Research from 1996 to 2019 on approaches to address conflicts in schools : A bibliometric review of publication activity and research topics

The numbers of publications within the field of research on approaches to address conflicts in schools is rapidly growing, and it is now important to map influential theories, methods and topics that shape this research field. In addition, student teachers, teachers and teacher educators would benefit from it being easier to find research-based knowledge of how to address conflicts in schools. Therefore, a bibliometric study was carried out on 1126 publications that were published between 1996 and 2019 in this field. The study aimed at examining publication activity, geographic spread, and dominant research topics. The findings showed a positive trend in publication output from 2006 onwards. Research output was found to be dominated by the United States. However, the results also indicated an internationalization trend expressed in an increased geographic spread of publication output. Furthermore, six research topics were identified through cluster analyses and labelled ‘peace and value education’, ‘classroom management from coercive discipline to relationship building’, ‘constructive conflict resolution’, ‘classroom management programmes’, ‘restorative justices and restorative approaches’, and ‘classroom challenges for teachers’. Within each research topic, a distinct number of publications were found that defined the core research.Rethinking Conflict: An investigation of how emerging conflicts can be utilized to promote learnin

Teachers' Understandings of Emerging Conflicts

Scholars in the field of conflict resolution in schools theoretically argued that minor distractions and disturbances are conflicts. In the present study, we refer to them as emerging conflicts. The study has been carried out within the phenomenographic research tradition and used semi-structured interviews. We addressed the professionals – the teachers – who deal with emerging conflicts every day, investigating their different ways of understanding an emerging conflict. The 9 different ways we found make the collective and shared understandings of emerging conflicts visible and form a professional language with which to discuss these kinds of conflicts. These nine could be divided into three groups, the social practice of the classroom, something that stems from outside the classroom, and something that characterises all human interaction. The awareness of the existing understandings could further be discussed in relation to what is actually taught in teacher education in Sweden

How teachers understand and strategize about emerging conflicts

This article concerns what have been variously called mild misbehaviours, minor distractions or emerging conflicts, i.e. situations of mild tension between the teacher and pupils in the classroom. The article responds to calls for further studies on the link between how teachers understand these emerging conflicts and the strategies they suggest to handle them. We carried out two studies on primary school teachers in Sweden, using a qualitatively driven mixed-method design, i.e. the studies were carried out sequentially using different qualitative methods. The first study, the main study, based on individual interviews with 20 teachers, used a phenomenographic approach, capturing these teachers' different understandings of emerging conflict. The second study, the supplemental study, based on six group interviews with 18 teachers, built on the main study and used a hermeneutic approach, capturing how these teachers link a certain understanding of emerging conflicts to certain themes of suggested strategies. By utilizing this design, we were able to investigate the aforementioned link and build a model of nine different understandings, each linked to one to four strategy themes. Altogether, 22 different strategy themes, together encompassing a multitude of separate strategies, were recognized and linked to the nine different understandings. The results suggest that teachers have a more divergent and nuanced understanding of emerging conflicts, and how to handle them, than earlier studies of this link have reported. The results give valuable insights into developing more accurate quantitative surveys as well as more suitable teacher training programmes

Professor Ed Cairns: A personal and professional biography

This article provides a brief overview of Ed Cairns' (1945-2012) personal and professional life. Born, raised, and educated in Belfast, Ed's career at the University of Ulster spanned the years of Northern Ireland's contemporary political violence-from the riots of the early 1970s, through the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and into the present postconflict period. A fellow of both the British Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, Ed was a leading international scholar on social identity, conflict and peace, and children and political violence. He was a committed teacher and mentor of many university students and of many peace psychologists from around the globe. He was also an influential leader worldwide and the first international President of APA's Division 48, the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence