Extracting Violence from the English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Informed by research and discourse from the contemporary movement for police/prison abolition, scholar Erin Geary makes the case for nonviolent schools, an ask that seems obvious, but, in many ways, is foreign and controversial amongst educators and administrators in America. Geary situates her study within the lived context of her own English Language Arts classroom and asks herself how she can provide a physical/emotional space conducive to learning that refuses to banish and exclude for the sake of “order.” In Geary’s nonviolent classroom, the flow of power is examined and disturbed, students’ needs are met, and conflict is mended rather than punished. Geary provides concrete techniques, resources, and ready-made lesson plans which cut-at-the-root of subtle, stubborn school violence and trouble the assumption that some students will always be “the bad kids.”