Adolescents in the borderland of normality: Education and treatment in special education classes and foster institutions. May 2010 Susanne Severinsson Linköpings universitet

 The study applies a combination of ethnography and discourse analysis and is based on research into interaction, daily life, and processes of identity transformation (Juhila et al, 2003; Hall, Slembrouck & Sarangi, 2006).  Film, fieldnotes and interviews in three different settings

 Through studying how society deals with youth who have been separated from the regular school, the aims are to reveal how different discourses about troubled youth, education and treatment create possibilities and limitations in relation to the goal of the practices targets, their means, and the actors.

 Fosterinstitution/home ”Vallby” with school boys age  Special education class/small school ”Myrmarken” age11-15 mostly boys  Foster institution/home ”Sandbacken” activities that seems like school in the mornings, age12-16 girls and boys

 home, school, and treatment, but associations may also be made to  prison, boarding houses, preschools, recreational centers, and the content is influenced by various contexts, discourses, and rationalities.

 The use of informal settings, playfulness, humor, and body contact help maintain consensus and build relationships.  The relationships provide a basis for exerting influence and offering support is also a means by which the young people can be controlled.

 Focus is on changing the youths. They should feel, think and act differently.  Discourses focus the individual, psychological; psychodynamic, cognitive, behaviorist orientation that sometimes are in conflict.

 homelike and informal are prominent aspects used by the staff to provide care and persuade the young people of the staff’s good intentions to help young people in their situation.  Formal settings, halls, locked areas, and staff lounges to which access is limited for the adolescents signal control and monitoring; that is, they have a more disciplinary framework.

 Very flexible arenas easy to redefine creates opportunities for discussions about what is possible to do or become.  The social care discourse are used and creates consensus.  The use of informal settings, playfulness, humor, and body contact help maintain consensus and build relationships.

 Are linked to that staff can work with, action-oriented and setting-related (Hall, Slembrouck & Sarangi, 2006; Mäkitalo, 2003, 2006).  reduce the burden of guilt and facilitate negotiations between the actors concerning the desired change. (ex “with learning difficulties”, “with low self esteem “ “concentration problems”….

 What is going to happen is constently negotiated and implicetly what the youth are and can become. Individual instruction, social training (ART), casework, and using reward/ punish systems.  Relation and informal talk and activities, humour, playfulness and massage are used to to create trust.

 Different categories and explanations are used to understand the youth. There are none common discourse or action alternatives that may be regarded as the sole province of this type of setting. The staff borrow language, categorizations, and approaches from other knowledge domain and from child experts that not are in the settings.  The lack of clarity concerning what the adolescents are supposed to do there, the practices offer an arena for negotiations about what should take place and who the adolescents are.

 In this setting there are processes going on of both clientification (Cedersund & Säljö, 1993) and declientification (Messmer & Hitzler 2011)

 The posibillities in resistance  Foster or education  In the safe hands of familjy discourse ?  Compensation of broken homes  How can social and pedagogic work theory develop without focusing the individuals short-comings?