3. Interpersonal conflict in the school settings

 

What is an interpersonal conflict?

In general, terms, we can define conflict as a fact that occurs between two or more people than act to obtain objectives or goals that turn out to be incompatible. Life in relation is a generator of conflicts because the human nature is essentially troubled and complex. Therefore, we should not consider interpersonal conflict as something bad in itself, but as something natural, consubstantial to relations, as part of life where the quality of communication operates as a regulating element.

Nevertheless, there is a way to conceive conflict as something negative, as if it was a harmful, strange element that one must make disappear in favor of establishing ideal, harmonic interpersonal relations, as a condition to create a harmonic life and peaceful coexistence. This produces a feeling of fear and rejection towards conflict that impedes to adopt a constructive and realistic position that turns conflict into an opportunity to change and acquire new learning.

Genetic Psychology shows that the ontogenetic development of human being is built on a process of reciprocal relations between the subject and the physical and human environment, marked by difficulties whose overcoming generates new learning acquisitions and an adjustment to the social environment. The teacher, and specially the early childhood educator has the responsibility of being aware of the inevitable intra-subjective and interpersonal conflicts that come up in the course of the development of the children, taking into account their evolutionary level, to provide them with suitable conditions that allow them to overcome them successfully. The attainment of this purpose depends fundamentally on the availability to establish a communication style that allows for sensible listening and a systematic and conscious observation of their manifestations. Perhaps it would be helpful to make a brief digression to clarify what we are talking about, when we speak of communication, understanding that this process is the base of all educational and social activity.

Two theoretical approaches on the communication process

We are used to considering communication as a process by means of which someone sends an elaborated message to a receiver who decodes it using a common code. The content of the message has an objective and explicit value, because the word serves in this case just to name the reality, to label it. On the other hand, reality is conceived as a given, something natural to which man is related to in an immediate way because he lives in it.

Genetic Psychology maintains a very different position. This approach maintains that the human being is not related to the real thing in a direct or immediate way, by the single fact of being in the world. The baby for example, does not understand the knowledge of space, conservation, or object, in a direct way as they imply, as we know, very complex constructions. Reality is the product of a human creation, in which symbolic elements of order between the subject and the means take part from which man receives and organizes reality. The relation with reality is intermediated by a child's creation: the child organizes the space, the time, the objects and the culture, from the sensations, perceptions and configurations of the cognitive type (structures of knowledge) and of ideological type that cause each person to see the same fact from "his own reality".

Here the points of view of Genetic Psychology and Psychoanalytic Theory converge. For Psychoanalysis natural reality, the reality that is considered as a given does not exist. Only "psychic reality" exists and it is also formed by structures that account for the real thing. Reality is something that human being creates through illustrations that constitute the base of psychic character, where the real thing is mixed with fantasy and unconscious elements. What we want to emphasize regarding communication and language is that man is related to the physical and human surroundings from an internal reality, from a "psychic reality”, he communicates through a set of meanings, ideas and personal concepts, and many times they do not match with the outer objective reality. Our structure of language and thought helps us to receive reality in a certain way and to organize the content of the language used by others according to our field of meanings. On the other hand, taking into account the nature of the psyche, we can say that in this psychic reality there are conscious elements that are actually expressed in the practice and contained unconscious elements that are not going to be expressed and that compose that set of meanings that also comprise the psychic reality. The communicative process, if we take into account what has been said, is not such a simple process as we used to see it from the theory of communication. When a person tries to communicate some content to another one, the explicit thing, the evident could be compared with the visible part of an "iceberg" that we previously made reference to, that is placed on another part that is hidden and that would represent part of the psychic structure that the Psychoanalysis refers to.

From these concepts we cannot derive elements of practical or methodological order for the pedagogical action but they have the value of giving a general orientation that prevents us from falling into simplifications, and it helps us to notice the complexity of the human phenomenon. As educators we are not in conditions and it is not our competence either, to go deep into the analysis of the unconscious elements that take part in the communicative relation, but to know that other contents exist beyond the declared ones in the expressions of the children and in our own ones, and sets us up in another way towards the transcendental task of mediation and communication that we must assume as educators.

