Reading the Violences of School Through a New Lens: A Literacy Teacher’s Changing Perspective in a US High School

ABSTRACT

This analysis explores a literacy teacher’s changing perspective about teaching in a prestigious high school after learning about ahimsa, or holistic nonviolence. Drawing from theories of transformational learning and critical pedagogy in addition to understandings of ahimsa, this article presents some of the participant’s new perceptions about her teaching and about the culture of the elite high school where she worked, including perceptions of structural violence. New understandings suggest that in order for schools to be nonviolent spaces, structural violences need to be considered alongside more overtly visible forms of violence. There are also implications for teacher learning. When professional development supports transformational change, it can be both inspirational and unnerving, and might shift participants’ perspectives and unsettle their ways of relating to established practices and familiar contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy teaching
• secondary
• transformational learning
• ahimsa
• nonviolence
• structural violence
• privileged students

Introduction

As teachers continue to learn and grow throughout their lives, the professional development opportunities they choose can have a profound impact on how they see themselves and the world around them. This article presents research conducted during the academic year in which an experienced literacy teacher returned to her school after participating in a summer program that she found transformative. In the program, alongside other teachers from the United States, she learned from Indian scholars about ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that loosely translates to nonviolence. Her new perspective impacted the way she defined nonviolence as it relates to pedagogy, the way she interpreted the systems and structures of the school where she worked, and her perspective on her own capacity and obligation to respond to violence and injustice around her.

In the summer before this study, Carrie (all names are pseudonyms) was a member of a group of US teachers who traveled to India to be immersed in Jain culture and philosophy in the Peace for Teachers (also a pseudonym) program. The focus of the professional learning program was ahimsa, or a commitment to practical, comprehensive nonviolence. For Carrie, the ahimsa program felt connected with other professional learning she had already been doing formally and informally, including her work as a teacher consultant for the local chapter of the National Writing Project (see Whitney 2008) and ongoing independent study to support her interest in social-emotional learning. Teachers’ professional learning can be transformative (Mezirow 1997), but according to Kennedy (2014) learning that might be qualified as ‘transformative’ is ‘more a combination of experiences and contextual factors’ than a replicable model. So, while immersive professional learning like the Peace for Teachers program is not necessarily transformative for all participants, for Carrie it was an integral part of a combination of experiences that contributed to forming what she called the ‘new lens’ through which she saw her teaching and other aspects of her life.

As a literacy teacher, Carrie subscribed to a broad and critical understanding of what reading is. Beyond print text, she wrote in a questionnaire, ‘reading encompasses the ability to be aware of your life, relationships, encounters, and political world. Literacy is using language to make sense of the world, to form it, and to change it.’ In addition to informing her teaching of literacy with adolescents, Carrie’s understanding of the significance of ‘reading the world’ alongside ‘the word’ (Freire and Macedo 1978/2005/2005) contributed to her ongoing curiosity and engagement with systems, hierarchies, and spaces for change. As this paper shows, Carrie’s perspective, informed by learning about ahimsa, supported her to read the world differently, particularly the world of the prestigious high school where she was a teacher. Through a new lens, aspects of her teaching practice and the structures of the school itself came into focus in new, sometimes troubling, ways. While the elite school where she taught had few incidents of direct physical violence, Carrie could no longer read it as a nonviolent place. As Carrie’s perspective continued to form, she came to read the world of her school as saturated with cultural and structural violences (Galtung 1990), which can (and did) cause very real harm.

After an introduction of key ideas and an overview of the methods of data generation and analysis, this paper will show how Carrie’s learning about ahimsa in the summer program contributed to the fuller formation of a critical lens that was already taking shape. The New Understandings section continues by showing some of the ways Carrie used humanizing pedagogies (Freire 1970/1996/2000; hooks 1994) and community-building practices as tools to resist the currents of dehumanization and competition in the school. Despite finding ways to assert nonviolent pedagogical approaches in her own teaching, she felt overpowered by structural violence as it manifested in the school and the English department. This analysis has implications for the ways we conceptualize schooling and structural violence, and for the practices of teachers and researchers.

Theoretical grounding: broad understandings of violence & nonviolence

In this study, theories of nonviolence and critical pedagogy are significant in understanding the textures of Carrie’s learning, the context of her school, and the goals and limitations of her efforts to teach in a way that actively prevents harm to others.

Ahimsa as comprehensive and practical nonviolence

The immersion program in which Carrie participated during the summer that preceded this study was designed specifically for US teachers to learn about ahimsa and Jainism. Jainism is an atheistic religion that has ancient roots and a strong contemporary following, mainly in India but also around the world (Vallely 2002), and Jains invite followers of any religion to explore ideas and learn alongside them. The central belief and responsibility of Jains is ahimsa, or non-harming, often interpreted as peacefulness or nonviolence but more comprehensive and far-reaching than many mainstream conceptualizations (Phillips 2008). Whereas ahimsa is a tenet of several religions, in Jainism it is foundational and central, running ‘like a golden thread’ (Singhvi 2002, 218) through histories and texts and outward to the daily actions of practicing Jains (Rankin 2009).

