Disrupting Schools

Disrupting Schools: The Institutional Conditions of Disordered Behaviour represents an applied sociological address to the intractable patterns of educational exclusion of students diagnosed with "emotional and behavioural disorders." Starting with the finding that these students commonly share educational trajectories signposted by critical incidents and alienation, this book seeks a scientific solution to this problem via a more reflexive way of understanding these students’ practices in situ—in order to avoid critical incidents and foster inclusion. Pursuing this logic, Disrupting Schools uses Bourdieu’s theorising of practice and Sacks’ Membership Categorisation Analysis and Conversation Analysis to prise open the epistemological dynamics of exclusion by forensically dissecting an incident of classroom violence leading to exclusion. This produces the discovery that institutional conditions operating within teacher-student interactions ensure, via psychologically informed knowledge construction practices, the non-conscious substitution of reflexive understanding for a symbolic violence that underwrites both critical incidents and exclusion. The discovery unlocks the possibility of systemic inclusion based on a consciously controlled reflexive understanding suggested by these findings.

Rod Kippax has been a human services research practitioner for over 30 years, specialising in young people diagnosed with "emotional and behavioural disorders." He completed a social science doctorate at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He currently runs a consultancy and is a QUT sessional social work lecturer.