1.1 The Pedagogical Meeting1
Wedged-in behind a small Formica desk at the back of a classroom, I sat among a group of teachers and the school director in an otherwise empty municipal school in the centre of SĆ£o Paulo. The plain white walls, pencil-scratched white desks, and our tired faces, all lay bare under the caustic fluorescent light. I stared wistfully up at the little shaft of sunlight just visible through the frosted glass vents at the top of the classroom wall, looking out at the crumbling, dilapidated apartment block looming over us.
Then I heard something that caught my attention. An elderly lady who taught year five was speaking. She leaned in towards the group, saying earnestly, āI put tables against the door so they donāt leave, because thereās nobody in the corridor to ask for rescue. I go to the head teachersā room and thereās nobody thereā¦. They start throwing chairs and tables on the floor, laughing, they start dancing and thereās nothing you can sayā¦. If they get up and pull the tables away from the door and say āTeacher weāre going now because the other classes have already goneāāis it worth holding the door?ā
To either side of me, backed right up against the rear wall behind a barricade of tables, as if trying to protect themselves from the school director and possibly from the rest of the group, a small huddle of teachers sat at jaunty angles, various expressions of boredom, disbelief, scepticism, desperation, impatience, indignation, and doubt washing over their faces in waves. A group to my left sat muttering under their breath, suppressing laughs or shaking their heads in disbelief almost every time the school director spoke. A mix of disaffection, frustration, resignation, and a feeling of ridiculousness seemed to dominate the atmosphere in the room.
Following the elderly teacherās statement, a man in a wool sweater at the edge of the group sat up and raised his hands, a mix of tension and empathy in his voice. āThey invade the classrooms without asking to be excused. Sometimes they come into your lesson and turn off the light and start clapping their hands saying, āCome on! Letās mess about!ā trying to work up the kids in the class. The other day they said, āLetās mess about!ā They threw tables, turned off the light, swore at meā¦. And I didnāt know whether to get the tables, turn on the light, hold the doorā¦. They didnāt do it because they donāt like me, itās because they like to mess about. They apologised afterwards, and one boy came and put his hand on my heart and said, āWow teacher you got really nervy!ā and I said, āI did, but Iām calming down now.ā I get worked up and stressed, but Iām not going to let it get to me. Iām not going to get ill.ā
Somewhere in the discussion, a younger woman piped in frustratedly, āWhen some teachers get fed up and let their class out early, they all come banging on the doors of all the other classrooms that are still in lessons. We canāt maintain the routine! They are out of control! JL2 carries on being out of the classroom from 1.30 until 6.30. He isnāt a criminal, he doesnāt use drugsā¦. Why canāt we reach him?ā
A young man in a tracksuit spoke of how he had told a boy who was in the corridor to go back to his classroom a few days previously. āHe told me, āIāll go back, but only because itās you whoās telling me.ā Sometimes I think they only respect me because Iām a P.E. teacher and P.E. is ācoolā. But you need to have a strong posture. If they find a millimetre of fear in you itās over.ā
āTheyāre not badā, another young teacher argued, āthey just need limits. Theyāre children. Theyāre not monsters. They just want limits. They want you to tell them where the limits are.ā
The younger woman added, āItās their way of saying, āwe can be violent in the classroom too. We become animals if the teacher shouts.āā
Across the room, a tired-looking man in a leather jacket sighed. āWe come here in the morning, and when we leave this place it seems as if weāre leaving a battle front.ā Heads nodded in agreement, and it was clear that many in the group could relate to this sentiment.
The conversation moved to the topic of what could be done to improve discipline. An older man, who had been sitting in silence doodling on a notepad throughout the discussion, looked up and said calmly, āThings that seem banal sometimes help a lot. For example, if the blackboard is by the door, the teacher can control the flow of entering and leaving. When I call the register I always stay by the door so as not to let the people who hang around hassling at the door come in.ā
The school director stood up from her table in the middle of the room and tried to move the discussion on to the topic of next weekās national test. But before she could continue, a new teacher who had been sitting meticulously filling out attendance registers from the start of the meeting looked up nervously. Tense, her hair awry from running her hands through it, she asked, āTest? What test? When is it? Do I have to administer it? Because I donāt know how ā¦ and I donāt think Iāll be able toā¦.ā She got out of her chair and walked halfway across the room, a look of panic on her face. āIn my classā¦. I donāt thinkā¦. I already have so many problems with disciplineā¦.ā She looked at the group, wide-eyed.
āAsk someone for helpā, the school director replied, rather shortly.
āBut thereās nobody to askā, the woman said desperately. āSometimes I look outside to see if thereās anybody to help but thereās never anybody there.ā
āWell go to the head teacherās office.ā
āBut I canāt leave the room; if I leave the room they start throwing tables andā¦ā
āWell thatās just the conditions we work under, weāre understaffedā, the school director replied. āWe should ask the DRE 3 for some help ā¦ weāre alone hereā¦.ā She paused for a few seconds in thought and then took a deep breath and carried on. āAnd discipline is not my responsibility. I canāt help you with that. It says so in my job description. I can go and get it and read it to you if you want. Come and see me afterwards and weāll go over the test.ā The new teacher slid back into her chair with a meek nod of acknowledgement, evidently still extremely anxious.