Relational conflicts in early childhood

Regarding childhood conflicts, the important thing is to try to intervene to avoid aggressive or violent conducts. Resentment, hatred or jealousy, are inherent feelings to human condition the same way as love, consideration, generosity or kindness. That is, the educator's action becomes essential to help form, through a suitable intervention, as much in the prevention scope as in the solution, human beings that are able to reflect and assume a critical attitude towards our own behavior, being able to use conflict to generate changes that encourage their personal development. A person gets to be assertive in the field of social relations if he has been trained for it from the early years of his life. There are many diverse factors that influence in the shaping of the personality, but the work that is carried out by education in the early years has an extraordinary importance.

Educating to live together: a project for the Centre

The first thing that we must take into consideration when we talk about conflicts in the school is that we are approaching a complex problem, not only for its nature, but because the school institution is part of the social relations that go beyond the school. Society, family and school are live systems that are in permanent communicative interaction and what happens in one of them inevitably has repercussions in the others. The school community constitutes at the same time an ample system in which we can identify several levels of interaction: supervisor-directors, director-teachers, teachers with each other, teacher-students, students with each other, in a relational and communicative crossing with a circular dynamics.

The will and determination of an educator or the educators of the center is not enough to face the challenges that the task of educating for coexistence entails. It is necessary that there is an educational project for the center, around which common yearnings and objectives are conjugated on the base of shared criteria and values. In a few words, an educative set of goals that stimulates, impels and orients educational action.

When this does not happen, we encounter the difficulties characteristic of a dysfunctional relational system that prevent good communication between the different components of the system and a lack of coherence and continuity in the educative action. It is also certain that a school can have an educative set of goals according to innovating pedagogic values, without this leading towards a coherent practice that corresponds with the enunciated principles. One thing is the words and another one the "spirit of the words". With this we want to indicate that often from so much hearing and reading the well-meant intentions and objectives present in the Early Childhood Education programs, words become empty of content; it also happens often that while using the same words we are talking about different concepts. Let us think about the unanimous agreement generated by objectives such as "development of creative capacity ", "autonomy", "critical spirit", "intelligence", "mutual respect", etc., when the real practice operates in the opposite sense to the attainment of those purposes.

There is no single way to conceive creativity, criteria, autonomy or intelligence. Piaget complained of the feeble interpretation that some times was made of his formulations, although in the language of his followers an enthusiastic acceptance of his principles was reflected. The same happens with postulates of New School or the Modern School represented by that extraordinary pedagogue that was Celestine Freinet, to whom pedagogy owes, along with others thinkers, an essential transformation in the way to conceive education, learning and the relation between teacher and students. Much has been written and model experiences have been made in the education field and education throughout the last century. These have brought about the concretion of innovating educational projects that we can see at present time, but are still exceptional cases. In many cases, educational practice responds to old and, in many cases outdated, pedagogical criteria. Until not long ago the 0-3 years it was considered again as “assistance" an expression of a backwards movement in the field of pedagogical ideas that obviously demonstrates that there is a need for a long time to go by so that obsolete concepts are definitely abandoned. The production of ideas in the field of education does not always have a parallel pedagogical practice, and perhaps one of the causes would be the power of the institutions to resist changes and transformations.

There are, at present time, schools where the classrooms including those of Infantile Education, are designed with fixed tables and chairs in rows to prevent mobility and to foster "discipline". Silence and order are valued as a manifestation of good teacher expertise, because noise and disorder are signs of an uncontrolled class. This reality expresses an extreme backward position in pedagogical thinking but without getting to this extreme, there are mixed situations that maintain bad remains of philosophical tradition that considered the body and the mind separately, the affective and the cognitive and that in the pedagogical level have had a deep influence.

