Elementary school teachers’ representations regarding school problem behaviour: ‘Problem children in talk’

With a few exceptions (Mehan et al., 1986; Payne, 1982), little analytic attention has been paid to the process of creating joint understandings between teachers and psychologists in order to understand ‘deviance’ in schools. One of the continuing basic assumptions made by teachers appears to be the attribution of the problem in ‘problem children’ to individual factors and principally to innate ability (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). In this paper, we are interested in a categorisation membership analysis of elementary school teachers with regard to problem behaviour in school children. All the examples considered are taken from semi-structured group interviews conducted with elementary school teachers. Specifically, in the interview, the questions asked gave the respondents the task of accounting for or explaining the behaviour of ‘problem children’ in school.