As a philosophical ideal and practical guideline for everyday decisions, ahimsa requires dedication to abstaining from doing or perpetuating harm, intentionally or unintentionally, through violent thoughts, speech, or action. The potential scale of nonviolent action is infinitely small and infinitely grand; some Jain practices are intended to protect insects or even bacteria, and concern for ecosystems and the planet itself drives some Jains’ personal and professional endeavors (Chapple 2002). Gandhi, whose mother was a Jain, cited ahimsa as a central tenet of his nonviolent approach to political action. Significantly, the nonviolence suggested by ahimsa should not be confused with inaction or pacifism – ahimsa is purposefully active, and Jains believe it is a solemn human responsibility to minimize harm and alleviate suffering of other humans and of all living beings (which include all beings with a life force). Because of its implicit acknowledgement of the harm that comes to living beings due to violences beyond the physical, ahimsa’s comprehensive view of nonviolence provides a strong foundation for considering less-overt forms of violence that impact contemporary lives, including the forms of structural violence that circulate in schools. A teacher who commits herself to practicing ahimsa would understandably feel an obligation to examine, illuminate, and work against acts and systems of oppression as they operate in and around schools.

Structural violence

Galtung (1969) defined violence, generally, as the ‘cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is’ (168). Within this overarching conceptualization, he explored dimensions of violence by discussing six pairs of distinctions defined by whether an identifiable actor is directly committing the violence or not. One of these pairs of distinctions was between personal and structural violence. As shown in this study, and elsewhere, structural violence can be difficult to define, to see, and to work against, in part because it is often so effectively embedded in the functioning and stable systems and institutions of a society. Whereas personal violence is visible, structural violence is an invisible and often silent part of our lives. Structural violence likely will not register as a disruption, rather ‘it is the tranquil waters’ (Galtung 1969, 173).

As Galtung (1969) pointed out, understanding violence as multidimensional and complex necessitates sustaining the same complexity in our conceptualization of peace. In order for peace to be achieved, there must be a true absence of structural violence as well as an absence of personal violence (183). As its own comprehensive conceptualization of nonviolence, ahimsa encompasses this wisdom in a parallel way. Developments in critical pedagogy practices show how educators can push against some of the overt and more subtle structural violences of traditional schooling, even from within the structures themselves.

Critical pedagogy & nonviolence

Theories of critical pedagogy (e.g. hooks 1994; McLaren 2009) recognize the political forces at work in schools and other structures, and illuminate the privileges and oppressions those forces reproduce. They also propose means by which education can instead be liberatory and emancipatory, with learning shared among students and teachers. Freire (1970/1996/2000) argued against ‘banking’ models of education in which educators deposit information into dehumanized students as waiting receptacles, thereby reproducing inequalities and injustice across generations. He posited instead that education can be a humanizing and revolutionary project shared among all members of a co-constructed learning community. According to McLaren and Crawford (2008), critical pedagogy is founded on a fundamental commitment to creating an ‘emancipatory culture of schooling that empowers marginalized students’; a recognition of the ways traditional schooling works against the interests of those students who are most vulnerable; an understanding of education as socially and historically situated; and support for a dialectical perspective that recognizes connections between individual and society, between theory and practice (148). For many teachers, embracing critical pedagogy requires a reconceptualization of the purposes and potential of education. Wink (2005) compared critical pedagogy to a prism that exposes the complexities of teaching and learning, and sheds light on social, cultural, and/or political subtleties.

Building from traditional understandings of critical pedagogy through their work with a novice literacy teacher who was committed to nonviolence, Chubbuck and Zembylas (2011) developed a theoretical model of ‘critical pedagogy for nonviolence.’ The teacher in their study, also a White woman teaching in an urban school like the participant in this one, experienced degrees of success and difficulty in implementing critical pedagogy for nonviolence. While their framework does not invoke Jainism or ahimsa directly, the foundational assumptions they named can be read as intrinsically connected with traditional Jain beliefs and ahimsa, including the inability to divide and separate the values of one area of our lives from others. In addition to understanding nonviolence as holistic, critical pedagogy for nonviolence also considers structural inequalities and power relationships and recognizes the significance of emotion in the construction of unjust structures and their potential deconstruction (Chubbuck and Zembylas 2011, 262). In line with these understandings, in the context of this analysis, Carrie saw much of her own learning about and enactment of nonviolence as connected across all spheres of her life and intertwined with her own emotional intelligence and with the learning about social-emotional learning (Cohen 2008) she had undertaken to support her teaching.

