42-1 A Study of the Status and Cause for Students with Disabilities Being Bullied by the Peers in Inclusive Classes: Take One Junior High School Setting as an Example
The purpose of this study was to explore the condition of students with disabilities who were bullied by their peers and the reasons for being bullied in inclusive classes in a junior high school. This research attempted to understand bullying problems through conducting interviews with bullied students with disabilities, teachers, and bullying students. Relevant files, documents and observations were also collected and analyzed for understanding the current status and the causes of being bullied. Subsequently a proposed anti-bully mentoring program was formulated based on the findings. The main findings of this study were as follows: The primary bullying behaviors found in the study were common in the typical school ground, such as physical bullying, verbal bullying and interpersonal bullying. Peer bullies in the inclusive classroom could be categorized into those of overt bulling type and covert bullying type. Although the overt bullying type students were just a few in number they exhibited explicit bullying behaviors. The majority of the bullying behaviors, however, were the covert type - these students overlooked bullying behaviors by other students and participated in subtle bullying behaviors themselves (such as isolating and excluding the bullied victim). The reasons for being bullied by students with disabilities include: having a poor academic standing, exhibiting atypical behaviors, having poor social skills, causing disruptions in their classes, and being unable to fit the norms of their peer group. These above behaviors often rendered bullied students the target of dislike by their peers and set off bullying behaviors by peers. When teachers intervened by applying the approach that “highlights the needs and weaknesses of students with disabilities to incur compassion” in dealing with bully incidences, it often ended up stigmatizing the bullied students further. Inadvertently, the process ostracizes the bullied students with disability even more and exacerbates the uneven power relation among the students in a regular classroom. In addition, the services provided by resource classroom teachers were inadequate in addressing the bullying situations suffered by students with disabilities. Finally, based on the above findings this paper offers some suggestions for implementing anti-bullying intervention programs in the future.
Keywords
inclusive education ； school bully ； students with disabilities
Download