De Lissovoy, N. (2011). Education and violation: Conceptualizing power, domination, and agency in the hidden curriculum. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(4), 463-484. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2011.618831

Power and Violation

De Lissovoy (2011) uses the ideas of Fanon, Du Bois, and Marx to look at how power and violation are tools used within the education system. Power ceaselessly raises up and tears down, alternately developing economies, identities, and social meanings and then laying them low through abandonment or active destruction (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 464) For De Lissovoy (2011) violation is more than just violence, it “acts against what has already been constituted, what already exists as whole… its aim is not pure destruction or negation, but rather the moment of prolific assault, invasion, and fragmentation” (p. 465). Violation breaks systems that are already in place, working to create dichotomies that didn’t exist before, or to reinforce those dichotomies through continued violation. The world we live in today is marked by historical violations, creating a system of domination that others those people of colour, and creates spaces of privilege for those who are dominating. Education and curriculum are the site for this trauma for students: the way curriculum is organized, standardized assessments, as well as the process of schooling as a method of qualification, create a system that ensures that education is traumatic, making it a space that is ripe for “demoralization, marginalization, and punishment” (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 465). According to De Lissovoy (2011), violation “marks the obscene point at which an arbitrary and particular offense against human being is made ordinary, systematic, and structural. But while it names this systematicity, the term also evokes the material hurt that is always the effect and aim of historical processes of oppression” (p. 469). We have to critique places that allow power and violation to occur, such as education, but at the same time we can’t allow ourselves to fall into the trap of believing we don’t have the agency to change the world around us, lest we continue to perpetuate systems of power and violation.

Engagements with Fanon

In working with Fanon and his work on racism and the division of colonial society, De Lissovoy (2011) proposes that “in producing an account of the invasions and assaults experienced by those who have been oppressed, we should not only count but recount, not only calculate but confront, in the service of an emancipatory analysis that in understanding history does not seek to separate itself from the outrage and agony that constitute its basic texture” (p. 469). Violation works to exacerbate this process of institutionalized power against Black people, especially in the process of how we “name, know, and organize student identities” (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 480) in our education systems. It is important to not sink into despair that these colonial and neo-colonial systems will continue to be perpetuated indefinitely; De Lissovoy (2011) gives us hope by reminding us that our resilience and agency will continually re-emerge in the face of violation and power, and the oppressed will continue to rise to challenge and renegotiate these systems (p. 476).

Implications for Education

The hidden curriculum helps reinforce the system of domination and violation through the preservation of social structures and systems in order to privilege some but not others, and by normalizing this violation as well. The process of labelling students and putting them into categories “is itself a kind of distorted instruction and knowledge production, in which students are ‘taught’ into the limits of the identities and aspirations that school and society make available to them” ( De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 470). Labelling is a legitimization of violence, by creating a system of privilege and othering based on behaviours and ability. Some students may be able to succeed because being labelled as a “problem” or as “poor” students may actually work to give them resources that they otherwise would not have had access to, but the benefits that may only work to help some of these students don’t make up for the overarching violation that the hidden curriculum brings. De Lissovoy (2011) points out that “just as the individual achievement of working-class students does not by itself disprove the general fact of educational stratification in favor of the affluent, so too the local benefits to students of labels for academic or behavioral deviance do not negate the their broader dominative and pathologizing force” (p. 471). This violation of students is continually reproduced, so much so that to teach in an educational system without labelling students would be considered a deficit in some way. In this way the power of labelling our students becomes “[addictive] and [excessive], seeking not only to know and name students under the proper headings and classifications, but at the same time to assault and injure them in the very process of this construction” (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 472-473). It is an intentional violation, an intentional perversion of power and domination. The students we teach are violated by the codes we label them as, and by the classifications and castes that we ascribe to them.

Moving Forward

There is hope for the future. As we continue to neatly box students into labelled packages, they continue to work in ways that maximise their own use out of the educational system and the intervention and aid it can provide, and “for this reason, power as violation should be seen as a process of injury rather than destruction, since the beings that it targets are never finally defeated” (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 475). Our students are resilient agents in their own lives, and as De Lissovoy (2011) notes, when looking at our students through the lens of Fanon’s work, we shouldn’t look at them as just products of the system they’re in, “rather, students’ selves are dynamically produced within the complex (mine)field of power and resistance to it” (p. 476). Students are able to erupt the power of the hidden curriculum by taking their classification into their own hands and subverting the expectations placed on them because of their label, as well as by utilizing the tools they have because of their label to break through these barriers. We shouldn’t just look at only these moments of rupture however, but also in the “in the privileged space of the classroom, in which students overtly challenge dominant understandings and interpretations, we should also learn to see a radical agency in the other worlds that students are already at work producing on their own terms” (De Lissovoy, 2011, p. 479). The radical agency that students have, and that can be fostered in our classrooms, can then lead to the radical change our students want to see in the world, especially when it comes to decoloniality, and dismantling the systems of oppression that permeate our world.

Reference

De Lissovoy, N. (2011). Education and violation: Conceptualizing power, domination, and agency in the hidden curriculum. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(4), 463-484. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2011.618831