Violence in schools: Expanding the dialogue

Introductory chapter to Smoke and Mirrors: The Hidden Context of Violence in Schools and Society, edited by Stephanie Urso Spina, Ph.D., published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2000 and is, unfortunately, still timely today

Urban Youth Reimagine Trauma: Making Meaning of Experiences with Chronic Community Violence Through the Arts

The impact of participation in the Creating Original Opera (COO) program was investigated among two consecutive (1999 and 2000) cohorts of eighth grade inner-city students living in a context of chronic community violence. Four research questions were posed: (1) What are these students\u27 experiences of violence? (2) What strategies, if any, do they employ to cope with violent events? (3) What, if any, of the above change over the duration of the project? (4) How might those changes relate (or not) to participation in the opera program? Data collection included a series of three semi-structured interviews with randomly chosen students (N = 8 students each year, total N =16 students; 48 interviews). Observational field notes and supplementary sources including conversations with teachers and administrators, and writings produced by the students in both cohorts were used to complement and contextualize the data and analysis. Analysis was grounded in and emerged from the data. Themes, patterns, and recurring or unusual features were identified and sorted to identify patterns and processes related to the research questions. Data were examined in and across individuals over time. Findings indicate that the experience provided by COO produced identifiable changes in students\u27 feelings and behavior, including greater psychic integration, increased willingness to speak about traumatic experiences, improved academic performance, a new ability to imagine the future, and a capacity for challenging some sources of oppression. My analysis identifies certain features of the program, as implemented in the study site school, that appear to facilitate these changes. First, the program immerses students in the aesthetic realm—one in which categories and presuppositions can be examined and re-imagined. Second, students\u27 operas directly represent and address the traumatic conditions of their lives. Third, the program engages students in collective activity that fosters cooperation, mutual trust, and a heightened sense of responsibility and agency. Ultimately, I argue, because the traumatic circumstances of these adolescents\u27 lives are themselves a product of political conditions, and because the students\u27 enhanced sense of agency is grounded in critical consciousness, the transformation they evince must be understood on a political as well as a personal and psychological level

Worlds Together . . . Words Apart: An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Arts-Based Curriculum for Second Language Learners

The objective of this study is to assess whether authentic arts-based1 curricula facilitate the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL) without sacrificing proficiency in the first language (Spanish). This question is examined theoretically and empirically. First, the use of an arts-based curriculum is positioned within a Vygotskiian framework of learning as reflected in current research. This overview is organized by two themes: 1) the authenticity of the art experience and 2) the emphasis on social interaction and the cognitive mediation among sign systems. Applicable findings from related literature are reviewed and synthesized within each of these themes. Secondly, results from an exploratory study are presented and analyzed. This study compared two classes of ESL fifth graders, one of which was taught through an arts-based curriculum while the other was taught using traditional ESL methods. Students were pre-tested and post-tested to assess their first language (Spanish) skills and their English and Reading skills. While the study is preliminary, the results suggest that an arts-based curriculum provides significant cognitive advantages to ESL students by building on the cognitive strengths inherent in bilingualism. The semiotic richness of the arts echoes the semiotic abundance available to speakers of more than one language, nurturing an ability to approach symbolization in a creative, nuanced way. While traditional ESL programs treat students’ first languages almost as obstacles to learning (since the educational goal is narrowly defined as proficiency in English), an authentic arts-based curriculum allows students to embrace diverse modes of expression with the result that their expressive abilities grow in a global way

Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics as a Tool of Critical Pedagogy

This article discusses the assumptions and curricular implications of a social semiotic approach to education. Semiotics refers to the meaning we make with language as well as other objects. events, and actions. Social semiotics emphasizes the social, cultural, historic, and political contexts that shape that meaning. A social semiotic approach to education can help teachers and teacher educators to deconstruct the reproduction of class, politicize the ideology of colonialism, and overcome the inequities they engender. By providing a way to challenge selectively reproduced cultural politics, social semiotics provides a way to reconstruct and democratize schools and society

Violence, Vision, and Voice: A Journey from Liminal to Transgressive spaces

This paper was inspired by the author’s experiences teaching a required class about feminism to affluent, predominantly female undergraduates who vociferously considered it outdated and irrelevant to their lives until they realized, in painfully personal ways, that this was the dominant discourse speaking, not their own voices. Inspired by these women, and in the hope of further displacing the hegemonically imposed code of silence, this paper breaks the author’s tacit complicity with these societal forces of repression. Written on a bus from Boston to New York, the author weaves her narrative with a description of that trip and its passengers, combining imagery and psychological interpretation to reveal her personal journey into the intersection of the social politics that shape and control the legitimacy, experiences, and representation of women’s stories, exploring how these forces are resisted and negotiated, embodied and survived, silenced and voiced. Sexual abuse is not an isolated phenomenon or private event. It is woven into our social fabric. It is a public issue. It is our anger and our outrage, not our silence, that will hold society accountable and provoke change

The Politics of Racial Identity: A Pedagogy of Invisibility

A Critical theory informed Review of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High by Signithia Fordham. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth by Stacey J. Lee. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, and Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader by Antonia Darder, Rodolfo D. Torres, and Henry Gutierrez (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1997

An Interview with Sandra Harding

Harding’s position has been critiqued as more postmodern than feminist, as viable without nasty entanglements in feminism, as too concerned with established Eurocentric, scientific discourses, and as appealing to foundational innocence by her concern with realism. But what seems to drive Harding’s choices more than anything is a conscious attempt to be effective in intervening in existing systems of power, whether empiricist and postmodern. By taking this position, Harding undertakes a difficult task. Its difficulty, however, is compensated for by the conversations she generates. As a voice not restricted to one intellectual school, Harding demands attention from many with opposing views and provokes scholarly exchanges (arguments) that would not have happened otherwise. So even as we question what may be called Harding\u27s postmodern spin on logical positivism, we respect her advocacy for change and admire her candor and integrity