‘An ember in education’: an autoethnography a mother’s story of school bullying

Abstract

School bullying is a phenomenon present in all schools and evidence suggests that children’s reluctance to tell increases each year as the child gets older creating many social and mental health issues. This dissertation ‘An ember in education’ examines the parent’s experience of how bullying caused a child to be silenced and suicidal. Specifically, it analyses the social, cultural and political constructs that enabled the situation. This autoethnographical approach utilised diary entries from a period of time, serving as the unique primary data source and as a lens for understanding the experience of bullying from a parent’s perspective. Autoethnography, is one of the many qualitative research methodologies that remains somewhat mysterious for figuring out social phenomena. Adopting autoethnography to explore difficult life experiences offers potential benefit to the author and the reader as it creates opportunities for insight that can challenge existing theoretical and applied framing of the phenomena under study. This study reveals the deep emotional trauma for the parent of a bullied child, that is not often represented in the literature, and the navigation through a collision of factors. It also exposes that bullying policy does not always align to practice, concluding that to keep children safe there must be a rights-based, whole community approach, adopting a zero-tolerance for bullying.

Please note this thesis is permanently embargoed.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Caitlin Donnelly (Supervisor) & Joanne Hughes (Supervisor)