A Case Study on Associations of Parents with futoko(School Non-attending) Children

Considering the Role of Narrative Community for Constructing the futoko Problem

Abstract

This study analyzes the activities of associations of parents who have futokoji, or school absentees (I will use the acronym AFPs for these associations). The purpose is to explore the role of the narrative community in constructing the futoko problem. The approach to the analysis is drawn from Bernstein's theoretical frameworks, “pedagogic codes” and “pedagogic device” The data used in this study was collected by participant observation of the three APFs in Tokyo and from interviews with their members.
I begin by focusing on the pedagogic code of the APFs. Pedagogic codes consist of classification and framing. Classification refers to “what, ” and framing to “how” meanings are put together. Communication in APFs is regulated by these dual values of the pedagogic code. While strong classification and framing regulate communications between the APFs and the outside, weak classification and framing within the APFs themselves regulate communications among the members. This characteristic of the APFs protects the families of futoko ji from being stigmatized, and encourages them to narrate their experiences with their children. In effect, the activities of the APFs bring about a process of restorytelling, which is the focus of narrative therapy.
Secondly, I examine how the pedagogic device regulates the practice and discourse of the APFs. By recontextualizing local knowledge among the members and using expertise mainly derived from clinical psychology and psychiatry, the APF's pedagogic device constructs a specific image of futoko as a “journey, ” and two types of identity, which Bernstein terms therapeutic identity and prospective identity. These instructional discourses are embedded in the regulative discourse which creates order and relationship between the family and the experts on psychology, psychiatry and education. Members of the APFs carry out re-storytelling in opposition to the expertise which stigmatizes their families and children as deviant. However, it is the expertise that helps the APFs create their own narration and their particular image of futoko.
Based on these results, this study concludes that APF's activities reflect an ambivalent relationship with expertise and an oscillation between medicalization and demedicalization, the control of “deviancy” and the creation of an alternative society.