Art Educators at the Quiet Center of the National Horror of America’s School Shootings: A Plea for Social–Emotional Learning

Yet another school shooting, yet another mass shooting, yet another one and another one and another one… Will this carnage ever stop? Which school will be next?

Every morning, when I pick up The New York Times, headlines record various shootings, stabbings, and related deaths that took place across the state and the country with frightening regularity. The journalists telling and retelling these violent stories are perhaps desensitized; but as educators, stories of these shootings escalate our helplessness. Simply put, gun violence is now woven into the fabric of America’s culture—it is a way of life and death (Gopnik, 2017).

Scrolling through the K-12 School Shooting Database research project (Center for Homeland Defense and Security, n.d.), I learned that it “document[s] each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits a K-12 school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, day of the week” (“About the CHDS K-12 School Shooting Database” section, para. 1).¹ Exactly 10 years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it was Robb Elementary School’s turn in Uvalde, Texas. The carnage in Uvalde marks the 188th school shooting in the United States since 1970. More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at their schools since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting (Cox et al., 2022).

The horrific imagery of dead innocent schoolchildren in pools of blood does not phase our heartless Congress to pull America’s schools out of the graveyard of the gun control movement (Winter, 2022). The children who witnessed these horrors, and those youngsters who have not yet experienced gun violence, are growing up as members of the mass shooting generation. We now live in a country and culture in which grade school children are routinely drilled about what to do in the presence of an active shooter. These active shooter and safety drills have changed the way we view our institutional surroundings, albeit with a bit of skepticism and underlying fear of which school will be the next target. Peter DeWitt (2022) argues that

America is obsessed with guns and violence, and Americans feed on it when they go to the movies, buy video games, or listen to music that highlights guns and more and more violence. Toxic masculinity plays a part in all of this, too, because let’s remember that most of these killers behind the massacres of innocent children, the Asian community, and Black community have been young White men. (para. 25)

NYC - March For Our Lives. Student-led rally for gun control in the United States. New York City, 2018. https://wasikphoto.com. This image is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.

The wounds of gun violence, racism, and hate crimes run deep in an extremely divided United States. Polarizing beliefs about interpreting the Second Amendment and fundamental discrepancies about the root causes of gun violence highlight the larger failure of our leadership. The politics surrounding gun control are now so toxic and divided that identifying a lasting solution seems far-fetched. As educators and human beings, we feel sorrow and fury about these heinous murders as we search for meaning to understand the why behind these mass shootings, yet we remain at the quiet center of this recurring national horror (Interlandi, 2018).

The ongoing interruption and disruption caused by school shootings and our desire as teachers to protect and educate our children calls for further action and reflection to place social–emotional learning at the center of schooling. What follows is a collective response from the Art Education editorial review board members to a series of powerful questions posed at a meeting in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting. These responses are shaped by our current moments of loss, anger, and fear while remaining attentive to the lived experiences of those we teach as we continue to find ways to educate meaningfully in the age of school shootings.

Lived Experiences of Our Students

How do we as teachers listen and learn from the lived experience of our students?

• Being aware of the traumatic experiences in the past and present of our students’ lives is extremely important—making room for personal and shared expression in art projects is necessary, but it’s also good to be cautious and recognize that some of us simply can’t relate to a lot of what our students deal with. —Albert Stabler

• Provide more space for self-reflection in a positive way to help counter emotional trauma.

• Watch and listen.

• Even if I share similar lived experiences as my students, it is important to listen and be open to variations of lived experiences instead of assuming that my experience is the same as theirs.

• Is there a way to translate the concept of listening circles into visual dialogues?

• Designing art assignments that allow students to share their thoughts and experiences if and how they choose to is an important way for me to truly listen to my students.—Marta Cabral

Responding to Crisis

How do we continue to be creative in strengthening and reimagining our reflective practice, using what we now know from responding to crisis?

• What is it that we now know? Crisis is something that most people are not prepared for until you are thrust into the situation. It is devastating and impacts the community. The notion of the importance of community is so much more relevant in times like these. It is a time to draw on compassion, empathy, and connectivity. The best thing we can do is be ready to react, respond, and discuss by having practices in place for students to have reflective dialogue and an opportunity to create in response to everyday occurrences as well as tragedy.

• Drawing inspiration from artists who respond to trauma and/or come from positions of minoritized vulnerability is pretty crucial, as is being sure to discuss the content and context of those works rather than simply their media and form.—Albert Stabler

• Resilience is important… drawing on our strengths (or students’ strengths).

