This discourse also contributes to assumptions that only literacy
learners will have experienced violence, as those who have
successfully negotiated the education system can not have
experienced these barriers. This allows other educational institutions
to ignore the issue entirely. Or this appproach can lead, as happened
in one of our focus groups, to questions about how those who do
succeed in the educational system in spite of having experienced
violence did so, with the idea that may be this knowledge could be
helpful to allow success for those who have failed. This direction
opens many questions about what is success, and success at what
cost?
The severed head
One possible cost is the "severed head." The educational system
can
be a place of escape for the mind, but can, at the same time, contribute
to a fragmentation of the whole person. Western educational systems
do not often invite the whole person into the learning process.
Success in this system is often gained at the cost of balance of the
whole self. For those who have experienced violence and already feel
fragmented, this further severance may be particularly costly. Those
who have sought to create a space in literacy programs to draw the
whole self into the learning process have been able to do so only when
they can find a space outside the discourses of "proper teaching" and
"acceptable outcomes" through working in the guise of research or
with the protection of special project funding. Yet workers in the
New England project, for example, who are using "healing arts" as
part of their experimental literacy work, speak with enormous
enthusiasm about the shifts they see in themselves and in the students
who participate in the program.
To attempt to bring the whole person into the teaching and
learning process is to go against the widely shared sense of the "real"
work of education. Instructors talked about their recognition that
when time is short they get drawn back to practising math and steered
away from spending time on supporting students to reflect on their
learning and to learn about learning, even when they believed in the
importance of the alternative approach. They were surprised to see
how the pressure to do proper teaching operates.
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