ABSTRACT
The socio-economic context of SEBD teacher-research and practice-based interventions – in inner-city state schools predominantly– means that the literature in this field has often given disproportionate predominance to the ‘social’ element in social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). Though seeking a ‘cause’ is not a determining feature of SEBD literature, it is nevertheless assumed in most literature that emotional instability and behaviour manifestations are usually loosely and intrinsically linked to social status and, to some extent, to economic difficulties and their complex ramifications. This paper will examine a decade of teacher-research analysis compiled within a private sector school and attempt to examine hypotheses that to some extent take the emphasis away from the ‘S’ in SEBD. The data which were collected in a residential school, situated in Quebec, during a period of 12 years between 1997 and 2009, will show that students with SEBD are frequently in fact encountered in the private sector even if, for administrative reasons, they are handled differently and often not given the SEBD label. If social disparities and economic difficulties are in fact not predominantly relevant in manifestations of SEBD, how then can assumptions be reversed and a different construct be put forward to explain why certain children, regardless of background and socio-economic context develop SEBD? Since many of the data collected show that these students may later develop into adjusted adults. The conceptual looking glass of the medical model must be discarded as being incapable of explaining the universal manifestation of SEBD through the socio-economic spectrum. The hypothesis put forward in this paper is that children with SEBD should be seen, foremost, as children unable or unwilling to make a socially acceptable distinction between ‘private’ world and ‘social’ context. For reasons unknown, they refuse to comply with or fail to recognise the ‘Chinese walls’ which exist between these two aspects of human existence and which must generally be adhered to achieve ‘functional’ status. The study draws on documents relating to and data collected from three cohorts, aged 16 to 19, over a period of 12 years.
