The Conflict of Interpretations between Teacher and Students: A Focus on the Work of Student Guidance as a Source of Troubles among Students

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how troubles among students are settled and to reveal the reality and difficulties when teachers handle students' issues from the viewpoint of ethnography in junior high school.

Lately, teachers have been receiving fierce criticism for issues about "bullying"- they are constantly judged for the process they adopted to handle issues among students and the fact that they cannot eradicate the problem of "bullying". This paper tries to disclose the reality and difficulties directly by capturing narratives at which teachers and students listen and explain to each other when teachers approach to settle and define the issue as a "problem" and solve it.

In the cases studied by this paper, the teacher and students uphold their thoughts as the only correct interpretation, so there is a mismatch between the two. Based on these cases, the author provided a diversity perspective to understand and interpret issues occurred in classrooms.

Furthermore, this paper pointed out the difficulties for teachers in guiding students may come from the different explanations between the teachers and students in term of the "problem". Therefore, this paper asserts that it is necessary for teachers to handling the problems among students before the problems being upgraded to bullying.