An investigation to explore how gentle teaching can be embedded and sustained in a school culture

his thesis explores a humanistic intervention called Gentle Teaching and how a special residential school has attempted to embed this into its school culture. This thesis explores a range of concepts and as such a conceptual framework has been
created to link each of these areas together. The conceptual framework is based upon Gentle Teaching, School Culture and Symbolic Interaction. Symbolic Interaction has been employed as a lens to explore the concepts of truth through the understanding of various factors that influence the understanding that people how regarding the meaning objects, interactions and words have for us. This is true still for the unique pupils within the school who express their own understanding of the school culture and what this feels like to them.

This thesis has a series of sub-research questions to ascertain if Gentle Teaching is a natural ability or if this can be taught/learned, it also seeks to identify if the recipients of Gentle Teaching are aware of the process and finally, how Gentle Teaching can be embedded within a school culture. A qualitative methodological approach is employed to gather data from adult staff participants and the views and opinions from the students within the school. This thesis contributes to a modern exploration of the Gentle Teaching pedagogy. This thesis also gains insight into the views and opinions of an often overlooked and marginalised group of students and offers an illustration of what Gentle Teaching can offer to other schools as both a pedagogical and behavioural approach that could become an alternative to less humanistic approaches.