Safe and Peaceful Schools

Addressing Conflict and Eliminating Violence

John M. Winslade, Michael Williams

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781452269689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation et orientation

Zero tolerance provides zero learning

We know that bullying and violence severely impact children’s ability to learn. If you are serious about creating a safe school climate, this book will show you how. Written by counseling experts, this volume’s variety of research-based techniques help educators and students develop conflict resolution skills that reduce the need for disciplinary action. Each chapter addresses a mode of practice for constructing peaceful interactions, including:

• Peer mediation
• Narrative counseling
• Circle conversations
• Undercover anti-bullying teams
• “Facing up to violence” groups
• Restorative conferences

1

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Understanding Conflict in Schools

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

Conflict Is Normal

Violence Is a Problem

Zero Tolerance Does Not Work

A Comprehensive Approach

What Is Violence?

Antecedents to Violence

Preparation for Democracy

Summary

CONFLICT IS NORMAL

Conflict is ordinary. That is the first thing that needs to be acknowledged. Even in the most homogeneous of schools, differences among students and teachers are always so nuanced that conflict is inevitable. In the pursuit of various agendas, people always bump into other people’s agendas.

Schools are a microcosm of the rest of society. Gather together a group of adults and ask them whether they have ever experienced conflict, and you will meet with laughter. Of course they have. Everyone has. As generalizations go, this is a safe one to make.

Conflict is inevitable. It results from the interplay of differences between people. Since people differ in many ways, in their cultural backgrounds and assumptions, their personal styles, their worldviews and perspectives, and their hopes and aspirations, there will frequently be places where they rub against each other. This is as true in school communities as in other places in the social world. Schools do not need to aim for an environment in which conflict is never manifest, so much as an environment in which conflict is handled and managed effectively, so that differences are respected, competing cultural perspectives are valued, and individual students and teachers are heard and included in the conversation—all so that educational activity can proceed.

On the other hand, ask people what it is like to experience conflict, and you will hear how often conflict does not go well. People get hurt by it. It is often managed poorly. Constructive ways of moving forward are frequently not found. Rifts occur and pain is produced. Much energy is expended thinking about conflict, which could be harnessed for other purposes. Sometimes conflict generates violence, and the hurt is magnified tenfold.

Actually, handling conflict constructively is challenging. We learn how to do it in our families and schools often haphazardly. There is seldom a systematic curriculum for learning to get on with others and resolve differences. Students, therefore, do not always learn how to handle conflict. They are sometimes lectured and advised to do it better but often without being shown or given the chance to practice the specific skills of doing so.

In this book, we aim to offer a range of strategies that together amount to a comprehensive program for addressing various types of conflict in a school community. It is not sufficient to introduce a single intervention, such as a peer mediation program, and expect it to deal with everything. In the application of these strategies, we hope that both students and teachers can learn to coexist peacefully and that they can, therefore, get on with the job of teaching and learning.

From time to time, it is inevitable that there should be tension and sometimes conflict among educators, between schools and their communities, between individual students and among groups of students, between students and teachers, and between administrators and teachers. What is needed is an explicit recognition that this is all normal and that the school is prepared to handle it. Handling it involves establishing procedures for people to assert different perspectives; influence each other; listen; and reach resolutions that incorporate multiple perspectives, rather than imposing singular ones. Effective leadership does not require the ability to always know what the best decisions are, so much as attention to the design of processes for constructively handling differences and, sometimes, outbreaks of conflict.

VIOLENCE IS A PROBLEM

If conflict needs to be normalized and learning how to address it made into a priority, that does not mean that we should accept the inevitability of violence. Violence is a problem in schools.

