Shaping Norms and Values, Conflict Management and the right school culture

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Shaping Norms and Values

This is a very broad question, but something I’ve been intensely interested in. The most general answer would be, I think, silently. We tend to think of ourselves as more or less autonomous individuals making decisions based on abstract or rational grounds that would seem to clear to us in posterior analysis. But I feel that if you dig deep enough, you’ll always find things that escape the basis on which you assume your decisions are made. Most of this new, obscure level of behaviour-determinants could be understood as “values, meanings and norms”.

There’s a very dynamic new field of economic thought called Institutional economics which is concerned with this very issue: how much better can we understand the economy if we take not the individual, but institutions as the central category?

What fascinates me most about this approach is its interdisciplinarity. It opens up conventional economics to a long-needed dialogue with the other human sciences. Sociology is the first one to come back to the game – institutionalism was born with Thorstein Veblen, and it has always surprised me a little that that economics keeps on using notions like rationality and equilibrium after all that sociologists have written in the last century. Understanding meaning, in turn, requires coming to terms with the truly revolutionary philosophical thought in linguistics that follows Wittgenstein and Saussure. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to bring in psychology – particularly psychoanalysis – to the field. The unconscious can be understood as the place beyond reason and abstraction in which things like institutions take hold. In the continental tradition, in particular, the Lacanian notion of The Symbolic can be seen as the first step in bringing together individual behaviour and the entire system of meaning in which the individual is formed, and through which it functions.
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Conflict Management and the right school culture

Sequel to the variability and dynamism of individual cherished values, core objectives and dire needs which most times do not always go pari – pasu, conflict occurrences in organizations like schools becomes aggregately inevitable. Thus, the teacher’s onus as an inloco-parentis in managing such inevitable conflict becomes grossly unavoidable. However, for the teacher to possess the disposition to manage such conflicts effectively in schools, a clear understanding and interpretation of conflict issues are requisite. Such an understanding is direly needed by the teacher so as to be able to address the given encumbrances which may be spotted out in the interaction among parties.

Conflict management in schools as it relates to teachers pertains to a given condition whereby teachers acquire programmed and patterned mediums through which they can twig and deal decisively with conflict as a way of embellishing conditions of conflict in schools at all times.

There are paradigms for elucidating the causes of those conflict conditions that require effective management in schools, just as there is cornucopia of avenues available at the teacher through which conflict within the precinct of schools could be managed. Those paradigms are what we shall attempt to explore in this paper.

In the classroom and by extension, school precinct, there are certain students-defiant behaviours that could be tolerated while some are and will remain insufferable, for example; fighting in the classroom, answering of phone calls in the classroom at the peak of the lesson, abusing and physically confronting the teacher, stealing, so many to mention but a few. Although, such conflict causing scenarios could be considered to be an integral part of every school system, the teacher’s role in preventing or even ameliorating their occurrences especially the ones that are seen to be internecine remains pivotal.

Conflict in school is said to occur when one party perceives the action of another party as encumbering the opportunity for the attainment of a goal. Hence, for conflict to actually occur in schools, two salient prerequisites must be satisfied, viz; perceived goal incompatibility and perceived opportunity for interference or blocking Conflict in schools can be objective or subjective, violent or nonviolent and positive or negative (Schmidt and Kochan, 1972) in (NUCUP, 2006). But whatever may be the case, the teacher’s rejoinder to them can either be assertive or cooperative in nature. Also, such school conflicts may constitute either a prominent debilitating or enchanting effect on the victims.

The concept of conflict management in schools is perhaps an admission of the reality that conflict in schools is inevitable, but that not all conflicts can always be resolved; therefore, what the teacher can do is to manage and regulate them, thus the teacher’s role as an inloco-parentis. It is also worthy of note to assert that School conflict management is inclusive of other discrepant variances of conflict management models which are in most cases at the disposal of the teacher.

In this instance, when we talk about conflict management in school and the role of the teacher, we simply mean those responses that the teacher makes in order to deal with the conditions that can encumber the realization of the aggregate objective of the school and the teacher’s instructional and/or behavioural classroom lesson objective.

The classification of conflict as it pertains to internal school systems can be between; students and fellow students, Teachers, non-academic staff and teachers, management and teachers, management, non-academic staff and management, non-academic staff, students and non-academic staff and students and management. But for the purpose of this paper, we shall limit our scope or consideration to conflicts between students, teachers, students and teachers.

In this article, we shall commence with the conceptual and theoretical explication of the key concepts of the discourse which are; conflict management, conflict, school and the teacher. We shall also establish the causes of school conflict, state the reason why we need to manage conflict in schools, express some of the contributory roles the teacher could make in the school conflict management process, advance some specific recommendations and finally present our concluding remarks.
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