The Enlightened Witness Reasserting Humanity in the Face of Violence at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)
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This paper builds on the foundational work of two great humanists who provide transformative lessons from confrontations with violence: Elie Wiesel who confronts the death camps of Nazi Germany and Alice Miller who confronts the 'poisonous pedagogy' of childhood discipline. On this foundation, we explore ways to incorporate these humanizing processes and transformative lessons for our students into three classes taught for many years: “Child Welfare", "Understanding Violence: From Suicide to Genocide" and "Violence in the World of Children: From Corporal Punishment to War." The central theme of this paper is the critical role of the enlightened witness: one who has knowledge of the realities of violence and speaks of and acts on that knowledge to break the silence and cycle of violence. The enlightened witness demonstrates how directly confronting the dehumanizing experiences that resulted from violence and continues to lead to more violence can chan...
Who will hear? Who will see? The Impact of Violence on Learning: A Historical Journey
This is a story of a journey involving the head – my coming to awareness of the prevalence of violence, its impact on learning, the inadequacy of traditional conceptualizations of violence and education. It includes my analytical work to re-frame and articulate effective approaches to support women's learning. It is a journey involving the heart and emotions. Hearing tales of violence was shocking, almost unbearable. At first I wanted to make others take notice of the extent of violence then, realizing how many have already tried to stop violence by raising awareness, I settled in to explore how to support learning in the face of violence. I continue to fight despair as I try to convince educators, funders and policy makers that the impact of violence on learning must be addressed in all educational institutions. I am heartened by educators who have travelled the same road, who join me in the insistence that this issue must be addressed, who change their own practice. Yet, I still struggle to make more change happen, and faster. Over recent years, I have realized that my fury over the fact that so few are prepared to hear and see the impact of violence is fuelled by my own childhood hurt that was not seen, by my fear and grief that was not heard. It's a journey involving the body. I learned about the importance of supporting students to bring their whole selves to learning and to explore how to draw on and draw in the wisdom of the body. I came to see that as educators we, too, need to bring our whole selves to teaching. I began to explore what memories were locked in my body that kept me distant from my self and others. It is a journey involving the spirit. I first supported educators in my classes to express their understanding in diverse ways, and finally began to give voice to what I have learned through head, heart and body in visual form as I reconstruct my childhood photos and tell new stories. I begin to bring together my analytical work on issues of violence and learning, and my own personal journey.
Between the Visceral and the Lie : Lessons on Teaching Violence
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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.
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.
Witnessing Violence in Literature and Humanitarian Discourse
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Beginning with Heidegger´s definition of violence as that which exceeds and reformulates normality, this essay questions how violence can be ethically represented and interpreted. In their ability to establish norms and then carry us beyond the bounds of the familiar, novels are uniquely suited to represent violence as norm-shattering. Contrasting tendencies in contemporary novels representing historical political violence with humanitarian writing, the essay uses the figure of the reader as witness to contrast the ways readers´ responsibility is constructed. I argue that many new works of historical fiction construct an imagined global readership whose non-violent normativity is meant to ground the novel and establish a contrast with extremes of political violence, discussing Chimamanda Adichie´s Half of a Yellow Sun as an example. In Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, Didier Fassin argues that we have entered a new era of humanitarian action, the era of the witness. Telling the story of suffering has become part of the humanitarian act itself. For the sake of highlighting the extremity of suffering, humanitarian organizations often publicize the most shocking experiences – the most violent, most pointless acts and the most vulnerable victims – but stripped of a context that could establish peace and compassion as norms against which this violence is contrasted, extreme portrayals of violence may normalize what they strive to condemn.
In Bryan Wright and Peter Trifonas, (Eds.) Critical Peace Education: Difficult Dialogues. (New York: Springer, 2013).
