The ecosystemic approach to changing chronic problem behaviour in primary schools

This thesis presents nine papers that consider the ecosystemic approach. The first five deal with a range of theoretical issues including the development of the approach and aspects relating to personality, phenomenological psychology and systems theory. These papers show that ecosystemics is part of the tradition of humanistic educational psychology and more particularly that it is closely related to the work of George Kelly and Carl Rogers. They also show that the approach is based on the phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation and aspects of phenomenological interpretation and on a systems theory which takes an interpretive frame of reference. Four further papers deal with two studies with teachers in Leicestershire that relate theory to practice. The first considers a small-scale study involving twelve primary teachers. The third and fourth relate to a larger study involving thirty-five teachers. The second paper in this group considers both studies from a Rogerian point of view. These papers demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in primary schools, its impact on teachers and links with the person-centred approach.