Schools as Sites of Slow Violence: A Case for Compassion Literacy

• In Event: Schooling and Intergenerational Mental Health

Abstract

There is growing physical, emotional, linguistic, racial, and sociocultural violence in schools through bullying, harassment, exclusion, bans, and criminalization, which disproportionately impacts marginalized groups. This evidence suggests that schools are sites for pain and suffering and places where slow violence (Nixon, 2007; Ray, 2025) festers. Compassion, or actively responding to human suffering, offers an encouraging way to address such violence. In this paper, the co-authors draw on DuBois’ (1903) conceptions of compassion in sociopolitical environments to share preliminary analyses of two exploratory study methods examining compassion as an actionable literacy. The exploratory methods include: 1. a meta-synthesis of existing studies, and 2. a dinner and dialogue series with intergenerational and intersectional education stakeholders used as a community-engaged focus group to check the interpretation of our meta-synthesis with the lived experiences of historically marginalized school communities. We argue that the absence of a collective moral compass in our current world has created a political, social, economic, and educational landscape rife with individualism, competition, and greed.

Authors

• Thais Council, Temple University

• Jianan Gu, Temple University