Methodological grounding

This case study (Dyson and Genishi 2005) of a literacy teacher’s engagement with holistic practical nonviolence in her teaching has its original basis in a broader ethnographic study of a summer cohort of an international immersion program for teachers. I, the author, am a White woman from the US and am also a former high school teacher. For the first phase of the research, I traveled to India as an ‘observant participant’ (Erickson 2012) in the program, researching the participants, their motivations and aspirations for participating, and their developing understandings of ahimsa. Some of the complexities of that phase were explored separately (Rubin 2020). As residents of the same city, Carrie and I saw an opportunity to continue working together following the summer program, when she returned to teach literacy in a local urban high school.

While not a direct focus of this analysis, the preceding work was instrumental in establishing shared understandings and a common vocabulary between Carrie and me. The experience of being in the summer program space together also contributed to our trusting and friendly professional relationship, which facilitated a level of candor in our subsequent conversations and interviews that impacted the data generated in this study. So, while understandings of Carrie’s shifting frame of reference (Mezirow 1997) and many of our interviews and informal conversations drew from shared experiences during the summer program, the present analysis focused on data from classroom fieldwork, related artifacts, and interviews throughout the subsequent school year. Carrie’s changing perception of her teaching and her school emerged as a potential focus in an early phase of this analysis. In particular, this focus contributed to the formulation of the analytical question (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) that supports this paper: How did a literacy teacher’s changing understandings about violence and nonviolence influence the way she was reading the world of her school?

As she is a member of, potentially, many different groups (e.g. literacy teachers, teachers of high-achieving students, teachers from working class backgrounds), Carrie’s experiences offer a degree of depth that could be a starting point for broader exploration; however, this study is not meant to be generalizable or replicable (Kvale 1995; Lather 1993). The purpose of this analysis was to develop a deep understanding of how one teacher experienced teaching at a school that, while it had not suddenly become a more violent place, was irrevocably changed in her perception.

Participant & context

Carrie Phillips is a White, cisgender woman in her early 30s. She was teaching in the same Southwestern US city where she had earned her degree, about three hours’ drive from the smaller town where she grew up, where many of her family members still lived. In addition to teaching, Carrie was a committed writer and a teacher consultant in the city’s vibrant chapter of the National Writing Project, and also performed as a singer with several local bands.

At the time of this study, Carrie was an English Language Arts teacher in her fifth year, her fourth year at Magnet High School (MHS, a pseudonym). All teachers in the English department taught a combination of core and elective classes, and Carrie taught tenth-grade Pre-AP English and Creative Writing (an elective for students in any year). Data was produced across both spaces, though this analysis mainly draws from her teaching in tenth-grade English. In addition to teaching, Carrie was also the faculty advisor for the school’s Pride Alliance, and supported the competitive debate team.

MHS was an application-based magnet academy that was part of the public school network in a large urban district. MHS was highly regarded in the community, which was initially part of what drew Carrie to apply for her position. The school is rigorous and quick-paced, serving about 1200 students across four grades. MHS is regularly ranked among the best high schools in the state and the country, in part due to students’ capacity to excel in a variety of quantifiable measures. For example, at the time of the study, 95.5% of graduates went on to attend four-year colleges or universities, and the mean SAT score was nearly 1400 (out of 1600, above the 90% percentile).

While MHS was regarded as a separate and independent school, it was physically located within the same building as the high school that served the local neighborhood community. Students from across the city would travel to attend MHS, and when they arrived at the site, they would enter the building of ‘Local High School’ and go directly upstairs. The district website identified students at Local High School as being predominantly (using their wording) African American (33.4%) or Hispanic (63.1%) and 73.9% were identified as economically disadvantaged. While MHS was technically open to applications from all students in the district, those who gained admission were not a reflection of the demographics of the district more broadly and were noticeably different from Local High School. At MHS upstairs, the largest ethnic groups were Caucasian (55.6%) and Asian (20%), and only 7% of students were identified as economically disadvantaged.

Data generation & analysis

As a focal participant and collaborator (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009), Carrie invited me to spend time in her classroom in the school year following the summer program previously described. Alongside passing an ethics review by my university, the study was approved by the school district and the school. In addition to obtaining parent permission for students under age 18, all students in Carrie’s classes agreed to participate. For eight months, I attended one section of each course Carrie taught during that school year, mixed-grade creative writing and tenth-grade English. Carrie and I have also maintained contact since the study’s completion, and she has read drafts of this article and had opportunities to reaffirm or revoke her consent before publication.

During more than 100 hours of observation, I made video and audio recordings of instruction, took field notes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), and collected artifacts like classroom documents and samples of student work. After each visit, data files were backed up and filed by date and keyword to connect them with my handwritten notes and reflections. Over this time, Carrie and I also had two semistructured interviews of approximately two hours each, two semistructured interviews of about an hour each, and more casual conversations on a regular basis about Carrie’s teaching and her insights about her learning. As a participant in the summer program, Carrie also provided information through online questionnaires twice during this school year.

