A Violence of "Best Practice": Domestic Violence and the Making of a Disordered Subjectivity

• In Event: 18.017 - The Unintended Consequences of Historical "Best Practices" in "Post-Truth" Times: A National and International Perspective

Abstract

Often, efforts by schools to standardize its marginalized children have violent effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religious-like adherence to data. It is in the prophesies of “data(s),” both big and small, that a newly, yet old forcefulness marches forward in what Author One (2017) refers to as a newer, and very different practice of “systems” rewriting specific “beings.” In decades of formidable literature, Author Five (2002) and Author One (2002) have defined what these kinds of violence(s) are and what they do to children and youth deemed in need of special education services. These scholars capture the effects of marginalizing practices, often framed as “best practices,” used in response to children and youth who have been labeled as defective and/or resisting their marginalized experiences in public schools.
In my previous work, I (Author Four, In Press, 2017, 2016) attempted to build on similar claims that children and youth with histories of domestic violence (HDV), experience similar effects, often intersecting at the crossroads of special education, race, and class.

These effects have extraordinary consequences, and often position HDV children and youth towards punishing life trajectories. I suggested that the collusion of HDV experiences often overlap with other socially marginalized encounters like the overrepresentation of special education labeling, racism, and poverty (Author Four, In Press & 2017). The consequences of such effects fashion HDV children and youths’ life trajectories demarcated by prison, prostitution, or worse, life itself. Thus, there is an urgent need to recast a current light on the realities of these deeply marginalized children/youth. It is not sufficient enough to identify when these reenactments occur, but to also identify how these consequences are either/or both intended and unintended for children and youth whose lives are intimately defined by domestic violence.
The goal of this paper is to disrupt when and how these consequences occur for HDV children and youth. Specifically, this paper examines when and how the school lives of HDV children and youths’ subjectivities are (re)shaped by popular, deficit-laden, and often violent discourses framed as special education “best practices” of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity. I trace the damaging effects of this current day rumination of cleaning up/out vagrancy (Authors One, 2017) embodied in a young girl’s necessary HDV cultural resistance (Author Four, In Press, 2017). Data includes personal interviews along with cultural analysis of a school artifact including the youth participant’s third grade special education IEP (Individualized Education Plan).

This research seeks to unsettle the popular discourses or what schools refer to as “best practices,” for labeled children/youth and attempts to counter-frame HDV children/youths’ necessary resistive relationships to normative-hegemonic experience in schools. The paper ends with related critique of the social and emotional frameworks (SEL) populating our schools today connecting their relationship to the school-to-prison pipeline for children/youth with histories of domestic violence.

Author

• Tracey Pyscher, Western Washington University