The challenge with young people may be the way they tend to make fun of each other and their discomfort with anything too unusual. Nevertheless, approaches that support students to bring their whole selves to learning might make an incomparable difference to learning. Engaging students in helping to generate creative approaches for drawing on body, strengthening spirit, recognizing emotion, and supporting all students to believe their minds can function well, would make it possible to develop innovative approaches which students would enjoy. Schools would then be more able to support learning more effectively.

One teacher offered a wise caution. Students must not be encouraged to believe that they will be able to bring their whole selves, or to believe that teachers care about them, and then find that this is not truly possible, that schools have incorporated only superficial change.

It's really horrible to be teased with the possibility of a space where you show up as a whole person, heart and head intact, and then get disappointed or worse still, betrayed. It's easier to show up for school and say "It's a meaningless or largely meaningless exercise, there's several hoops that I have to jump through, I'll simply endure it and then I'll be on." But to show up with expectations and then have them dashed is really hard, so I think that's part of the resistance too, because the minute you start talking about the impact of violence on learning-the minute you said to me that my students actually care about what I think about them, I mean, I'm really relieved, but the stakes are much higher. And I imagine for them, too, the minute they acknowledge to themselves that they care, and they don't have the defence of "This is stupid, who cares, and I'm just getting through it." It's painful. (Julianne Hodgins)

Creating "space"-physical, emotional, spiritual and mental-for students and professionals in the school is a huge challenge. Students and teachers spoke of the lack of physical space to retreat to in the school. Students reminded me that there is no space that is their own, aside from their locker, and even that may be vulnerable to attack. The area in front of the locker is contested space. Where schools have created physical spaces students can retreat to, students reported this has made a huge difference in their ability to learn(12) . Yet with funding cuts, libraries and learning centres are rarely open full time. There are few spaces where students can quietly retreat, and few staff available to keep an eye on students who need time alone.

Bronwyn Davies' work, cited earlier, (Davies, 2000) also suggests possibilities for new ways of relating to disruptive students. If teachers pay careful attention to the discourses in operation in the school and explore ways to avoid confirming the "bad" student identity that can so easily become fixed, students have a chance to get their needs met in more positive ways. Though learning to notice the specific discourses and how they play out would be extremely timeconsuming, it may offer exciting new possibilities for creating different sorts of interactions with students and generating a possibility of agency for students beyond flouting teachers' authority and rejecting school rules.

A starting point for innovative programming will take into account that many students have a lot going on in their lives. These students need school and educational programs to become a place they want to be, where staff can help them understand their issues and offer safe spaces where they can retreat. Schools need to develop new responses to the learning needs of students who have experienced violence. A variety of holistic approaches might support learning. If school personnel and a team of students interested in developing approaches that can work in the school setting had opportunities to collaborate, creative and effective approaches could be developed.

(12) During my earlier study I also heard about an elementary school with a retreat room. The option for students to go there whenever they chose dramatically reduced the tendency for students to act out in the classroom.