Panayota Gounari examines some of the limits of peace (as) discourse in this chapter. By critiquing the dominant discourse on peace and human rights, she exposes some of the fundamental elements of hegemonic Western teleology. In “critiquing the discourse of peace as agency,” she proffers a critical review of what has taken place internationally during the past ten years that reveals how violent and bloody this decade has been despite a designation in 2000 by the United Nations for an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World. Despite the hard work, strides, and achievements made by peace organizations and movements worldwide and despite the positive interventions and the increasing awareness on issues pertaining to nonviolence and peace, the history of humanity remains one of atrocities, pain, and devastation. Calling for a deeper reflection and understanding of the multiple forms of economic, political, symbolic, and discursive violence, and their very real human consequences, as well as an intensified move toward militarization worldwide, Gounari wonders how do we reconcile a decade dedicated in the “culture of peace” with the ongoing wars and aggression? Furthermore, she acknowledges a tension that exists at the discursive level, as well: through the designation of an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World, institutions like UNESCO that are legitimized to define, process, and work on peace produce their own discourse in reports, news briefs, and other antiviolence and pro-peace material and provide specific recommendations and directives. Gounari analyzes the dominant discourse and “universal” character of peace and human rights and the way they have been used to neutralize or even promote aggression. This has been done in the context of a liberal ideology of missionary politics that promotes tolerance. She interrogates this missionary politics of tolerance and provides some thoughts on violence drawing on the seminal work of Slavoj Zizek, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in an attempt to provide a theoretical framework of understanding the ongoing aggression worldwide. Finally, Gounari looks at peace education through the lens of critical pedagogy as a radical educational discourse and pedagogy, to suggest ways to integrate pressing questions about violence in the curriculum.
The Challenges of Teaching Children their Rights in a Violent Context
Children living in societies severely affected by violence deal on a regular basis with a broad spectrum of human rights violations and abuses, either as witnesses or as victims themselves. Such contexts increase the complexity of teaching children about their rights as these are far from being a reality around them; thus, human rights educators are forced to develop pedagogical strategies to face these contextual challenges. This chapter focuses on Mexico as an exemplary case to explore the challenges and strategies for human rights educators due to the alarming crisis of violence and the increasing levels of abuses and violent incidents affecting children in the country. The chapter discusses the way in which Mexican educators make sense of human rights and human rights abuses to teach the subject; the challenges they face specifically when teaching children about their rights; and the strategies they implement to overcome them. Through the examination of educators' reflective practice, it is possible to better understand the way in which educators' narratives and practices are developing a more critical pedagogy on the ground while creating a more radical framework for Human Rights Education.
Bang on the System: People's Praxis and Pedagogy as Humanizing Violence
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Bang on the System pairs critical race theory (CRT) with the litany of radical democratic analysis guiding the social practices of various revolutionary movements, proposing a new pedagogical framework that deploys a mutually informed critical race praxis as the basis to engage historically dispossessed youth in their own learning. This lens is utilized to examine an interpretive case study from a corpus of existing qualitative data collected through teacher action inquiries in one of California's most underserved schools and targeted communities. Specifically, the authors analyze the role of a People's praxis as an effective pedagogy to mediate student resistance.
This paper argues that to be effective methods of confronting global violence, contemporary critical pedagogies for citizenship must take into account the theoretical distance between citizen ‘paralysis and praxis’. This distance, the author posits, comprises the path between individual reactions of helplessness and powerlessness to disturbing global and local issues, and experiential or praxis-based educational opportunities that can help citizens transcend such feelings toward confronting and changing a violent world. To explore these themes, an interdisciplinary approach is taken that fuses insights from the psychology of stress and coping with a framework of peace education, and education for citizenship. conceived as praxis responding to disturbing trends of global violence, drawing on the traditions of positive peace and a complex conception of violence rooted in Johan Galtung’s work. A core argument is offered in the form of a provocation to educators dealing with citizenship, peace or global issues to be attentive to inviting participants to consider paths for their own forms of ‘peace praxis’ that comprise the best hope for transcending individual reactions of helplessness in the face of global violence.