Conclusions: Rethinking School Violence: Implications for Theory, Policy and Practice

Abstract

Each of the authors in this book has highlighted the complexities involved in the manifestation of school violence in its multiple contexts. Integral and foundational to each of the chapters has been the importance of reconceptualising school violence through the lens of socio-cultural, political and historical discourses that impact on the ways in which violence is constructed, understood and situated. As discussed in the introduction to this book, to date, understandings of and approaches to school violence have continued to be largely dominated by psychological discourses that focus on individual pathologies, rather than in complex relations of power that underpin the interplay between individual identities, social, cultural and environmental factors. This has limited understandings of and approaches to dealing with school violence. Each of the chapters also highlights the ways in which violence is often normalised in young people’s lives through the hegemonic socio-cultural and political practices that operate in different cultural contexts. What has been argued in this book is that the ‘everydayness’ of school violence in many young people’s schooling experiences, and lives more generally, stemming from broad socio-cultural, political and historical discourses, is missing from many analyses of school violence, rendering much of this behaviour as invisible and/or unremarkable in the eyes of many students, teachers and educational researchers.