Masculinity, Violence and Schooling: Challenging 'poisonous pedagogies'

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper has three major purposes. The first is to point to the connections between male to male, male to female and adult male to child physical and 'sexual' violence and such matters as masculinity, marginality, sexuality, intimacy and age. The understandings that arise from this discussion will be used to offer an interpretation of the connections between schooling and violence. In this context Alice Miller's ideas about 'poisonous pedagogies' will be applied to schooling. The second purpose of the paper is to identify the major orientations of mainstream, sociocultural and feminist anti-violence pedagogies and to offer an implicit critique of them, drawing from the ideas developed in the first section of the paper and from research about responses to gender reforms in schools. The third purpose of the paper is to identify the contours of an alternative anti-violence pedagogy. This will both draw from the above and from narrative therapy.