to promote learning
Short description
Disagreements in the classroom, name-calling on the playground, misunderstandings and clashing views, conflicts have always been present in schools. Conflicts can become constructive and promote development and learning, or they can become desctructive and lead to traumas and violence.
About the project
Conflicts are unavoidable and no matter how well trained or skillful teachers may be, they will inevitably encounter a myriad of conflicts on a daily basis. In this project, we are interested in emerging conflicts that can be negotiated or mediated and have not yet escalated to the point where they must be reported to the Swedish Schools Inspectorate or Equality Ombudsman. Because emerging conflicts go unreported, they are rarely explored and studied by researchers. They are often invisible outside of the contexts in which they occur. Moreover, it is not clear how teachers and schools handle emerging conflicts in ways that either support or undermine learning.
Due to the profound importance of emerging conflicts as educational tools, the proposed project seeks to investigate ways in which teachers conceptualize and work with emerging conflicts in their classrooms as well as the ways in which emerging conflicts can be utilized by teachers to promote learning.
Research Questions
Research Questions:
1. What are the qualitatively different ways in which teachers conceptualize emerging conflicts and conflict resolution? What are the educationally critical aspects of their conceptualizations? What are the didactic implications of their conceptualizations?
2. What do teachers‘ conceptualizations look like in practice? Which conflict resolution strategies do they use? To what extent do these strategies promote and diminish learning? Which strategies do they use to explicitly promote learning that implicitly play a role in conflict resolution?
3. Which resources do teachers employ to address emerging conflicts? What do they find useful? What do they need?
The study consist of two stages that will be undertaken over the course of four years. The first stage will consist of a phenomenographic study and the second stage of an observational investigation employing a stimulated recall methodology
Project members
Agneta Lundström, Senior lecturer, Applied Educational Science, Umeå University
Jonas Lindahl, Postgraduate student at Department of Sociology, Inforsk, University Umeå
Research Environment
Power and Agency in Education - PAGE