Who will hear? Who will see? The Impact of Violence on Learning: A Historical Journey (original) (raw)
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Between the Visceral and the Lie : Lessons on Teaching Violence
2020
Drawing from two qualitative case studies, one researching how teachers teach about war to the children of soldiers and the other examining how teachers teach lynching near historic lynching sites, this critical phenomenological study weighs how much horror and how much hope should be taught if the aim of the instruction is a liberating education. The author argues that a balance of both is necessary. Students cannot be left in the hopelessness of knowledge alone but must also be taught how to engage their world with the possibility of making change.
Making Meaning Together: Helping Survivors of Violence to Learn at School
Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 2010
The deleterious effects on cognitive capacity in children and adolescents who have been exposed to violence at home and in the community have been meticulously documented. What is less well known is how very much these youngsters want to learn at school. Children and adolescents from violent backgrounds, like others, equate education with a hopeful future and are eager to attend. However, when they do go to school, the violence that they experience leaves them terrified to think. Instead they resort to concrete enactments that make completing school work nearly impossible. Attachment based research suggests that thinking about thinking is a neuropsychological capacity that is co-created with caregivers, parents and teachers. People with “reflective function” “mentalize,” that is, they think about what they are thinking and what others might be thinking. This capacity is part of what is lost when caregivers and the surrounding community are replete with random violence. The fact that we know how mentalization is created implies that it may be possible to restore, by creating conditions in the classroom that can foster it. Following an extensive review of psychoanalytic literature and theory, this paper offers a case example of a mentalization based approach to helping children affected by violence to tolerate their affects, survive putting words to experience, begin to mentalize, and through that process, succeed at school.
Crossing from violence to nonviolence: pedagogy and memory
This qualitative case study addresses the use of memories of violence in a workshop with ten young student leaders in Durban. The pedagogy included the use of guidelines and gender-based groups as ways of enabling safety. A particularly direct discussion of gender and its relationship to violence followed, though violence in relation to other social identities was also explored. Walkerdine's work (2005) on border crossing is used to analyse the data from the records of discussion and evaluation comments. The argument is that such a pedagogy enabled participants to address some of the sedimented connections that held them to relationships based on violence. Generally, if we understand violence as caught up in social identities, work on memories of violence will require attention to dynamics related to the identities present. While gender's relation to violence is central in this context, further cases in which the pedagogy is structured around other social identities would extend our understanding.
Teaching sensitive topics: Transformative pedagogy in a violent society
Collins, A. (2013) Teaching sensitive topics: transformative pedagogy in a violent society. Alternation (9) 128-149., 2013
This paper explores problems and possibilities in teaching courses that raise deep emotional issues for the participants. Two courses were developed to examine violence in South Africa, and provide social and psychological support for victims. It became clear that most of the students were themselves survivors of violence, and that the courses triggered powerful emotional reactions and shifts in self-understanding. This presented a danger that the participants would be overwhelmed by negative emotional responses to the course materials in ways that could be psychologically traumatic and also undermine their potential learning experiences. The challenge was thus to develop a teaching model which allowed more positive emotional engagement with the course materials. This entailed exploring critical pedagogy as personal transformation and empowerment, and integrating the psychotherapeutic idea of providing a safe space for emotional healing. This allowed students to engage with the materials in a deeply personal way while maintaining a supportive environment that fostered increasing intellectual and emotional self insight and autonomy.
2021- Fear: Giving voice to the silent victims of violence in schools
Education Today, 2021
With bullying being a key topic in every school, children's literature often promotes stories of defeating bullies at their own games. That does not always happen, and not every student can morph into the Karate Kid. This article is focussed on the unfortunate childhood witnesses of violence who are not physically injured, but nonetheless experience fear for their own safety. This experienced violence can happen at home, at school, and at the shops. In fact, it can happen anywhere. However, without exhibiting bleeding wounds or bruises, or severe shock, these child victims are usually overlooked as the more "serious" cases, the immediate victim and the perpetrator, are triaged by busy school staff. https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/Fear-5273
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Higher Education, 2020
In this time of COVID-19, continued and relentless violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, (BIPOC), organized resistance by many young people, and violent institutionalized attempts to suppress resistance, demonstrations and social change movements, what should educators be thinking about as we return to our college classrooms? In this short piece, we share our thinking and experience about our students' psycho-social needs and our belief that faculty must be focused both on students' and faculty's socio-political context and students' and faculty's emotional wellbeing as we think about teaching and learning for this moment.
Exploring a secondary school educator's experiences of school violence: a case study
2020
In an increasingly violent society, South African secondary school educators often need to manage violent learners. In the context of a challenging and uniquely South African educational environment, managing this escalating violence often leaves educators battling to cope with increasing demands for learner perform ance in the midst of an inherited culture of violence and intimidation that spills over into the classroom. We attempt to explore, from an interpretive perspective, the experiences of an educator in a violence-affected educational setting. This includes the educator's perceptions of the causes, nature and results of violence. The article also unveils the educator's emotional experience and her perceptions of what contributes to the violence.
Teaching Anthropology, 2024
For the same reasons that action, thrillers and horror are among the more popular film genres, within anthropological teaching and research the vicariousness of anthropology is often amplified when we delve into violence, suffering and the morality of others. Over the past two decades I have taught across many themes and topics, but recurrent throughout and increasingly central to my teaching (as I became more specialised and gained more agency in designing curricula) have been violence, human rights and anthropological controversies. These are subjects that inherently deal with narratives and testimonies of violence and abuse of power, exploring traumatic events through prisms of history, theory and lessons to be learned. In a ten-week course spanning across centuries and continents it is inevitable that some of the suffering touched upon will relate to specific student's experiences and familial biographies. This reflective piece explores some of the lessons students have taught me, helpful practices I have developed along the way and thoughts about the problematic limits of ad hoc trauma-informed teaching.