Gerald Walton

Spinning our wheels: reconceptualizing bullying beyond behaviour-focused approaches

Bullying behaviours remain common in schools despite an abundance of policies and programs aimed at curbing them. In this paper, the author argues that such policies and programs are problematic not because they are flawed in themselves, but because they draw from the dominant and usual ideas about what bullying is taken to be. These ideas are presented as more fundamental problems that contribute to ‘wheel-spinning’ where efforts to reduce bullying are concerned. Key concepts that inform such ideas, specifically safety and diversity, are interrogated. The paper advocates for a new framework by which to think about and conceptualize bullying that moves away from those that highlight behavioural and developmental perspectives. Implications for education administration, especially with regard to supporting marginalized students, are explored.

The problem trap: implications of Policy Archaeology Methodology for anti‐bullying policies

James Scheurich argues that practices of policy – normalized over time through repetition – serve three purposes. They structure social problems for which policy is designed to address; construct certain people, implicitly or explicitly, as problem individuals; and shape policy solutions. Following Foucault, he offers what he calls Policy Archaeology Methodology as an approach to policy analysis that emphasizes how particular social problems (but not others) are socially constructed in certain ways within certain political and social contexts. The purpose of policy archaeology as a mode of analysis is ‘to investigate … the grid of conditions, assumptions, forces which make the emergence of a social problem … possible’. Drawing from his method of inquiry, I identify, through examination of policy documents, how the problem of bullying in schools has come to be understood in certain ways (the dominant narrative) and how policy solutions are constrained and limited accordingly, thereby confounding their purpose. I suggest that Scheurich’s perspective provides a way of addressing bullying that accounts for complexity in ways that current approaches mostly do not even consider.

Moving Beyond the Injustices of the Schooled Healthy Body

A healthy body is determined not by medical treatments and lifestyle choices alone, but by a complex interaction of social influences (Raphael, 2009). Despite this, many North American schools continue to espouse the notion that individual choice and behavior alone are the solutions to educating youth for long-term health. In this chapter, we argue that current “healthy body” discourses in schools, in particular in health and physical education culture, privilege certain body types and marginalize others. Through a critical lens, we advocate for a new social movement that deconstructs the injustices of biopedagogies in schools, challenges the regulation of bodies in and through educational practice, and disrupts the idea of the schooled healthy body. Resisting hegemonic biopedagogies, we advocate a vision of social justice in schools that fosters a physical education culture of safety for, and democratic inclusion of, all bodies.

Corrupting Children: The Regulation of Children’s Gender Presentations and Identities and Implications for Educators and School Administrators

In this chapter, Gerald Walton explores the ideology of gender and focuses on the problem of social violence against gender atypical people, meaning those who do not, or refuse to, conform to the dominant norms, expectations, and expressions of gender. He thinks of such violence broadly to include genderbashing and gaybashing, which are more extreme examples of daily and normative gender regulation that shape, but do not determine, gender presentations regardless of gender identity. Walton challenges hegemonic conceptualizations of gender as two rigidly distinct categories (girls/women and boys/men) that stem from two distinct sexes (female and male). He also describes how gendered violence operates in schools, mirroring society at large, to regulate the gendered expressions of all children, whether gender atypical or typical. Approaches to understanding and supporting gender atypicality are offered so that school leaders can work towards shaping their schools into more equitable and safe spaces for gender minorities especially and spaces where gender regulation is a diminished source of violence.

Curb My Cynicism: Employing Photo Elicitation to Address the Problem of Research on Bullying

Seemingly, everyone has something to say about bullying and most have had some direct experience with it. People tell stories of when they were bullied or their child was bullied. For many, it is an emotional topic because it is personally experienced, often in violent, cruel, and sustained ways. People have lost friends and family members because of suicide that is sometimes seen as the only escape from the torment. In the US, Donald Trump, widely described as a “bully” on a world scale because of his many misogynist and racist comments, was elected President of the United States in November 2016. The problem, or what has been largely depicted as the problem, is that bullying is largely viewed as a form of behaviour. As the author outlines in other works (Walton in Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics 3(2):1–17, 2015; Walton in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32(1):131–144, 2011), bullying is a social problem, not just bad behaviour enacted by individual young people, that is learned, validated, and replicated. Recognizing bullying as a social problem should leave little wonder why it seems to go on and on without any sign of abating. The reason for its tenacity is that it operates not only in society, but as society. This chapter highlights data from a 2012 study (Walton and Niblett in Journal of Youth Studies 16(5):646–662, 2012) with 37 children in which we employed photo elicitation strategies to acquire adolescent perspectives on bullying. In 2012, interviews were conducted in which photo elicitation strategies were employed to acquire children’s perspectives on bullying. The research was guided by Gauntlett and Awan’s (The handbook of visual culture. Berg, London, UK, pp. 589–606, 2012) claim that photo-elicitation is an avenue to “a different route into discussion of a topic” (p. 591). The specter of finding a different route provided insights on how to research an already over-researched topic and led the author to problematize the broad enterprise of research and assess his contributions to it.