As an early career researcher, the generation and analysis of the data in this study, and the writing of this paper, occurred during a time of shifting and growth in my thinking, particularly as I learned with both qualitative and postqualitative approaches to developing understandings (Augustine 2014; Jackson 2013; MacLure 2013). The analysis of data was interwoven with its generation, and the generation of this data was interwoven with Carrie’s expressed interest in ahimsa as practical nonviolence and her desire to continue in this exploration after the summer program. Diffractive methods of analysis create opportunities to pay attention to that which exists beyond the discursive, while ‘alert[ing] us to the entanglement of the apparatus in addition to the embedded and embodied researcher, who is seen as part of the world’ (Bozalek and Zembylas 2016, 118). Amplified by the length and nature of my involvement with Carrie’s classes and her teaching, my presence is inextricable from the events that unfolded during this study (Barad 2007).

After data generation in the classroom had come to an end, analysis as the development of meaning with the data-texts cannot be separated from the development of meaning with theory-texts alongside and as part of this work, some of which are mentioned in the preceding section on theoretical grounding. So, as I was able to discern and construct tentative meanings over time, decisions about which data to focus on were informed by theories of critical pedagogy, and ahimsa as a philosophy of peace and nonviolence. Reading through those lenses rendered visible some connections with other data (including some generated in the summer program), which invited more reading-through of data with other data (Zapata, Kuby, and Thiel 2018).

The new understandings that follow were developed through a re-immersion in the data post-generation, and through diffractive readings and re-readings (Barad 2014) of data alongside and through other data and through the theories (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) introduced in the previous section. Analyzing data through diffractive reading, rather than reductive methods that seek to smooth out and obscure complexities, offered ‘an escape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, and judgment, and ultimate representation’ (Vannini 2015, 1–2). In other words, the new understandings produced through diffractive readings of data and theories are meant to gesture forward, outward, and toward possibility rather than represent a distilled meaning of an event.

Reading the world of school: ahimsa as a critical lens

The insights generated through this analysis are presented below. First, I show how for Carrie, the learning supported by the ahimsa program contributed to an already-forming critical lens through which she was now ‘reading’ the world, including the world of her school. With ahimsa as a thread that helped to linkpreviously unconnected practices, Carrie continued to support her students and aimed to develop her class as a humanizing (Freire 1970/1996/2000; hooks 1994; Land 2022) and sustaining community of learners. Carrie’s newly focused critical lens also contributed to her reading of the structures and systems at her elite school in a new, clear way; where she previously saw injustices or frustrations that she could negotiate enough to live with/in, she now saw institutional violence that was dehumanizing toward students and, at times, inflicting real harm on them.

Reflecting and unifying nonviolent classroom practices

Upon returning to MHS in late August (just a few weeks after attending the program in India), Carrie expressed excitement about sharing the knowledge she had developed and talking with colleagues about how she was envisioning incorporating it into her teaching. At the start of the academic year, Carrie was invited to give a presentation to staff about her professional learning, which she used as an opportunity to articulate her understanding of ahimsa as it relates to teaching and invite attendees to join her ongoing thinking about this. She began the presentation by talking about her philosophy as a teacher: ‘basically, I’m a literacy teacher that cares about creating democracy and classes of positive citizens and community builders.’ She called ahimsa ‘a sort of active love that takes shape in belief, language, and action, and reaches out to others to invite and include them … whether in interpersonal relationships or relationships between communities.’ Carrie noted that thinking with ahimsa both reflected and extended her priorities as a teacher; several practices and pedagogies she already had as part of her repertoire were in harmony with the goals of ahimsa. She was now able to draw connections between some of these practices as philosophically related to each other and anchored in an established commitment to preventing harm and showing care for her students. Some of the pedagogical priorities that Carrie viewed as woven together through ahimsa were: being mindful of her position and power; welcoming students’ voices and building authentic relationships; and making space for emotions and care in her curriculum and ‘beyond the curriculum, caring for them as humans.’

Throughout the school year, Carrie sought to engage students as decision-makers in their learning through guarding space for students to make choices. Many of Carrie’s literature-based assignments were built around student choices from several options, and there were frequent opportunities for students to work with partners or in groups. While Carrie could not ignore her position of power as a teacher and the person who marked assignments, she was mindful of making her processes transparent and fair. During a discussion in October (mid-first semester) about planning her instruction, she said ‘There’s freedom and they have to make decisions, but I don’t want them to feel like they’re on unsure footing. I want them to know that I might provide instructions or guidance in a way that maybe feels different from other English classes.’ In an interview around the same time, she talked about planning a unit of study and making a daily class schedule that she could post, because ‘this is the time of year that students are really, really stressed, and they might appreciate knowing what to expect.’

