AbstractsPsychology

Background The following thesis is part of the project “Disorder in Schools”, which is a comparative study between The United States and Norway. Professor Liv Duesund at the University of Oslo is the supervisor of the project. Disruptive behavior can be seen as a subgroup to disorder in school and has been chosen in order to refine and create a clear definition of what the thesis is about. In this thesis, the goal is to identify disruptive behavior of one pupil during class and recess. The type of disruptive behavior that is in focus is said to be the most frequent kind and can be defined as behavior that disturbs learning and teaching. Phenomenology will be applied to analyze the results found, mainly through Martin Heidegger’s terms “Dasein”, “The One”, “Mood” and “Absorbed Coping”. Research problem Exploration has been said to be one of the key figures in qualitative research (Given 2006; Hatch, 2002). For this reason, my research problem was created after the observations and based on the data that was gathered. The research problem is the following: “A phenomenological analysis of disruptive behavior in schools” This research problem can cover a vast amount of topics, which may be to comprehensive to serve the purpose of this thesis. Therefore, I have created three research questions in order to refine and answer the research problem. 1) What kind of disruptive behavior is being expressed? 2) How can teachers see pupils as Dasein? 3) How can seeing pupils as Dasein create possibilities for absorbed coping of school-related tasks? Methodology The project “Disorder in Schools” required that I used a pre-structured design. Qualitative observations was conducted and recorded in a pre-structured observation form. In total, I conducted five observations, one of an entire class and the remaining four focusing on one pupil. Results The most frequent kind of disruptive behavior expressed during my observations consisted of off-task behavior where the pupil in focus (made anonymous and referred to as NN in the thesis) was talking in class. The talking was mainly characterized by chatting (having an informal conversation) with other pupils and thereby may have been disturbing other pupils as well as himself. NN was mainly chatting with one or two pupils. The volume of the chatter was fairly low, but the intensity and frequency was high. Regarding teachers seeing pupils as Dasein (subject and object at the same time), this may and may not have happened. In one observation, NN was talking during the entire observation, something the teacher ignored. In the first observation, the level of noise in the classroom was extremely high, and the reactions towards it was telling pupils to be quiet or asking them if they needed to go outside without giving any further reason. Maybe none of these reactions takes the subjective side of the pupil into consideration and thereby does not see the pupil as Dasein. Maybe the disruptive behavior intensified as a consequence. This can be supported by NN talking louder and the level of…