TEACHERS AND SECONDARY-SCHOOL BULLYING - A POSTMODERN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This paper analyses a set of accounts from within a postmodern discurs ive framework. Interviews were conducted with secondary school teacher s and were semi-structured, focusing on school bullying. The aim of an alysis was to tackle the problem of bullying at a discursive level. Th is marks a shift away from seeing bullying as something situated withi n the interpersonal relations of pupils, or explained in terms of fixe d personality traits. This paper argues that in order to understand a social problem such as bullying, we have to be aware of the discursive limits employed in the way that the problem is constructed. It was fo und that teachers draw upon modernist discourses of individual respons ibility and fixed personality traits, and that bullying strategies are maintained by these modernist individualist discourses. This paper go es on to provide recommendations for tackling bullying at a discursive level.