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Short abstract:

This paper discusses 'emotional-behavioral disorder’ as a nosological and conceptual problem in psychiatry and neuroscience, and its translation in the Israeli education field, via an exploration of school teachers’ framings of pupils with special emotional-behavioral education needs.

Long abstract:

This paper thinks with and through the neuroscience of emotion to interrogate the boundaries of ‘emotional behavioral disorder’ (EBD), a disputed psychiatric and special-education category, as a recognized disability in education. Historically, EBD has served as a catch-all bin for children’s underspecified mental health difficulties, and has controversially overlapped with categories of socioeconomic marginalization. Yet, emotional distress and aggression present real challenges in the everyday management of children’s school participation and rights to education. The controversies surrounding EBD are especially acute in Israel, where the number of school children classified as having an ‘emotional-behavioral disorder’ has increased seven-fold in the past two decades, and where policy reforms increasingly call for the mainstreaming of special-needs pupils in general (not special education) classrooms.

Based on semi-structured interviews with 45 homeroom teachers in general-education classrooms, and critical analysis of scientific and policy documents, we characterize the blurry boundaries of EBD and how teachers apprehend its nature and legitimacy in elementary vs. secondary schools. Drawing on critical neuroscience and feminist disability studies, we show that EBD is configured through teachers’ locally specific understandings of children’s brains, emotional experience and moral behavior; and we highlight how teachers cultivate practices of care around EBD.

Findings call attention to the culturally-specific translation of child mental health epistemologies in local contexts, and to certain conditions that may drive the fashioning of school as a therapeutic environment.