The younger teacher who spoke earlier had been sitting with her head in her hands, shaking it from side to side and muttering, āI donāt believe thisā¦ā under her breath. Suddenly she burst out, āPeople, thereās no such thing as team work here! Thereās no such thing as interdisciplinary work here! We have a discipline of shouting!ā
The man in the leather jacket cut in. āWe teachers donāt know each other, we are strangers to each other. We sit together for forty minutes in the staff room, me here at the table and the other on the sofa over there. The two of us breathing for forty minutes. And then the bell rings and not even a āhave a good class!ā How am I going to ask for help from a person that is a stranger to me?ā He was getting more and more worked up, his face becoming red and tense as he waved his arms emphatically in the air. He turned and pointed his whole arm at the man in the wool sweater. āAnd you, who said that you wonāt get ill ā¦ you will! We donāt know any more who are our colleagues and who arenāt. Are we unbalanced? Are we? I came to this school balanced and healthy and now Iām ill, so-and-so is ill, youāre going to get ill.ā He brought his arms down decisively. Some of the others hid sniggers and looks of amused surprise at their colleagueās outburst.
The director looked around at the entire group and said, āWeāre all in this together. Weāre all going to get ill.ā
The man in the leather jacket sighed and his shoulders slumped as if in defeat. āI see the state of education as a silent screamā, he said. ā[W]e shout and shout and nobody hears.ā4
The meeting carried on much to the same tune for a while longer and then disbanded along with a few complaints about the school director being up in the clouds and ānot having a clueā, how it was another day wasted, and how perhaps a change in the time schedule for the year groups might help to improve discipline. On Monday, the children returned and it was business as usual until the next pedagogical meeting, which played out in much the same way.
1.2 The Problem of Conceptualising and Addressing Violence
The vignette above contains many examples of manifestations and impacts of violence, although to some this may not obviously appear to be the case. Throughout this book, I will elucidate in detail how this is so, but for now, I have opened this book with this vignette because it illustrates a key issue: the difficulty of clearly and sufficiently defining violence. Without a clear understanding and definition of what violence is, it is difficult to focus research on understanding its root causes. And without an understanding of the factors leading to violence, it is difficult to design and implement meaningful, effective interventions and non-violent ways of working.
It is well known that violence is an issue in schools around the world. Few people have not heard of violent tragedies in the USA in which youngsters have taken guns to their peers, teachers, and themselves (Elliott et al. 1998). Indeed, while I was carrying out my research in 2011, a former pupil returned to his school in Rio de Janeiro, gunning down 12 students and then killing himself (Phillips 2011). Sadly, such occurrences have not been infrequent news headlines since.
When considering the words āviolence in schoolingā, for many, school shootings will be the first thing to come to mind because of their sudden, extreme, tragic, and well-reported nature. However, as illustrated in the above vignette, violence can manifest in a much wider variety of ways. Common in some parts of the world is the use of corporal punishment in schools and the occurrence of sexual violence, often carried out by male teachers on female pupils (Harber 2002). Teachers can be victims of physical attacks by pupils, and even more common are occurrences of physical conflict, verbal abuse, and bullying between pupils (as is the case in Brazil) (Smith 2003; Sposito 2001).
To varying degrees, all of the above are widely recognised and condemned. Even more commonplace however, and particularly insidious because it largely goes unrecognised and unchallenged, is the bullying of students by teachers and the socially accepted forms of violence and abuse which are carried out by school institutions on pupils and teachers every day (such as the control, suppression, and neglect of physical, emotional, psychological, and intellectual needs) (Schostak 1986). This includes the less obvious, but pertinent, subtle forms of violence perpetrated by the institutional and pedagogical practices of schooling, and often unintentionally by well-meaning teachers (ibid.). The latter is so commonly engrained within the day-to-day functioning, rituals, and policies of the school day in traditional schooling that it is normalised, and is therefore rarely recognised as a form of violence (Horta 2005).
Due to this normalisation, many of the more implicit, subtle, and insidious forms of violence embedded in institutional and pedagogical practices (and the contexts in which they are situated) are likely to go unrecognised as such, in the majority of contexts. This perhaps explains why much of the literature on violence in schooling published to date focusses on attempting to define and categorise violence rather than understanding its root causes. That is, in order to understand the root causes of violence, it is first necessary to define what is being investigated.
Definitions of violence in relation to schooling range from the very narrow to the relatively broad and far-reaching. At the narrower end of the spectrum, Elliott et al. state that āviolence refers to the threat or use of physical force with the intention of causing physical injury, damage, or intimidation of another personā (1998, p. 13). Based on this definition, the authors assert that āhistorically, our schools have been relatively safe havens from violence. However, over the past decade there has been an epidemic of youth crimeā (ibid.). This narrow perspective allows for the perception of physical acts of interpersonal violence in whi...