Utopic Horizons of Prevention: The Fantasy of an Undangerous Curriculum of Violence

• In Event: Affective Cunning: Curriculum With/in Relational Networks of Gender, Knowledge, and Violence

Abstract

Public affects of fear and concern about multiple forms of violence collect on bodies and in lives asserting pressure for violence prevention. Schools are directly subject to the collective affects of fear that accumulate as atmospheric pressure (Anderson, 2017) to prevent danger and ward off future harm. When it comes to stopping violence by children and youth or upon children and youth, a commonsense approach is to teach children and youth about it in schools. Schools and the curricula in them often serve the moral imperative and utopian imaginary (Butler, 2021) to ward off danger.

Curricula is a popular mode of prevention. Prevention curricula is a constellation of knowledge intended to avert, deter, obviate, and forestall someone from doing something harmful. The D.A.R.E. curriculum of drug abuse prevention and Smokey the Bear wildfire prevention curricula might be the two most well-known prevention curricula in U.S. history. An enduring assumption of prevention curricula is that understanding the negative or harmful outcomes of certain behaviors will deter people from those behaviors or objects. The logic of cognitive theories of learning suggest that acquiring new knowledge about what is to be stopped is thought to make something stop happening or deter people from doing the something that is happening before they do it. An enduring difficulty of prevention curricula is teaching and learning the difficult knowledge of the something, such as violence, that is to be prevented. The conditions and relations of safety required to enact the pedagogical responsibilities of care in violence prevention curricula are in direct relation to an infinite amount of unanticipated affects animated by unknown degrees of personal and social trauma experienced by all persons, bodies, and lives in the classroom. This can feel dangerous curricularly and pedagogically making the designing, teaching, and researching violence prevention curricula a difficult and dangerous proposition for many, including me. This paper shares findings from a study which set out to offer some assistance with this proposition when we were asked to evaluate a violence prevention curriculum designed for learners in grade K-12. We have a much better understanding of how difficult, and potentially dangerous, it is to smooth out the sharp edges of knowledge in a curriculum designed to teach about many forms of violence.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize some of the findings of a broader qualitative case study of a violence prevention curriculum by confronting a psychoanalytic theory of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998), affect theories about atmospheric pressure (Anderson, 2017), and Butler’s (2021) framework of violence and the social bond. The following questions guide the inquiry of this paper: (1) What is the knowledge about “danger” and “safety” in this curriculum of violence and what affects accumulate in relation to desires for harm reduction? (2) What functional, moral, socio-political, affective and utopian rationals shape the curricular conditions and pedagogical relations of violence prevention curriculum constructed?

Author

• Stephanie D. McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University