Gun Violence in Schools: The Impact of Discouraging Discourse

• In Event: Theorizing Gun Violence: School Shootings, Politics, and Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose

In this paper, I unpack the paradox of school as both safe and dangerous by: 1) distinguishing between fear as a cultural condition and fear-like excitation as a useful and predictable, but temporary, reaction to the possibility of danger; 2) considering competing cultural and political pressures to underreport incidents of gun violence in order to establish an individual school as safe, while constructing schools as part of a social milieu that is dangerous; 3) asking under what conditions a particular school is a place where danger lurks.

I then consider the culture of dis-courage-ment in and about schools and analyze its origins. I employ a metaphor, “filling kids’ emotional tanks” (Positive Coaching Alliance), to illustrate what is missing when schools are physically or psychically dangerous places, both with respect to gun violence and with respect to the quotidian dangers that mark interpersonal interaction and academic challenges. Filling kids’ emotional tanks is not a matter of shaping their feelings toward “emotional intelligence” (Goleman); rather, it involves linking effort to outcome, valorizing mistakes in the pursuit of the better, and acknowledging what is positive (persistent effort and taking calculated risk) over what may seem less so (the fact of the mis-take). Kids whose emotional tanks are full do not enter schools with guns. They neither bully nor tolerate bullying. Nor do they shrink back from academic challenges.

I argue that the discouraging discourse of and in schools is as much the cause of gun violence as vice versa -- and that the current cultural and individual tendency to frame schools as dangerous places is creating the very conditions its articulators decry.

Perspective(s), Mode of Inquiry, Evidence and Warrants

In making this argument, I employ cultural critique and postmodern deconstruction as grounds for a constructive pragmatist argument that school structure, program and curriculum can be framed to minimize fearful responses by students, teachers, administrators and parents, and, in the process, to create the conditions for minimizing school violence as well. I rely on lived experience and media reports as “grist” for my “philosophical mill.”

Scholarly significance

Gun violence is often taken as a signifier that schools are dangerous places, despite data suggesting that school violence rates are down (Cornell, 2006) and despite personal experience that schools are safe. Federal policy contributes to this perception of school-as-dangerous by requiring schools to submit figures for various forms of violence and then uses those figures to designate schools as “persistently dangerous.” Recent proposals to place armed guards in schools and the rapid accumulation of security systems have transformed open buildings into fortresses. The net effect of all this is to cause fearful affect to “stick” to the object that is “school” (Ahmed, 2003) for students, parents and the public, even when most students experience school as a safe space, and in some cases, as the safest place they spend time each day. No effort to eradicate school violence will be successful until this association is defused and schools become fearless places.

Author

• Barbara S. Stengel, Vanderbilt University