by Val Diggle

Created on: November 20, 2009

There is little to rival the feeling of being confronted by a tense, stereotype situation in a classroom. All teachers will recognise the symptoms, mostly located in the gut, of rising panic, of being on the verge of a situation that could easily escalate out of control. No matter how experienced you may be as a professional educator, there is still that primitive response, the accelerating heartbeat encouraging you to flee or fight - which, in the majority of schools, is neither acceptable nor appropriate!

Unpacking these feelings reveals that, in most incidents of bullying through attaching a label to someone - for that is what stereotyping is - the teacher is compromised, angry and disappointed. It is very hurtful to watch students that you had mentally marked down as gentle or empathetic souls (your own, systematic, stereotyping...) keep their heads down and fail to come to the defence of the individual under attack, or, worse, rally behind the perpetrator of the offense. In these situations, every pastoral fibre in your body wants to protect the unfortunate individual that is the focus of so much negative attention. It is so hard not to get sucked in, not to feel their pain.

It is precisely because manipulating stereotypes is so powerful, and so easy, that it is often the default position of students who would rather create havoc in the classroom than absorb any more information about the world from you. Transforming such volatile moments into teachable opportunities is therefore an opportunity, full of creative potential, to de-fuse and re-centre the power.

A mental trick, to objectify the situation, is to try not to read it in terms of a shorthand (aggressor/victim) code. Schools and colleges, particularly at secondary level are intense learning institutions and you may not know the students very well. It is easy to slip in to the world of stereotyping yourself by thinking about these students in terms of labels, in order to deal mentally with challenging staff/student ratios, for example. There is always a bigger, more complex, picture, and the key to discovering what that bigger picture might be, is to treat it holistically.

As a young teacher, returning after a residential week away with a group of 16 year olds, I felt my nerves stretched to breaking point by the incessant teasing by one particular girl in the group, of a fellow student with a speech impediment. When I returned her and her gear to her home, her mother invited in me in for a cup of

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