Violence and social climate in secondary schools: experiences of teachers and principals

Abstract

The article presents some of the results of the author's doctorate thesis, in which he analyzes the types of dominant social climates in respect to which the subjects build their experiences in public secondary schools, using as a guiding thread the practices and meanings developed by them around the incidents of school violence. The fieldwork, conducted between 2005 and 2007 at two public secondary schools from the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, combined three qualitative techniques of social investigation: participant observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The determination of the sample (theoretical sampling) and the analysis of the corpus constructed followed the general guidelines of the grounded theory, using as an auxiliary computer tool the software Atlas.ti 5.0. The article is organized around two of the central categories identified: a) school violence; b) crises of the institution and of the school authority. In the first two sections, the categories emerging from the practices and discourses of the teachers and principals are presented, in a dialogue with conceptual tools from the contemporary social theory and from other investigations on the subject. Finally, an articulation is proposed between them, bringing together the main features and connections between the two types of school social climate dominant in both institutions: de-subjectivating and normative-integrationist.