Explore ways to teach that acknowledge the presence of violence and its impact on learning

Many new approaches for teaching remain to be explored in practice with youth. Exciting and creative ways forward could emerge from a school or youth literacy program taking on the challenge to work collaboratively with a team of students to identify what might make a difference. One key challenge will be to find ways to avoid confrontations around control, while still maintaining clear structure and boundaries. Appealing to students' sense of justice or fairness may be fundamental in developing systems that work creatively to support learning without leading to conflict around issues of control.

Creating diverse opportunities for connections among students and between youth and adults is widely known as crucial to support learning (eg. Grobe et al. 2001, Lewis, 2003). Focussing on how to build this connectedness in an era of cutbacks and policies which limit connections is a challenging goal. A crucial element of new approaches will be to create opportunities to challenge the meanings which students make of their own worth and potential when they are mistreated at home or at school. Similarly, there must be space in schools and literacy programs to challenge the meanings that personnel make of students' misbehaviour, inattention and absences, all of which can easily be misinterpreted as lack of interest in learning.

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.