This project was concluded in 2024.
Project information
Project manager
Joakim Strindberg
Financier
Linnaeus University, the research environment Research on pedagogical professions and practices (PEPP)
Timetable
March 2023–2024
Subject
Pedagogy (Department of Education and Teachers' Practice, Faculty of Social Sciences)
More about the project
Regarding the preventive work against school bullying, previous studies suggest that school personnel tend to rate relational forms of bullying (such as social exclusion) as less serious than other forms of bullying (such as name-calling and/or physical violence) (e.g., Bauman & Del Rio, 2006). Studies have highlighted that school personnel may have difficulty identifying lonely or socially marginalized students (e.g., Oldenburg et al., 2016), but also that whether the student is a girl or a boy has significance for how school personnel experience, categorize and act in various events and proceedings emerging in school (Lunneblad & Johansson, 2019).
Still other studies have drawn attention to the fact that school staff's work against various forms of bullying is closely related to schools' structural and organizational conditions. Such conditions concern, for example, teacher density, size of student groups and the design of school yards and school buildings (Horton et al., 2020). School staff's preventive work can also be related to opportunities, and/or lack of opportunities, for collaboration between different types of school staff (Hjalmarsson & Odenbring, 2021).
The degree of workload and/or perceived stress in the work of school staff is an additional aspect that has been noticed as significant in terms of schools' preventive work (Rajaleid et al., 2020). High workload and perceived stress – when combined with legal pressure to report incidents of abusive treatment – risk not only that school staff perceive that they are expected to report more incidents (Hult & Lindgren, 2016), but also that school staff focus on the type of interactions that are perceived as relatively easy to report and document (Lindgren et al., 2020).
The aim of the present project is to explore and deepen knowledge about school staff's experiences of school loneliness and involuntary social isolation. Around 10-30 school counselors, school nurses, social pedagogues, and teachers will be interviewed about their experiences of working with this.
The project is part of the research in the Research on pedagogical professions and practices (PEPP) research group.