Speaker
Description
While researchers have pointed to particular ‘hot spots’ for school bullying, such as playgrounds, hallways, and changing rooms (e.g., Vaillancourt et al., 2010), relatively little is known about how the design and management of the school-built environment influences the relational issues that occur within schools (e.g., Francis et al., 2022). Taking a generational perspective to school bullying (e.g., Horton, 2016), this paper investigates how the construction and design of school spaces impacts its occurrence, and more specifically how school bullying relates to the generational organisation of schooling. The findings stem from an ongoing qualitative research project investigating the relations between school bullying, spatiality, and the school-built environment. The project is based on situation plans, floor plans, photography, observations of breaktimes, and semi-structured interviews with school principals, caretakers, safety teams, teachers, and pupils (aged 5-19) at nine schools in one Swedish province, as well as architects and builders with experience of designing and building schools. The findings presented in this paper point to certain spaces as ‘hot spots’ for bullying precisely because of how their geographical design brings different generations of students into conflict with one another over the use of those spaces. The findings suggest that rethinking the design and organisation of these spaces could significantly impact bullying prevalence and reduce younger students’ experiences of generational insecurity. This has important implications for the focus of antibullying initiatives that have hitherto tended to focus on relational and organisational factors without adequately accounting for issues of spatiality and school design.
Keywords
school-built environment, school context, experiences, insecurity, school design
| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
|---|---|
| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Qualitative method study |