Carrie continued to think about how she could not only accept, but actively invite students’ authentic voices into the process and products of English class. She used an SEL-related ‘check in’ practice at the start of each class; it was a ritual that she had used before, but now she viewed it as one of several connected nonviolent practices. She crafted assignments that asked for students to include opinions and experiences that helped her to get to know them, and emphasized that who they are matters, including but not only within the context of the classroom and their academic work. Carrie said ‘I want to hear students’ voices in assignments. I’m seeking to understand them, and creating a space to understand and space to listen, to listen and appreciate. To listen and learn from them.’ She acknowledged that the way she responded to student writing was also informed by beliefs she had deepened through her engagement with the National Writing Project, which she now also saw as related to ahimsa: ‘I know I can respond supportively and still push them to keep improving. Those things are not in conflict with each other.’

Reading the violences of school

While ahimsa became a helpful lens through which to organize her efforts and priorities, this lens also cast some of the dynamics and structures at MHS in a new light. MHS was not a different place than it was before Carrie’s engagement with ahimsa, and many of the things that troubled her were things she had noticed before. Carrie had previously noticed, for example, the tendency of the older men in the ‘traditionally-oriented’ English department to speak over voices from newer teachers, many of whom were young women. She also had noticed the way some teachers spoke with condescension or hostility about the students and staff ‘from downstairs’ at Local High School, who she noted were mostly people of Color. And, she had noticed how some teachers were dismissive of their own students, ‘bragging’ about not knowing who they were several months into the school year.

What was new to Carrie was the connection she saw between the constructed hierarchies, the fostering of competition, and the silencing of actual and literary voices that were not older, white, or male. Over the academic year that formed the basis of this analysis, Carrie increasingly referred to her school as a violent place:

Now I think violence in my school looks like teachers who brag that they don’t even know their students’ names … People who take any opportunity to denigrate students, in general or on an individual level … And then there’s the violence of people with a little more power just saying no or not allowing space for others’ voices. I feel like there’s a lot of violence in how people’s voices are valued or not.

Teaching in an “icy” environment

Despite the success and many high-profile achievements of the current and former students at MHS, the relationship between building administration (a principal and two assistant principals) and the teachers (approximately 70 teachers in six disciplinary departments) often appeared ‘fraught’ to Carrie. As mentioned earlier, Magnet High School was regularly named among the best high schools in the state and the country, and individual students were often recognized through prestigious awards or scholarships. However, no achievement was cause for celebration. In an interview, Carrie said that a member of the administration had openly said that they don’t want ‘the [teaching] team’ to know they are the best in the country, since then they ‘wouldn’t work as hard.’ Meaningful positive reinforcement, which Carrie acknowledged as being important to her as a teacher and a learner, was not offered to her by administrators at MHS. The options Carrie saw were either to be ignored by her administration, or to be vaguely ‘in trouble’ for something an administrator had heard from someone about her teaching.

The broader culture of the school, in many ways, reflected this way of relating to one another, a model built on competition, withholding, and criticism. Like the students, teachers were positioned as being in competition with one another and some seemed proud to be called ‘the hardest,’ ‘the strictest,’ or the one who ‘gives the most homework.’ Carrie noted that she was not interested in competing, generally, and ‘I’m not trying to be better in those categories than anyone. I’m not trying to be harder, more stressful, more rigorous, more impossible.’ The culture of competition, and Carrie’s refusal to participate in it, contributed to feelings of isolation and sadness, even quite early in the school year. Teachers were not directly discouraged from collaborating, but collaboration was not actively facilitated nor did it seem to be valued. During a conversation in October that year, she said, ‘I feel very alone. I just wish I had someone to plan [teaching] with in a real way.’

In addition to feeling as though she had limited options for connection because of school-wide structures, Carrie became increasingly distressed over the English department she was part of. While there were a roughly equal number of men and women in the department, meetings tended to be dominated by a few older, male voices. Those voices repeatedly championed a ‘traditional’ approach to teaching English, both in the limited perspectives offered by canonized literature and requirements to engage with text and with teacher-authority in deferential and non-critical ways. The way Carrie described her department shifted over time. Toward the start of the school year, she named ‘teaching in a department that’s pretty icy’ as a challenge she was feeling; she connected this coldness to her own emotions and experiences. Toward the end of the school year, she named the ‘dysfunction’ as more systemic in nature. She said, ‘I think my department is aggressively misogynistic.’ She recognized this in personal interactions and in the dismissive comments about the school’s mainly female counseling staff, and refusals to diversify the texts students were required to read to reflect voices outside the predominantly White and male Western canon.

Students as dehumanized producers of cultural capital

The prestigious reputation of MHS, which had been a point of pride for Carrie when she first started working there, became a source of ambivalence after she returned from the ahimsa program. She now questioned whether the school’s prestigious reputation was actually a beneficial force for students and teachers. While it was positioned as an important feature of the school, she wondered whether the cultural capital the institution seemed to benefit from increased the freedom of students and teachers, whether it reduced suffering and difficulty in their lives. She questioned whether the location of MHS on the top floor was having any positive impact for the students at Local High School. The more she examined these questions, the more she considered the school’s prestigious reputation a vehicle for exploitation of students and teachers.

