Why Was She Being Punished?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Affective Climates in Teaching: Optimism, Discipline, and Retention

Abstract

Research on school discipline and school punishment has long received global attention, while few studies have focused on the situations in which school punishment occurs in Chinese classrooms. How does school punishment actually unfold in the classroom? With the help of classroom ethnography and context analysis, this study finds that Chinese teachers' punitive measures are more situational, mainly in the sense that they generally make disciplinary decisions based on the overall classroom context, with less consideration of who most deserves punishment. This finding gives us a glimpse of classroom life in the context of Chinese collectivist culture. Meanwhile, discipline in the classroom is not merely the enforcement of rules, but rather the real-time construction of situated meaning.

Author

• Danqin Chen, East China Normal University