Rethinking approaches to working with children who challenge: Action learning for emancipatory practice

This article describes an action-learning project that helped teachers to rethink their approaches to children who challenge. The project enabled and encouraged teachers to reflect critically on why and how particular children challenged them and then to use their critical reflections to strengthen their capacity to work with those children. The outcomes were that participants changed their model of children who challenge, their classroom practices and their view of themselves as teachers; strengthened their desire and ability to respond to children who challenge; and increased their ability to reduce the stress in their work. The project was small-scale, but it was significant. Mainstream approaches to children who challenge use pharmaceutical or behavioural means to change children's behaviour, effectively marginalising early childhood staff from both the 'diagnosis' and the 'treatment'. The Children Who Challenge approach is a critique not just of the 'medicalisation' of behaviour defined as problematic or challenging, but also of the drift to a technocratic, top-down micro-management of education and, by implication, of children. Children Who Challenge poses an alternative - the autonomous, reflective teacher-researcher who is a member of a reflexive community committed to improving the classroom and pedagogic effectiveness by emancipating it.