A Learning and Violence Stance is a place to stand with curiosity, resisting  judgment, before the colonial gaze of diagnoses, labels, and standard stories shape our view.

There is usually sharp relief when a particular incidence of violence ends, when a captor is released, or a war ends. But there is rarely acknowledgement of the ways that violence lives on in us, or how each violent experience, large or small, echoes and vibrates with every other moment of violence in our lives. It continues to reverberate and impact what and how we learn long after any individual incident is over.

Violence is rarely, if ever, a singular, acute event; there are usually patterns where people have been or continue to be diminished and disrespected, whether by the same perpetrator, or others like them. For anyone whose whole community is devalued in this society—by race, ability, or any other systemic injustice—violence can be ongoing and relentless, and so ordinary it may not get named as violence. Violence is not in the past, and we don’t just get over it, whether it’s violence against an individual, a community, or a people.

Violence dehumanizes us. It denies us comfort in our own bodies, steals safety from home, pleasure from public spaces, and it passes down pain from generation to generation. All violence should be recognized as a crime. Violence is a toxic soup. The ingredients vary; the pieces are surely sharper, harder to swallow, more virulently poisonous for some than for others; but nobody is free of it.

Yet usually, society and support services operate as if violence is not commonplace and everyday, but a one-off and finite event. We are expected to get on with our lives as if it never happened—to return to “normal” as if there were a place free from violence. These expectations erase lived reality from view. They make it harder to move forward, to heal harm, and to share wisdom learned at such terrible cost.

When we fully take in this picture, it becomes clear that it is not individuals that need to change, but society itself, and the systems that are founded on and benefit from violence. Institutions and systems set up to serve those acknowledged as victims of violence may also too often add further harm, unless they understand their role in perpetuating it.

It is a challenging and precarious balancing act, supporting ourselves and others to engage creatively in this world as it is, while we also hold awareness of the breadth and extent of violence and its impact. Yet it is holding that tension between individuals and society that we need to do if we are to be part of decolonizing practices, growing more humane systems—breathing something substantially different into existence.

Where do you find support for your part in this complex endeavour?

About the Author

I am an educational researcher, a white first-generation settler in Canada, a migrant from England by way of Sierra Leone, where I spent nearly four years beginning to unlearn much I had been taught about the world in England. In Sierra Leone I absorbed new awareness of colonialism and white privilege, though I didn’t really understand the significance of those lessons until years later.

For more than thirty years I have been studying the impacts of all forms of violence on learning, and exploring how to support more effective and joyful learning of the things we choose to learn, at any age and in any setting. I first stumbled over the connection between violence we experience and how and what we learn during my doctoral research in the 80s, and later came to understand that what I heard resonated with some of my own childhood experiences.

I have learned a lot over the years, from research, experience, the wisdom of colleagues and students of different races, religions, cultures, and socioeconomic locations from my own, and a wide variety of training and study.

I prefer the language of a Learning and Violence Stance to the commonly used “trauma-informed”, in order to stress this point of view that recognizes the multifaceted nature of violence in society, and the correspondingly complex pressures when any one of us try to support learning, our own or others’, within colonial institutions and an unjust society founded on violence.

This post is also published at LAVA.care and is part of a set of materials created as part of Victims and Survivors of Crime Week 2021 with the support of Justice Canada. 

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I was infuriated by that expectation. I was learning all too clearly that there is nowhere free of violence to “go away and heal.” I saw too that for too many people violence is not an occasional incident, but an ongoing reality, or at least ever-present danger. Healing, I felt, should not be the expectation that we adjust to the sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, classism, and so many other insidious violences, that too often expose a person to further violence.

I wanted to insist that the reality of the daily expectation of violence is and should be unbearable. I was drawn to the idea of the canaries that miners used to carry into the mines to keep them safe. I found myself speaking often of the idea that the miners didn’t tell their birds to “get over it” to get back on their perch when the methane gas made them keel over. Instead they would have hurried out, racing for fresh air themselves. They knew the deadly gas would get them next if they were too slow. They didn’t tell their birds they were “overreacting” because they themselves couldn’t yet feel the effect of the gas. They ran!