We do not need a library full of rocket science to appreciate that children who are afraid of being hurt, or are upset and angry, are in no state of mind to learn things. Effective learning takes place in a context of emotional calmness and enjoyment, not one dominated by anxiety, anger, or fear. Nel Noddings (2002) is a leading educational thinker who has stated it clearly:

Through more than five decades of teaching and mothering, I have noticed also that children (and adults too) learn best when they are happy. (p. 2)

Noddings (2002) suggests that it is not just the occurrence of violence but also the threat of it, the fear of it, or the witnessing of it happening to others that affects the ability to learn. Just how bad a problem violence in schools is was put into perspective by a review released by United States Attorney General Eric Holder in October 2009. Announcing the publication of this review in Chicago, where concern about youth violence has become concentrated, Holder said,

The Department of Justice is releasing a new study today that measures the effects of youth violence in America, and the results are staggering. More than 60 percent of the children surveyed were exposed to violence in the past year, either directly or indirectly. Nearly half of children and adolescents were assaulted at least once, and more than one in ten were injured as a result. Nearly one-quarter were the victim of a robbery, vandalism or theft, and one in sixteen were victimized sexually. Those numbers are astonishing, and they are unacceptable. We simply cannot stand for an epidemic of violence that robs our youth of their childhood and perpetuates a cycle in which today’s victims become tomorrow’s criminals. (n.p.)

The National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (Slowikowski, 2009) found that 46.3% of children had been assaulted at least once in the previous year, including 14.9% who were assaulted with a weapon. Of these, 10% were injured in the assault. Meanwhile, 6.1% were victims of sexual violation, 9.8% had witnessed family violence, 13% were victims of bullying within the last year, and 21.6% during their lifetimes. Other data (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2007) suggest a higher figure for victims of bullying between the ages of 12 and 18: 32% in the previous year, of whom 4% were subject to electronic bullying (via the Internet, or text messaging).

To keep these figures in perspective, the majority of children are still not directly exposed to violence, nor does the evidence support a growing sense of alarm about a worsening situation. The American Psychological Association (APA) Zero Tolerance Task Force (2008) reported that

the evidence does not support an assumption that violence in schools is out of control. Serious and deadly violence remain a relatively small proportion of school disruptions, and the data have consistently indicated that school violence and disruption have remained stable, or even decreased somewhat, since approximately 1985. (p. 855)

For those who are exposed to violence, however, the data still point to the potential seriousness of the problem of violence in the lives of children. We say “potential” seriousness out of respect for the many young people who are resilient in the face of violence. They do not accept violence as normal or as an ordinary aspect of life. It is not automatic for exposure to violence to lead to psychological harm, but there is a clear enough risk that the traumatic effects of violence on children have to be taken seriously.

For those growing up in poverty, the situation is of heightened concern. A recent study (Kracke & Hahn, 2008) noted that 43% of low-income African American children had witnessed a murder and 56% had witnessed a stabbing, while comparable figures for upper-middle-class youth were 1% and 9%, respectively. A moment’s thought suggests that for these children, learning and performance on tests are going to be affected and that simplistic measures to “close the gaps” in learning outcomes are not going to succeed without addressing the effects of violence.

We could go a lot further in detailing the problems of violence, but that is not the purpose of this book. Spreading alarm about problems by citing statistics does not in itself change anything. It may indeed whip up fear or anger and unleash responses that are less than effective. It is more important to offer a range of practical ideas that might help address the problem. That is the aim of this book.

ZERO TOLERANCE DOES NOT WORK

First, however, let us note some common solutions that have been tried. On principle, if current solutions are not working as we would wish, we should try something different. Many school leaders and administrators have moved to get tough and take strong action against violence. Since the 1990s, a wave of schools and school districts have instituted “zero tolerance” policies for violent behavior. Originally devised for the enforcement of laws against drug trafficking, the concept of zero tolerance was adapted for use against violent behavior, especially after some high-profile school shooting incidents in the 1990s. While there is considerable variation in how such policies are interpreted, these policies usually mandate

the application of predetermined consequences, most often severe and punitive in nature, that are intended to be applied regardless of the seriousness of behavior, mitigating circumstances, or situational context. (APA Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008, p. 852)

Most often, the predetermined consequences involve removal of the offender from the school, on the assumption that the relational climate in the school for other students will be improved and that future offenders will be deterred. The perpetrators of violent behavior are identified and zero tolerance is extended to these persons, rather than to violent behaviors. They are suspended or expelled from school. The implication is that violent practices are natural features of the personhood of some individuals and that the school community should not extend any tolerance to those individuals. We would call this an action based on an essentialist assumption. It assumes that violence is part of the “essence” of the person-hood of the perpetrator of violence. The result often has been that those who practice violence are themselves subjected to the symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) of the school authorities and are thrown out of school.

