Every Day Is a State of Emergency: Learning to Teach Amidst Violence and Pedagogies of Management

• In Event: Teacher Preparation Before and During Full-Time Teaching: A Comparative Analysis of Learning to Teach

Abstract

In this paper we explore ways in which, over time, first year educators working in schools labeled “persistently dangerous” (PD) are potentially at-risk for becoming complicit in the maintenance and infliction of violence within these institutions. What do teachers learn about violence in these contexts, and how does that change over time and through practice? Our investigation and analysis began with a subset of the wider framework of the Learning to Teach interview data. Included are multiple interviews with eight beginning elementary and secondary teachers certified through an alternative certification program during the course of their first year in the classroom. Interviews were coded for descriptions of incidents teachers described as “violent” throughout the year. Within these interviews, narratives of “management” and “violence” provide windows into ways in which daily terror is either questioned by new educators or becomes normalized as everyday lived experience.

Our framework for understanding management and violence includes Giroux's (1988) concept of "pedagogies of management", Bourdieu's (1977) perspective on symbolic violence, and Foucault's (1977, 1973) analyses of power within institutions such as schools. We use these frames to illustrate the complex and invisible impacts that school-based practices have on instructors and pupils. Our findings suggest that "pedagogies of management" shape and pervade school practices in such a way that students - both in special and general education - face multiple types of violence every day in school settings, and that the concept of “violence” is one that developed and reinterpreted through practice. These understandings drawn from both anthropological and educational theoreticians provide important insight into often hidden aspects of the daily work of new practitioners in these institutions.

Authors

• Mary Elizabeth Del Savio, University of Pennsylvania

• Katrina Morrison, University of Pennsylvania