In our educational system, beyond the written pronouncements in the curriculum, education is directed towards the intellect, assumed as an independent entity from the body and feelings. Although rationally we know that the human being is not divided, these ancestral ideas remain as an assumption on which the curricular program is based. The body and the movement have their time and specific space during recess and in the physical education class. Intelligence, the privileged object of the educational task occupies the centre of all the activity and monopolizes the greater interest from the planning point of view. Emotional education lacks pedagogical status to such a point that in many centers the children whose parents have chosen the option of an “alternative” activity take this class as an alternative to religion. In Early Childhood Education, one hour per week is dedicated to it and it is implemented according to criteria of each teacher as far as the content of the activity.

When we gathered information in the schools, the teachers told us that they did not have any specific planning for that subject and frequently occupied it for academic reinforcement tasks, mainly in the second cycle where the insistence that the children entering primary school knowing how to read and write, constitutes one of the most important purposes at this stage. The situation does not vary too much in primary schools. We know teachers that with a great dose of intuition and generosity help the children "to speak out” to talk about the problems that afflict them, and to try to orient them in the reflection and awareness of the emotional and interaction problems that they face in their daily life in the school and social setting. The emotional education of our children is not a relevant worry within our educational system or, at least, it is not comparable to the interest that exists in relation to intellectual formation. Luckily, this situation is being reviewed now.

Walloon tells us about the inter-relation between body and emotions in his theory of emotions and closer in time R. Damasio, mentioned by Sastre and Marimon in his book “Conflict resolution and emotional learning" (2004), emphasizes that emotions and thoughts and their content of have a corporal repercussion since their action does not operate just in the brain but is transmitted to different organs through the nervous system. On the other hand, these physical states affect their operation and effectiveness. In his own words: "feelings have the last word when it refers to the way in which the rest of the brain and cognition take care of their affairs". These theoretical considerations are easy to state if we turn to our own personal experience, and what we can observe from the experience with the children that we work with. Nevertheless, the force of tradition, which slips into people's mind, “stealthily" suffocates the forcefulness of the evidences and common sense. Proof of this is the little importance assigned to emotional education in school programs. There is no plan that takes into consideration the emotional development of children as a fundamental aspect. The contents and objectives of academic subjects are programmed in detail and civic formation is left to improvisation as if it was thought that children and young people should obtain by themselves an education that allows them to approach one of the most important aspects of their life, as is to reconcile their personal life with their social experience.

The systematic attention that children receive in the emotional development area is directed towards the ones that show behavioral problems, or some disturbance that prevents them from having a good academic development, in which cases they are separated from the rest of their classmates to receive specialized attention. This in some cases causes a new outbreak of the problem or as a lesser evil, its relapse. It is necessary to conceive another way to order the needs that education must take care of from the first years of schooling. We need to become aware that to attend the children's emotional development implies to work with the complete school group handling the relational conflicts at the same time as the bases for the development of their personality are created.

As we said in the beginning, the school is a system of relations that is part of other systems that include it, (society, family, etc.). It operates as a testing ground of the set of conceptions, social ideas and predominant values at any given time. In addition, the school community constitutes in itself a system of relations that reproduces the effective guidelines in the social and family system. To be able to stimulate continuous reflection, to produce proposals for change and to work jointly in the concretion of those proposals is the great challenge faced by the Early Childhood Education Center as an institution. The determination of teachers will not be enough, if they do not feel supported by a group that endorses and stimulates their work.

For education for coexistence to be responsibly carried out it must be part of a coherent educational project of the center, which means to harmonize a style of pedagogical practice with the values that we wanted to transmit. The objectives stated for a civic formation cannot be in conflict with a pedagogical practice that in its didactic aspects and methodological promotes opposite behaviors to the values in which it is expected to educate. An authoritarian, repressive education style and a transmissible manner of education, will limit the possibility to generate responsible attitudes, autonomy, tolerance, self-criticism and respect towards the positions of others. Equally, the type of relation and communication that is establishes between adults in the school space constitutes a live example that operates with far more forcefulness than the moralizing sermons that completely lack any pedagogical effectiveness.