Globalised discourses of ‘challenging behaviours’ and implications for their construction and management in education

The article adopts an exploratory lens to unravel the nature and construction of diagnostic labels associated with challenging behaviours while discussing their ideological underpinnings, politicized character, effects and policy implications. The non-normative nature of categories related to challenging behaviours calls for adopting a critical and cross-cultural perspective in exposing the intricately complex web of context-specific ideological and institutional dynamics that underpin the genesis, legitimation and subsequent management of these behaviours. The analytical edge also involves unravelling the political and socio-culturally mediated processes of constructing categories of ‘need’ based on deviant and disruptive behaviours while exploring how these normative discourses ‘travel’ globally, are indigenised and pathologize human behaviours by, inter alia, prescribing clinical-orientated identification and behaviour management strategies. A cross-cultural lens is not only instrumental in bringing to the fore points of cross-national convergence/divergence and identifying examples of good practice, but also in revealing the politically driven nature of categorical ascriptions and associated nomenclature of challenging behaviours, and understanding how they are constructed, disseminated and managed in contemporary schooling. As an action-oriented response to these critical considerations, the article makes a case for the imperative of adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to preventing and managing students’ behaviours in inclusive education.