Students’ Strategies and Solidarity to Survive Student Maltreatment

This presentation aims to explore elementary students' strategies against teachers’ oppressive behaviors. Teachers' continuous aggressive behaviors toward students, often termed student maltreatment, are frequently justified as normative educational practices across various countries. This situation has motivated researchers to clarify the frequency of occurrence and the damage (Gusfre et al., 2022).

This research employs autoethnography and interactive interviews to comprehend the classroom where student maltreatment occurred from former students’ perspectives. I reflect on my personal experiences in 6^th grade at a Japanese elementary school. For the interviews, I engaged former elementary students from the same class to gather their perspectives on their interactions with the teacher. The combination of the methodologies explains the former students’ understanding and attempts while critically examining my standpoint.

The findings indicate that students employed some strategies to manage the situation. When a gap was revealed between their will and the teacher’s guidance, former students experienced troubles, which could result in student maltreatment. Some students attempted to bridge the gap by suppressing their own desires or engaging in dialogue with the teacher, while others adapted their behavior to align with the teacher’s emotional cues, masking their true feelings of anger or scorn. The students experienced great distress when performing, as Hochschild (2003) suggested, but simultaneously, they would resist in solidarity with their classmates. I never intend to trivialize the damage of any bullying or glorify a child’s patience against power abuse. However, this result counters treating students as just an educational object or powerless to change their living environment. This presentation highlights the potential for students’ collective performance and solidarity to transform rigid and oppressive teacher-student dynamics into more fluid and empowering relationships.