Despite the impressive statistics on the MHS website, Carrie noticed students being consistently driven to achieve more, and to keep producing the same quantifiable level of local and state/national prestige. While yearly state-based examinations might haunt other schools, they were hardly even discussed at MHS (ostensibly, it is taken for granted that all students will pass). However, rather than moving beyond the hollow pressure of standardized testing and approaching learning in a more comprehensive and responsive way, Advanced Placement tests moved to the center of the discourse around measuring student (and teacher) success. The school published numbers of Advanced Placement tests taken, passed, and the number of students who achieved a top score; numbers were expected to improve every year. These became important indications of the prestige of the school, which was then activated to continue to recruit high-achieving students from across the city, continuing the cycle.

Throughout the school year, teachers were expected to input two grades per week for each of their 150–180 students. Students each took eight classes, so they were ‘being evaluated constantly’ in Carrie’s view. Amid the dizzying frequency of evaluation, Carrie saw there was a higher cultural value placed on assessments and classes that were ‘hard,’ and taught by teachers who were the most ‘demanding.’ These attributes were positioned in opposition with less quantifiable and more collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. To the more traditional and more established members of the English department, this translated to having the teacher be the distributor of correct knowledge, the selector of the correct texts, and the final judge of quality of students’ writing, speech, and thinking. For example, another teacher whom Carrie often was compared to taught the same personal essay assignment that she did. But while Carrie used the assignment as an opportunity to teach writing processes and offer constructive feedback, the other teacher’s rubric for success was simply ‘impress me.’

There were other practices that Carrie saw as problematic that seemed to go unchecked or even to be tacitly encouraged by the culture of the school. It was expected that teachers would assign several hours of homework each week, with students doing three hours or more per night (in addition to attending school full time). ‘There is just no view of students as people who do anything except complete assignments and take tests,’ Carrie noted. Students who did not perform well enough could be assigned extra or even ‘double’ homework, and could be required by their teachers to attend extra tutorials during lunch. A fear of failure spurred students to achieve more, a tactic Carrie now perceived as violent in its harmfulness, particularly to MHS students, a population she described as ‘bound by a high-achieving, intellectual identity.’ She described how another English teacher would purposefully give assignments that were impossible for students to succeed on, expecting them to fail. Then he would ‘magnanimously offer them the chance to revise it for a better grade,’ a chance everyone takes because they’re so horrified at their first grade, ‘which he knows will happen!’ She said, ‘That is violent, it’s a harmful thing to do to those kids,’ she said. Definitions of violence linked to ahimsa permitted Carrie to view practices like this as detrimental: they not only displayed disregard for students’ suffering, they were actively constructed in ways that produced unnecessary suffering.

Carrie’s quiet refusal to engage in some of these practices did not go unnoticed. She mentioned being ‘called in’ to talk with an assistant principal, who had ‘heard through the grapevine’ that Carrie’s creative writing class was ‘too easy’ and asked ‘how I was going to make it harder?’ Upon recounting this, Carrie added that this person had never seen her teach this class, had never even stopped by. ‘She just heard that students aren’t miserable and can see the grades are good and so thinks something must be wrong.’ This assessment circulated in her department as well, ‘They just think that because I have a heart and a conscience and like, some modicum of energetic youthful idealism that my classes aren’t real.’ All available quantitative data and student/parent feedback supported that Carrie’s students succeeded at the same rates and in the same ways as everyone else.

Structural violence and the safety of children

Since MHS was physically located within the building of another school, they did not have their own cafeteria, and rather than go downstairs MHS students usually ate lunch in bustling hallways. Some of her quieter students would sometimes ask to eat in Carrie’s room, and she welcomed them. On many of the days I was there, a student named Roberto from the tenth-grade English class I observed would come in and quietly eat his lunch and read. Carrie told me he was a ‘sophomore transfer,’ so was new to the school and had not entered MHS as a first-year with the rest of the class.

Staff were told Roberto died by suicide a few weeks before the final exams that marked the end of the first semester in December. Carrie was deeply troubled by his death. She said she knew he wasn’t having an easy time adjusting, that being a sophomore transfer, being a new kid at MHS can be hard, but she was shocked. Before hearing this news, Carrie had been out of school for over a week due to a medical issue. We spoke on the phone about Roberto. Carrie wondered if she had just been there, if she had talked to him, if anything could have been different. She was quiet for a little while, then sobbed. ‘Where had he even been eating his lunch?’