There is one big problem with this approach: It does not work. That is, it does not work if we take as our goal the reduction of violence in schools and increasing a sense of safety for students. The American Psychological Association–commissioned task force, noted above, was formed to investigate the effects of zero tolerance policies in schools. The report by this task force (2008) argued strongly against the effectiveness and value of zero tolerance policies in schools. They concluded bluntly, “Zero tolerance has not been shown to improve school climate or school safety” (p. 860). The evidence “consistently flies in the face of … [the] beliefs” (p. 860) that removing disruptive students from school will improve the school experience for others. Instead, zero tolerance is actually shown to effectively increase disruptive behavior and dropout rates and to lead to higher rates of misbehavior among those who are suspended. Schools with higher rates of suspension also do not show higher rates of academic performance, even when socioeconomic differences are taken into account.

Zero tolerance approaches may satisfy the righteous urge to act decisively and punitively, but they do not appear to teach young people to resolve conflict or to eschew violence. One example of the ridiculous responses to which a zero tolerance policy can lead occurred in an Arizona elementary school. A 6-year-old boy one day brought a toy gun to school and pointed it at another child and talked about killing him. Rigid adherence to a zero tolerance policy meant that this boy was escorted off the school property and taken away in a police car! The official response was way over the top of what would be indicated by discretion and wisdom.

Zero tolerance policies do not even succeed at scaring young people into behaving more prosocially. As the APA report suggests, young people often do things that violate other people on the basis of immaturity or as a result of not yet having learned to think through particular consequences. To consign them to the prison pipeline (which is often what happens when students are sent off to juvenile detention) ignores the developmental dimension that should always be considered when young people offend.

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH

What is needed is a fresh approach. While no approach can provide all the answers, in this book we are seeking to offer a fresh perspective. It is based on a particular philosophy of narrative practice, which we shall outline in more detail in Chapter 2. There have been publications that have promised much in the way of reduction of violence on the basis of a single intervention. Zero tolerance policies are often used like this, for example. They may even prove to be more effective if used in combination with a range of other approaches but, on current evidence, they are less than effective on their own. Some have advocated peer mediation programs and we have seen examples of such programs doing wonderful work but they cannot address all problems of violence on their own. In some parts of the world such as New Zealand, where both authors of this book have worked as school counselors, such counselors were originally introduced into schools expressly to reduce “juvenile delinquency” (Besley, 2002). But counseling on its own makes little impact on the overall pattern of school violence. In other instances, programs to reduce bullying have been instituted. But not all violence fits within the standard definition of bullying.

What is needed for a school to become serious about creating a climate that is free of violence and where conflict is handled constructively is to use a comprehensive range of approaches on the basis of thoughtful decision making about what is most appropriate in a particular situation. There is no magic silver bullet that will transform a school climate with one intervention. Zero tolerance is no silver bullet. Neither is peer mediation. Neither is the teaching of relationship skills. We advocate having a range of approaches, from which the most appropriate response needs to be selected for each situation.

Sometimes what is needed may be mediation, sometimes counseling. On other occasions, a restorative conference or mini-conference may be called for, and on others, referral to a “facing up to violence” group. We shall introduce a range of these practices here and advocate for a comprehensive package approach. We shall also include targeted classroom guidance lessons aimed at reducing interactions that lead to violence. In addition, we shall outline an approach to instances of bullying that is proving very effective in circumstances where it has been tried. It is called the undercover anti-bullying team.

We are conscious of especially addressing school administrators, on the one hand, and school counselors and school psychologists on the other. Both groups need to work together for these approaches to work. School counselors and psychologists bring the professional expertise for these approaches to be carried out, and school leaders and administrators need to be involved in the decisio...