Discourses about Education

Violence as a barrier to learning

This discourse separates out those who have experienced violence and conceptualizes them as 'other,' maintaining a concept of the normal student who has not experienced violence. Students who have experienced violence may be seen as having 'special needs,' or needs which should be addressed outside the education system, while the educational system itself can remain unchanged.

The severed head

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.'

Drawing the line

Various pressures lead some teachers to feel that they have no option but to counsel. But if they do so, they take on the work illicitly, without resources, office space, supports, time and with the risk of being blamed for 'crossing the line' into therapy. Institutions benefit from this unpaid, unacknowledged work, while teachers can be framed as the problem.

What is missing?

In various settings, instructors experienced the challenge of taking up issues of violence given the specific lack of resources students and teachers experienced, the lack of institutional support for their work, and the outright hostility of some colleagues or the subtler resistances. Structural constraints such as attendance policies and waiting lists for places in programs increased the challenge.

Safety is fundamental

A focus on safety can support learning in a variety of ways, making it feel safer for instructors to open the 'can of worms,' knowing how to approach this work while maintaining a safe environment for teachers and students. A discourse of safety can open talk about what might be required to maintain a safer learning environment and what exactly it might look like in each context.

Integrating New Discourses

When literacy workers imagined the possibilities of shifting discourses and creating spaces for new practices, they spoke of constraints within their own institutions and within government discourses. Teachers might feel the constraints from the administration, but administrators were clear that they were limited by provincial or state constraints and policy change was needed at that level.

Provide legitimacy for new discourses

When literacy workers can take part in special projects it creates the possibility to explore the unknown and to launch into unlikely experiments. Funding can pay for and legitimize talk about new possibilities, allow for new collaborations, support a focus on creating beauty in the classroom and make it possible to try out new curriculum such as learning about learning, self-empowerment, writing and creative arts. It is only within such a space that new models can be generated to demonstrate the 'success' of shifting what counts in education and provide a basis for challenging policy.

Draw new lines between teaching and healing

Project funding also creates the time and space to explore building connections and collaborations with therapists and healers, and integrate the creative arts into learning opportunities. Instead of trying to draw a line to divide these areas of work, literacy workers need to be able to explore drawing new lines to link work that is connected within each person, and imagine new programming and new collaborations. This offers new insights and supports to take the tensions and worries of the work of taking up issues of violence and learning.

Where to from here?

A key question now is whether the literacy movement will be able to build on the discourses which support diverse possibilities for teaching in ways that recognize the widespread nature of violence and the impact of violence on learning.  Change is already occurring in many individual literacy programs.  As new discourses become more broadly recognized, the simple divide between literacy and therapy may shift. Addressing the impact of violence on learning may seem less of a 'can of worms' and more enticing, offering the potential for creating nurturing spaces for workers and learners alike.

What will allow discourses of violence and education to shift radically in order to create the necessary, widespread change in the whole terrain of literacy work?