A genealogy of policy, programs and practices for the management of the child with challenging behaviour in Prince Edward Island, Canada

Conducted from a poststructural analytic framework, this thesis examines the construction of the child with challenging behaviour as a subject produced in discourse and critically analyzes practices and programs that have aimed to manage this problematic subject. Methodologically, this study utilizes two approaches: a situated genealogy and critical discourse analysis. Engaging a situated Foucauldian genealogical method, I trace this problem in time and in place: Post World War II to the late 1990s in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I have examined how localized policy and competing discourses on Prince Edward Island have been implicated in the production of specific programs and practices for children who have been identified with challenging behaviour. Using critical discourses analysis, I have identified four discourses within which the child with problematic behaviour has been defined and treated, these being discourses of medicine, psychology, education and justice. I have examined data consisting of historical and contemporary documents, policy statements, and analyzed interviews with practitioners who worked with children with challenging behaviour on PEI during the period of focus. The use of critical discourse analysis in examining the various definitions, ways of thinking, and recommendations put forth concerning the child with challenging behaviour has created an opportunity for me to produce a space in which to think differently about this figure of a child subject whose behaviour is constituted as ‘problematic’. Such an analysis has illuminated the complexities involved in the shifting nature of the ‘problematic’ child produced in discourse in time, and place. Most importantly, I have considered the implications of the effects this discursive context may has on actual embodied children whose behaviour has put them at odds with the demands of social institutions. I argue that actual children with challenging behaviour move in and out of the institution of education depending on which discourses are in the ascendant at a particular time. A key finding is that the ‘the child’ with challenging behaviour as a figure of discourse is not just one child; this particular child is constructed within these four discourses (ie medicine, psychology, education and justice) differently at different times and in different places. I suggest that how the various ways the different discourses chosen for this study constitute the figure of the child with challenging behaviour as problematic helps to define the ‘normal’, the ‘ideal’, either as what they are not, or the reason they are to be separated. The figure of the ‘problem’ child is always being reshaped and requiring different kinds of intervention as a result. Further, this study demonstrates the necessity for engaging in conversations, which explore critically the effects various interventions have on the embodied child identified with challenging behaviour. Such a view is suggested as a means of challenging naturalized or taken for granted approaches in understandings of the child with challenging behaviour both as a figure constituted by discourse, and also as an embodied child