I began to wonder why society didn’t see the sensitivities and triggers of survivors as indicators that there is too much violence, too much toxicity in daily life. I became insistent that there was something wrong with the judgement offered in the therapeutic literature that people who have experienced trauma “overreact to minor stimuli.” I was clear to me that “minor” would only be used as a description by someone not experiencing that violence or numbed to its impact. I believed the description perpetuated the frame that there are normal, appropriate reactions, and unacceptable ones.

Clearly the stimuli do not feel minor, when too many violent experiences layer and fill up one being. That of course, sadly, may frequently be the case for those mistreated and violated by prejudices against a particular, race, class, ability, gender, gender presentation, or sexual orientation. For the person experiencing relentless violations the reaction becomes the only one possible in the face of the experience. I argued that the person overwhelmed by the experience of too many violent experiences is the canary in the mine. Listening, not judgment, is essential.

But canaries in the mines, though it meant a lot to me, didn’t say the book was about violence, or about education. So instead Too Scared to Learn became the second choice. Many people have loved this phrase over the years. They have often told me: “Yes that was exactly what it felt like. I was too scared to learn.” It has become the title for many workshops, presentations, and courses.

But still I’m never entirely sure I want to choose that title now. My concern is that it ignores how much is learned through violence. We learn from all experience. The challenge is that through violence too often we learn many negative messages. We may learn that we are worthless, that we deserve to be mistreated, that we are only good for one thing.

Particularly important for educators is that violence may teach us that we cannot learn the things we choose to learn. We may fear we cannot succeed in the studies we want to take on. We may feel defeated by the tasks we dream of completing. Perhaps, even more disturbing, learning enforced through violence may get in the way of dreaming of possibilities at all.

So the challenge for us as learners and as educators, is to make it possible to learn afresh. The need is for us in either role to figure out ways to loosen the old learning that limits. Then we can explore how to create spaciousness for new learning, learning that opens fresh opportunities, not only in individuals, but more broadly in society.

Originally draft 2018

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Many educational programs have stopped their usual practices and gone virtual. I have heard people say that learning has been interrupted, but I don’t believe it. Normal has been interrupted. I am fascinated by the idea that interruption might be a strange gift for many of us. I’ve learned so many things that I have been thinking of these #covidtimes as #learningtime and using these hashtags on social media in hopes I can spark new conversations.

It is likely only a gift for those of us not sick, not at full stretch tending the sick, and not so beleaguered by life that there is no possible space for reflection. But all of us have been abruptly kicked out of normal life and perhaps that allows us to see “normal” a little more clearly.

This time allows many of us an opportunity to notice things we didn’t see before, to carry out some personal research. One teacher I worked with years ago got under the table with a kindergarten kid who didn’t want to come out. Once there she learned how safe it felt under the table and understood why cajoling and insisting the student move only made their need to stay hidden more intense. Now that so much has changed, many of us can look from a new angle, notice new things. Perhaps we will see our own relationship with fear and anxiety, or with time and tasks, with greater clarity.

We might notice what is truly life-giving, what really matters for us. For in this not-normal time the stakes are higher. There is danger and dread, and colours are heightened. I notice my emotions. For instance, some days it takes only a few small things going awry for the message “Internet unstable” to make tears well. Some people follow every news item, looking, perhaps, for explanations or some semblance of control, others avoid and cocoon. Whatever our route, if we are free to move a step beyond survival mode, we can observe the choices we make in this strange time, learning about ourselves and our lives.

Perhaps we will learn something about the “cost” of normal life, for our physical and mental health, our relationships, or our daily happiness, and begin to imagine making different choices in the new normal. Perhaps we can even imagine that the learning will be stretched beyond individual insights, so that as a society we will learn something about the “cost” of normal, the damage to so many lives, both human and animal, and begin to explore new possibilities.

I’m not sure I am ready yet to imagine the future personally, preferring to stay in the present, though I do notice glimmers of hopes and fears cross my mind and heart. Mostly I find myself immersed in my own exploration of a million and one details of daily life and what I want to spend time on, or avoid. I’m fascinated, for instance, how strongly I am drawn to work with my hands and material things in this time of virtual or distant connection with people, and I am noticing starkly what settles or agitates my nervous system.

What about you? Are the conditions of your life forcing you to learn new things? Are you able to learn more about yourself your life and your yearnings?

Photo by DirkKo form PxHere

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