• The current events make me think of the additional layers of anxiety that teaching and learning in school today entails. It is challenging to think about how to we can support future teachers in dealing with these levels of anxiety, and how they can better support their students.

• I think it’s important to reflect on our role in crisis and to take actionable steps to move forward.

• Reactions to crises can sometimes take the form of fear. Let us not fall into this trap.

• Empathy is key, and our practices can only be strong if empathy is at its core. I find that designing curriculum that is very flexible and that takes into account different realities is key to my (higher ed) teaching. Listening to students is fundamental. —Marta Cabral

Being Responsive

For art educators, being responsive to individual and community needs by questioning what is and what could be is an everyday experience. As we consider the challenges we face, many possible questions arise.

• Personally, I think the inaction of police, which have become a fixture in many schools partially as a response to school shootings, should prompt teachers to think about how narratives that valorize police and state violence are present in much of the culture that ends up being discussed in art classes. —Albert Stabler

• The United States is built upon concepts that are contemporarily identified as hate and exclusion. Recognizing and acknowledging that our present actions have those elongated roots, and focusing on that truth, can point us in the direction of questioning, healing, and then moving forward to reconciliation. The everyday experience contains those roots and is also the product of generational experience. This needs to be considered as part of responsivity.—Mara Pierce

• Consider the broad statements about mental health—be careful because mental health does not equate to violence; I worry about stereotyping, exclusion, and the problematic narrative this perpetuates.

Teaching During Turbulent Times

How do we as educators creatively and collectively reimagine teaching and art practice during these turbulent times, which is shaped by our most powerful asset, our own lived experience?

• Through our writing and creative practice, it is essential to draw from lived experience and share our testimonies both textually and visually.

• Connecting schools more deeply with the local community through community-based art, bringing community into the schools through local artists, and building community with and in community is so important—it helps build connections between various groups.

• Who is supporting teachers at this time? So many feel that their schools do not support them or their students in order to make schools safe spaces.

• I think recognizing the limits of our lived experience is actually pretty key, since most art teachers are White, and most urban public school students are from BIPOC communities. Being open to learn alongside our students would be an excellent place to begin thinking in terms of relating, communicating, and formulating ideas of accountability for various forms of historical and institutional harm. —Albert Stabler

• By being present through these traumatic events in order to engage students. Keep in mind that teachers are experiencing trauma as well, and build in your own capacity to be able to heal and reflect (think of the concept of applying your oxygen mask during a plane crash before you help others apply theirs).

• As a BIPOC person, the discussion surrounding the need to recognize the limits of our lived experience really resonated with me. It’s something that I’ve found to be pretty crucial from my own points of marginalization and privilege, as well as within and outside the field. Being open to continuing to learn is a fantastic way to begin.

As parents and educators, when we continually read about and watch the horrors of gun violence, we feel sick to our stomachs with the rhetoric that schools and massacre now go together. No school remains immune to the epidemic of gun violence. As you read through the reflections shared by the editorial review board, consider them as a call to action and refection to weave in social–emotional learning, which is a moral ecosystem between home and schooling. It is becoming abundantly clear that as art educators we must make a shared commitment to help and join forces with others to lead through the arts within our communities of practice and beyond. I’ll leave you with late educational philosopher Maxine Greene’s quote to ponder on: “The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.”

—Ami Kantawala

Author Notes

1. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the senior editor at this address: Art & Art Education Program, Box 78, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027. Email: [email protected]

2. I would like to thank the entire Art Education editorial review board for their input and commitment to the work that we do—the journal couldn’t be where it is today without their selfless and tireless commitment.

3. Robert W. Sweeny’s editorial in Studies in Art Education (2022), titled “Dialogue and Tension,” highlights the importance of dialogue among educators about crucial issues such as gun violence.

3. The organization Facing History and Ourselves (https://www.facinghistory.org) has an excellent blog resource titled Teaching in the Wake of Violence.

4. For more information on talking to children about mass shootings, see Pearson (2022).

5. Another great resource is #UNLOAD, which is an arts-based initiative that seeks to reduce the amount of gun violence in the United States (http://unloadusa.org/about).

6. Suggestions here are not exclusive or inclusive.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ami Kantawala

Ami Kantawala, Adjunct Associate Professor of Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Notes

1 The School Shooting Database Project is conducted as part of the Advanced Thinking in Homeland Security (HSx) program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS).