The psychosocial construction of risk through the hidden curriculum : three studies in the cultural politics of school-based support services

Abstract

Mental ill-health, neglect and family/relationship issues are among many risk factors that can compromise students’ academic success and well-being. Such psychosocial and emotional afflictions are often invoked as contributors to student absenteeism, sub-standard academic performance and destructive school behaviours. School-based support services (SBSS) work to identify at-risk students and prevent, assess and intervene in the barriers that impede their success. Yet, conceptualisations of risk and students at-risk are as multifarious as the social, political and professional ideologies that render them intelligible as such. This study examines risk at the intersection of education and student welfare through SBSS, the interprofessional collaborations of social work, counselling, pastoral care, guidance and discipline services in schools. This study employs critical psychosocial and anti-oppressive theoretical perspectives to analyse the activations of SBSS by risk concerns, and the multiple ways they simultaneously construct risk while responding to students deemed at-risk. Through interpretivist qualitative research methods, this study highlights the interpersonal relations, professional practices, and social and educational policies that condition SBSS, and their role in shaping the hidden curriculum of schooling. This study comprises three interrelated studies that draw upon primary research in South China and Hong Kong schools. The first is an autoethnographic account of ‘Western’ psycho-educational programmes and interventions structured around a risk prevention imaginary in a Southern Chinese school. By analysing personal and professional socialisation where ‘Chinese’ and ‘Canadian’ worldviews converge, I problematise professional education as a condition of possibility for knowledge creation concerning risk and intervention in international social work encounters. The second examines risk in relation to heteronormativity as it shapes the secondary school experiences of Hong Kong sexual and gender minorities (SGM). I combine ecological systems and intersectionality theories with an interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology of semi-structured interviews (n=8) to analyse SGM identity formations and pedagogical-therapeutic relationalities with SBSS staff. In situating heteronormativity within a structural context of (post)colonialism, Christianity and Confucianism, I delimit possibilities for school social work that traverses micro-affirmative and anti-oppressive practices. The third examines specific contexts of SBSS praxis in three Hong Kong secondary schools through case studies with an ethnographic lens, written as confessional tales. I foreground facets of school cultures and practitioner narratives through observational fieldwork and semi-structured interviews (n=45) to illustrate how risk becomes constructed, activating psychosocial and educational intervention technologies in the formal and informal curricula. I develop the concept of psy-curriculum to explain how psychologised discourses—diffracted through divergent assessments of student academic performance, behaviours and afflictions—influence school lives and what comprises an ‘at-risk’ student itself. This study is an interdisciplinary engagement with the cultural politics of school-based support services, unsettling the traditional interventionism of school social work research. It contextualises the psychosocial construction of risk through the psy-curriculum, which forms at the interstices of education, welfare and mental health services. Adopting phenomenological and ethnographic sensibilities, this study uncovers the diffusion of risk in how it is compelled by global power structures, shapes lived experiences, and is reproduced by the stratified education system of a highly unequal society.