Settling Down: Confronting Silence and Other Foreclosures in a Violence Prevention Curriculum

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Early Childhood, K-12 Education, and Postfoundational Thought (Table 4)

Abstract

We analyze limitations embedded in a pedagogical dichotomy of language and silence in a K-12 violence prevention curriculum. Reliance on verbal/written expression forecloses some embodied affects of violence for teachers and students. When silence functions to settle affect, its expressive capabilities are lost, misplaced, or ignored. We complicate Zembylas’s (2005) pedagogy of silence using critical feminist and affect theories to re-envision the possibilities in the in-betweens of silence and language. We analyze two interconnected findings in enactments of silence: curricular materials and our own affective experiences through our five-month study. We attempt to challenge overreliance on language in this violence prevention curricula by encouraging educators and curriculum designers to re-imagine silences of the difficult knowledge that teaching violence carries.

Authors

• Stephanie D. McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Isabella Devin Bartels, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Suma Cheru, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Monika Mehta, Teachers College, Columbia University