Roberto was the second MHS student to die by suicide that fall semester. Carrie spoke with the counselors at the school, in part for support with her own grieving but also to seek out support for responding well to her students in the shadow of this loss. All tenth-grade English classes were meant to start the second semester reading Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th century Divine Comedy (translated to English). Inferno is about the speaker’s journey through the nine circles of Hell, witnessing the suffering of those who were being eternally punished after their deaths. Carrie worried about this choice in the wake of recent events. It is not unusual for English teachers to adjust curriculum to respond to a collective loss (Dunn 2021), and doing so was within the scope of the English department’s authority. She said, ‘There’s no way I can get excited about teaching this, right after the death of a child.’ Carrie said her concerns were brushed aside, and the rest of the department would not consider changing the text.

Upon returning to school in January, all English classes would have a session with a counselor about grief and depression (scheduling was done through English classes since all students in the school had a grade-specific English class on their schedules). Carrie followed up with the counselor for support again, for guidance specifically with teaching Canto XIII in Inferno, in which Dante enters the Wood of the Suicides where the souls of those who died this way are tortured. The school counselor gave Carrie some suggestions about how to teach this material sensitively and safely, and she offered to attend an English department meeting to share some general guidelines for teaching with topics like this. Carrie was relieved both that this information would be shared and that she did not have to be the one to speak up about it; she hoped that her colleagues would listen to an expert.

On the day the counselor was meant to attend the English department meeting, she was called away for an emergency. In her absence, the meeting (which Carrie described to me afterward) started with the Department Chair summarizing and then immediately dismissing the counselor’s advice. The meeting then descended into a general session of complaint about counseling ‘interrupting instruction’ and how ‘these kids’ need to learn how to ‘cope with difficulty,’ which wasn’t going to happen if they kept being able to ‘leave class whenever they wanted’ to see a counselor. Carrie acknowledged that there were several teachers in the meeting who pushed back on this discourse in different ways, but she was disturbed by what she heard. ‘This is how these people think about taking care of children, even after we all have been reminded that it’s so important. It’s only January and two children have died here.’

Discussion: reflecting on structural violence with a new frame of reference

In this paper, I have explored how a literacy teacher’s changing understandings about violence and nonviolence influenced the way she read the world of the prestigious high school where she worked. For Carrie, attending the Peace for Teachers program contributed heavily to a transformation that was already underway, and added to the formation of a critical lens she was starting to apply to her work and her world. Significantly, learning about ahimsa offered Carrie an opportunity to construct her perspective as a cohesive new lens, or ‘frame of reference’ (Mezirow 1997).

Even though Carrie saw ahimsa as connected with established social-emotional and justice-related priorities (Bajaj 2008), a new frame of reference was required. Ahimsa is, in many ways, compatible with various frameworks that prioritize social justice and humanizing practices (Freire 1970/1996/2000; hooks 1994). However, as a philosophy with its roots in a specific cultural ontology, ahimsa has an intellectual genealogy that is fundamentally different; for Carrie, incorporating ahimsa was not only about changing practices but reflected a paradigmatic shift (Wang 2013) in her understanding about her relationships and responsibilities.

Initially, a new frame of reference offered an exciting way for Carrie to organize, prioritize, and develop humanizing and critical pedagogical practices. But, according to Mezirow (1991) transformational learning does not just change the way we think about a single subject, it changes how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us. When reading the wider world of her elite school from this new perspective, Carrie was increasingly troubled by what she saw. Physical/personal violence was rare at MHS, but through a lens informed by ahimsa, Carrie was able to discern and label violences she may have been able to look past before. Galtung’s (1969) definition of structural violence, particularly its nature as invisible and inherent to the functioning of all kinds of systems and institutions, is helpful here.

Carrie’s individual pedagogical responses to the violences of school were very much in line with Harris’s (1990) firmly established tenets of peace pedagogy, which he juxtaposed with traditional education practices. For example, two of the tenets of traditional education that Harris noted promote violence are encouraging competition, and positioning teachers as the holders of truth (256). Peace pedagogy, however, acknowledges the value of students’ voices and promotes cooperation and collaboration to ‘break down competitive procedures that can contribute to structural violence’ (260). So, despite feeling ‘alone’ at times in her school, the perspective Carrie developed through the study of ahimsa put her in the company of a long tradition of educators who think about peace, nonviolence, and pedagogy. Aligning with ahimsa, specifically, also focused her sense of responsibility to alleviate the suffering caused by these violences.

Invisible violence and the development of this analysis

Teachers who participated in the ahimsa program alongside Carrie were from all across the US and many worked in schools that were less-resourced and perhaps more visibly experiencing impacts of violence than Magnet High School. Due to geographical and other limitations, Carrie was the only participant available and willing to continue this project into the school year. While I was grateful for the opportunity, I felt conflicted about pursuing nonviolence research in a space I had viewed as exceptionally privileged. I also felt conflicted about potentially producing research that might further glorify the successes of MHS, an institution I regarded as an aggressor of sorts toward the neighborhood school and the local community in a rapidly gentrifying area. MHS did not look like the schools in the research I had been reading. For example, in Chubbuck and Zembylas’s 2011 case study about an educator focused on critical nonviolence pedagogy, the students were experiencing dangerous physical violence in their school and community, and were marginalized by standardized tests and the structures of schooling.

