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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I was troubled then seeing how the concept of professional could separate “us” the educators, from “them” the students. They need help, not me. I am the helper, the one with it all together. I suspect many of us enter helping professions as a way to avoid our own problems. I know I did. I once applied for funding for a project called “What body, whose body”; my proposal suggested that health care workers as much as patients might be disconnected from their bodies, impacted by experiences of violence. However, the project was turned down; I was told to focus only on the “significant” experience, the patients’, as if professionals were exempt from “real” experiences of violence.

As a Board member of a small non-profit I was told I should be more professional, and understand the power of the role I was to play. As a professional it seemed I could not also be an activist or a collaborator. A daycare worker told me that at some centres formal professional clothing is required, the policy ignoring the practical needs of working with small messy children, as part of the attempt to achieve recognition and legitimacy for that field.

I realize that “professional” can be a valuable protective mask for both sides through setting rules of conduct and delineating what is acceptable in each profession. It can set requirements, and punishments for those who do damage. It also lays claim to the importance of and actual skill involved in the work; in adult education too, it can be a valuable part of the process of demands for better pay, benefits, and recognition.

But professionals it seems must not bring their whole self, must hide their needs behind a mask of expertise, of being the knower. Though there can be value, a clarity about what to do and how to behave, there can be loss too. That mask can obscure the possibility of connection. It can divide. As I notice the numerous ways that white supremacy and colonialism are deeply embedded in the ordinary practices of organizations and in personal interactions, the insistence on professionalism worries me more.

My deep dislike of the concept is tied to the ways it often offers protection for only one side in the relationship: the teacher, the doctor, the lawyer, the therapist, can hide, while those they work with cannot. As professionals, we hold the power of specialized language, of familiarity with that distinctive site where our work takes place. Perhaps we have spent many years there, have come to feel an ease, a secure sense of belonging.

When we meet the student, the patient, the client, the visitor in that world, will we recognize the challenge for them to feel any ease in that space? Will we feel the vulnerability of the receiver of our work? Will we notice the way that class, race, gender presentation, disability, and more, can combine with other traumatic experiences and legacies of being discounted or devalued in precisely these settings?

We will use our expert knowledge to help, it’s true, hopefully never intentionally to harm. But the recipient of all that expert knowledge must bare themselves: their lack of skill or knowledge, of health, of safety. They have no mask, maybe even literally no clothing, I remember viscerally still, years later, the feeling of wearing a flimsy gown, leaving my self behind along with my clothing when I was admitted to hospital. All inadequacies are exposed to the gaze of the “professional” helper as they (or we) try to figure out how to survive in this specialized space.

So, I wonder now how we as professionals can use our knowledge and skill to meet the knowledge and skill of the recipient of our help. Can we hold space for a meeting of inner and outer knowledge, for the knowledge gained from within that body, and that experience, and for the knowledge and skill gained from professional training and practice? If we could, a deeper, more honest connection might be possible. Can we learn (or strengthen our capacity) to take on the professional role with care not to use it for self-protection while the other must bare all, and bear all?

I want to think about how we open safer, or braver, spaces, where we can share both our knowledge and our lack of it, where hopes and fears can be present without shame.

Perhaps when we think about masks we can see why the recipient of the perhaps much-needed help seeks to cover up too. In classrooms one might hide behind the “good student” role. They might avoid asking questions that reveal lack of knowledge. In these times of online teaching, they might avoid being seen on the screen. This impulse to hide may also be why the patient doesn’t admit to their failure to exercise, quit some “bad” habit, or “comply” with health directives.

In this current Covid time, we must put on face masks to limit the spread of the virus. But many of our other masks have been ripped away. When we went to a work setting we could leave our personal messes behind. It’s harder to “show up” as a professional when a toddler tugs at your arm, a dog patters into the middle of the room while you teach, or the space is shared with a cacophony of everyone’s competing needs.

In this new virtual space educators may share discomfort with students, shifting the power imbalance a little. Maybe this new space offers potential for us all to notice what once was “normal” with all the inadequacies and imperfections of the old normal and then to play with new possibilities.

Perhaps this moment can help make visible the difference between the professional “mask” and thoughtful offerings of expertise gained from listening and watching, as well as from professional training, and we can use our fully present selves to hold space? For we need the sort of space that allows for loving connection and the vulnerability of learning, healing, or demanding justice, to be borne without loss of dignity.

Do you wear a professional mask? Are you curious about how our many masks impact learning, healing and the search for justice? Are you finding ways to connect deeply, even in these strange times? What ways have you found to shift power imbalances that might serve well as we move forward into new versions of normal?

Revised March 2021

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