One morning, when the children came into the classroom, one girl had a bleeding lip. She had been involved in a fight on her way to school. The children were excited and talked among themselves: 'next time I'm really going to beat him up,' 'no, he's much stronger' and so on.
The teacher asked what had happened and was immediately flooded with six different versions of the event at the same time. She told all of them to be quiet and asked the injured girl. Whilst recounting what happened, she was interrupted by the other children, who were getting impatient and making comments, and then by the teacher, who asked the interesting question: 'Why is it always you who gets into fights?'
The girl got defensive. 'I'm sticking up for myself,' she responded. Raised eyebrows from the teacher, and another child saying 'this is boring' finally made the girl give up and subside into sulking. The teacher was not entirely satisfied with this conclusion, but she knew of no other way to deal with it, except to warn, 'If I were you, I would be more careful in future.'
This example, with an exceptionally patient and well-meaning teacher, is nevertheless quite typical. My feeling is that nothing has really been resolved and that the same thing will happen again tomorrow.
What is lacking is the belief that human beings can actually resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of everybody involved. Most children operate on the assumption that human beings are basically hostile to each other and are only held back by the guarding and policing forces of law, order and authority.
I understand this belief as the children's accurate perception of most adults they come into contact with. The children mirror, in an unmediated and raw form, the largely unconscious underlying assumptions by which most of us shape our social reality (although a lot of well-intentioned adults would disagree vehemently that they are in fact operating on these assumptions). The violence and distress in the ordinary school yard is an elequent reminder that the slogan 'Don't do as I do - do as I say!' doesn't actually work very well in education.
This situation to my mind calls for urgent social invention. We need structures that make conflict resolution possible without violence.
The method I used with this class, and which worked astonishingly well, is called Forum Theatre. It was developed by the Brazilian, Augusto Boal, who was inspired by the writings of Paolo Freire, and worked in South America with those suffering from oppression.
The basic method is as follows:
The conflict is first discussed. When the situation, behaviour and feelings of those involved are clear and understood by everybody, they 'perform' this 'original' once from beginning to end without interuption.
With the children, we took up conflicts that happened in playtime and used all the emotional 'charge' that the children brought with them to keep them motivated in, for once, investing energy in actually resolving the conflict.
Usually we spent quite some time listening to everybody's version of what had happened before we could agree on what the sequence of events had been. It was very important to give everybody space in creating this 'original' (the reproduction of what had actually happened). If we did not do this, the children dropped out and gave up, feeling ignored or misrepresented, and were not interested in working out alternatives.
In the beginning they needed a great deal of guidance until they all understood the ground rules of Forum Theatre. Thereafter the process was quite smooth, and my main work was to hold them back from all shouting 'stop' and wanting to suggest alternatives at once.
It was important that we made it very clear that we were not on anybody's side. By the end of term, the groupings that used to form, threatening the other side with retribution - which seemed to me like a Lilliputian version of superpower politics - were no longer necessary. We had provided a structure for conflict resolution that they all accepted and felt safe with, for they were confident that they would be able to establish their needs and position through it.
The children got so involved that they wanted to demonstrate Forum Theatre to their school assembly, which they did. In the last session of term they discussed what they had learned: mainly, they said, 'how to avoid fights, how not to be greedy and hog things, how to listen to each other, and how to respond to name calling.' The feedback from parents and teachers was that they felt the children had learned something that would be useful for the whole of their lives.
Michael Soth, 16 Riverside Road, Oxford OX2 OHU (tel 0865 723613).