The scope and impact of structural violence that became apparent to Carrie at MHS surprised us both.

I do not intend to minimize or compare experiences and impacts across different contexts; they are different, and the students at MHS experienced many privileges. This study suggests that structural violence can impact any school that is embedded within a broader system where standardization, competition, and exploitation form the ‘tranquil waters’ of the status quo (Galtung 1990, 73). Even the ‘best’ schools are not immune to the impacts of structural violence. When the systems that entangle us are violent, even those whom the systems are designed to serve can suffer.

If children are dehumanized in and through the structures of schooling until they are seen only as the roles they play within that system, the truth can be quietly forgotten: beyond being students, they are whole, complex human beings whom it is our solemn responsibility to teach and also to protect and care for. This is no less true of children who might be dehumanized in and through their roles as high-achieving students who produce test scores and institutional prestige. Perhaps, the gravitational pull of doing things as they have always been done is especially hard to resist from the upper rungs of a shaky hierarchy.

Of course, Roberto was a student, but in my memory and in all the data I reviewed, when talking about his death, Carrie always called him a child. After this analysis, I understand better the weight of this word choice and what it means within dehumanizing and violent structures. In a context where ‘students’ can be reduced to an endless stream of grades and some teachers might not even know their names, remembering Roberto, a teenager, as a child was not a reflection of his age. It was a reminder of his humanity and his place in a family; it was a reminder that something precious had been lost.

Implications & conclusions

Alongside ahimsa and the imperative to refrain from doing harm, a foundation of Jain understandings of the world is anekant, the nature of truth as being many-sided, partial, and visible in ways that are relative to the perspective of the seer (Rankin 2009). In addition to accounting for a multiplicity of views of truth from different perspectives, anekant permits us to not grasp too tightly to our own viewpoints, which might dissolve in the light of new understandings. Carrie’s relationships – with students, with colleagues, and with the status imbued on her as a teacher at an award-winning school – changed in complicated ways. Reading her teaching, her department, and her school through a new lens required that Carrie loosen her grip on some aspects of how she had previously understood these contexts and her place in them.

In some ways, Carrie’s experiences echo extant research about teachers’ transformational learning as complex (Strom, Mills, and Abrams 2023), nonlinear (Scanlon, MacPhail, and Calderón 2022), and with the potential to be supported by immersive local (Whitney 2008) or international professional development (Patterson 2015). However, this transformational learning contributed, ultimately, to Carrie recognizing a fundamental incommensurability between her revised ahimsa-based perspective and the status quo at MHS. Like all learning, teachers’ learning and the possibilities that unfold are not predictable, linear transactions. Honoring the multidimensionality of teacher learning through research requires complex theoretical perspectives and approaches that do not treat teacher learning and change as immediate and sharply defined cause-and-effect interventions. The long-term relationship on which this research was based provided a scope to see and develop some understandings of the complexities of Carrie’s learning and her experiences in reading the world in a new way. This research highlights the significance of honoring complexity in learning and researching, allowing time for unfolding to occur and time to think deeply about possibilities.

There are also significant implications for the ways in which we conceptualize, and thus respond to, the structural violences of schooling in the US. As a practical and comprehensive philosophy, ahimsa requires an understanding of the multiplicity of ways that humans and other beings experience harm and suffering. This means, also, there are many ways we (as humans, as teachers) can use our position and abilities to prevent and reduce the suffering of others (Rubin 2018). To disrupt the quiet violence embedded within our structures and institutions, perhaps we need radical and unreasonable (De Lissovoy 2016) approaches that undermine forces like individualism and competition.

While there are endless potentialities for contribution, no one person can be responsible for reversing the cultural tide of structural violence. Aligning with ahimsa is not a mandate to solve every problem; it encourages us to take any possible action to prevent and alleviate suffering. Structural violence tends to be so seamlessly interwoven into the normal functioning of our institutions it can be rendered indetectable. Illuminating its place in our lives is significant in itself.

In addition to revealing violences that might have otherwise gone unseen, viewing the world through a lens informed by ahimsa was a way for Carrie to ‘imagine things otherwise’ (Greene 1995) in her life. Carrie’s nonviolent approach to teaching her classes contributed to building, with her students, a classroom space within MHS where people often seemed calm and genuinely happy. Literacy teachers and teacher educators can look to examples like Carrie’s as a place to start, a way to begin conversations about nonviolence and peace as being necessary and possible, even from within institutions that valorize the opposite.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Cira Rubin

Jessica Cira Rubin, PhD, is a former teacher from the US who is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Education at The University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jessica’s research interests include teacher education and the literacy practices of children and adolescents, particularly as those topics relate to priorities of nonviolence and social and ecological justice.