POSITION PAPER 3

LEONITA ARBAIMAN (0724142)

Violence in the school is a result of different outside school. We as counsellors can’t do anything about it. Discuss.

Nowadays, violence in the school had been arising especially in high school throughout the nation. Many assumptions had been made as a cause of this thing happens and one of the main reasons is because of a different outside school. But, we as a counsellor can do something to prevent it or at least reduce the amount of violence at school. As we know, counsellor responsibility is for promoting successful in school, increasing motivation and confidence for success in school and community activities. The actual role of counsellor in school is very wider, but here I just want to stress on this two main responsibility towards the school. I strongly disagree that we as a counsellor can’t do anything about the violence in school because many activity of preventing violence can be implement.

Violence can be define as physical force used as to injure, damage, or destroy which is active roughness action. It is also can be a great force or strenght of feeling, conduct or expression towards others. A common definition of school violence found in the literature is the intentional use of behaviours or threats to inflict physical or verbal or harm on others. At the first stage of doing violence in school, the student will be sent to the discipline unit before they’ll be sent to counselling unit. It shows that the focus is given to punish the student rather than giving awareness to them about their mistake. Among the most important advances in school discipline procedures over the past decade is recognition of the need school-wide behaviour support system. Discipline in school driven by attention to specific children with problem behaviour. It seems like all student that involve in violence in school have problem behaviour. What can the counsellor do with the student’s behaviour? Counsellor had been trained and learned about behaviourism, although these will not fully help the counsellor to deal will the student based on their knowledge about behaviour but their basic information might be useful in order to understand the student well compared to other parties in the school which did not clearly learn about human’s behaviour. Counsellor supposedly is one of the most understanding people in the school in terms of coping with violence. Counsellor must well-planned about their approach in the school not only engage with the school administrator but also with the student to attract them to the counselling unit.

Everything in this world happens for a reason. Nothing happens without any causes behind it. In this crucial stage of being a student, the counsellor must identify why the violence happens in the school, find out what is the most critical violence that cannot be solved in the school. Arrange a meeting with all that teacher and administrator, and make a meeting with the parent to inform them about this matter. All sort things may be seen so easy but by gaining a lots of information from the teacher and parent, the counsellor might come up with a comprehensive solution such as dealing particularly with the problematic student and based on their family background. When it comes to family issues, the counsellor can be familiar with the family culture for instance in how they live, how they communicate with others, and how they deal with the community. Different culture had different way of behaving and interacting with other. It may emerge misunderstanding and miscommunication if we lack of respect towards others. Through counselling unit, the counsellor can organized a culture week or culture day to show the uniqueness of each ethnic and avoid under estimating others and try to instil the speciality among them at the same time others will learn and enjoy a new things in the school. The student may interest in culture event rather than just a syllabus lesson in the class.

As a counsellor we should clearly understand that counsellor work in four essential areas which are personal development, social development, educational development and career development. The wider range of responsibility must be carried rigidly by the counsellor. Well-planned, and well-organized counselling unit is necessary to convince not only the student but the parent as well. All these four areas can describe vividly a big accountable of the counsellor to change the school climate from violence in school into successful school climate. We must realize that not all the violence in school done by the problematic student because of they hate to go to school but it is because they have their own hidden agenda. When a large percentage of students feel they must compete with their peers for attention and gain physical dominance to feel safe, violence becomes a daily part of school. They make a violet in school to seek for attention.

To conclude, I would like to mention once again that actually the counsellor can do many things to prevent and cure violence in school as long as they have an intention to improve the school and help the student to change. Hence, an error might be occurred in any implementation, but that is the need of evaluation of each program that runs by the counsellor. The counsellor is the main factor of generating ideas to save the school and develop the community.