As we reflect on the past semester with our interdisciplinary Resist Violence Community of Practice at Dawson, we are witnessing a global uprising that has left many of us – inside and outside education – speechless and unsure about how to engage in dialogues around race, police brutality and injustice. Although we knew this pedagogy was timely, it is difficult to have imagined to what degree. Our community grew this term to include four new faculty members from Social Science, Creative and Applied Arts, and General Education, who, like us, were immediately struck by the ways in which what we were exploring in the CoP was relevant to our everyday lives, and our teaching practices.

During this term, Resist Violence alumni have also reached out, asking for advice about how they can find ways to express their solidarity, anger and pain about what is going on in the world. Our reply has been unwavering: creatively do what you can to make the changes you seek seem possible to others and always try to focus on adding to the constructive voices raised against injustice. While we zoomed our thoughts about such endeavours, this contact with students further motivated us to keep going.

As a teacher, I have had many students come to me and say, “OK, I get it, I’ve learned about these histories of injustice; but now what can I do about it?” Resist Violence asks students this very same question as a part of the curriculum; it is built into the pedagogy. It is difficult to imagine a more valuable and important pedagogical intervention in a student’s cegep career, at a time when students are learning about who they are and how they want to be.

Mark Beauchamp

We began this first community of practice with Allison Loader (3D Animation), Anick Legault (Psychology), Mark Beauchamp (History) and Susan Elmslie (English) with much excitement but also anxiety about how this collaborative process would unfold. We met frequently over the semester, over 10 times as a full group, reflecting on key readings, sharing classroom experiences, exploring the pedagogy, and, thanks to Sue, reading quite a lot of wonderfully pertinent poetry, while also collaborating in smaller groups and exchanging on the Resist Violence online forum. Over the last few weeks, we have all been looking back on our experience within this community of practice and have come to one common conclusion: we will continue to need one another. Our collaborations are only just beginning.

Starting Out: Thinking about the Challenges

While no one explicitly asked the question, “Why take the risk?”, we began this process by revealing some of the difficult moments we have all encountered in the classroom while addressing the issue of violence. Anick’s experience spoke to us all.

…I used a story that was beyond eliciting empathy and that was simply too much violence to deal with. It had become an example of voyeurism and my students and I were inadequately equipped to deal with the fallouts of the video…. I froze from that moment on and could or would no longer allow myself to take a risk with conflictual topics of discussion with my students. I felt that I had failed and did not know where to find support for change and personal and professional growth.

Anick Legault

Silences, always difficult to interpret and difficult to handle, are moments teachers typically fear. Why are they suddenly so silent? Are they overwhelmed? Have I made them feel even more powerless about the world today or reinforced their cynicism about human nature? Have I simply provoked their anger at those responsible, or even worse, the groups the perpetrators supposedly represent? And, what about those students who have been victims of violence, have I triggered past traumas and done more harm to them?

Sue and Pat both have never forgotten experiences in the semester following the shooting at the college in 2006. Sue remembers the first day back in the classroom, wondering whether she should teach a literary text that featured gun violence. She later wrote a poem, “Trigger Warning,” about the moment:

The next story we were
scheduled to read was
“The Things They Carried.”
And when I stood before them and opened
my mouth I gave what was the first
trigger warning, before I knew
what such a thing was.
The story had guns and violence in it,
and I didn’t know if they’d want
to read it now. Should we read it?
Or should we strike it?
No answer.
I asked again. Silence.

For Pat, it came later that semester in a course that focused on the theme of war, when she was exploring psychological explanations for the human capacity to take the lives of others. From the first day and even after the shooting, this group of students had always seemed particularly engaged with the material, but this day they just sat there, looking like “deer in the headlights.” Pat remembers thinking, “How could I have been so clueless?” and decided to go and visit one of the trauma counsellors on campus. His advice has stayed with her over the years, providing her with both motivation and reassurance. Yes, your students may be triggered by the material you are presenting, but potential triggers are everywhere, and central for healing is an intellectual understanding of what they have been through. Sue reflects that our discussions over the semester have now confirmed her intuition “that the answer is not to avoid representations of violence or to avoid talking about violence (because, as we learned at Dawson, violence can find us anyway), but rather to confront, to contextualize, and to teach critical thinking about violence. Only by critically reframing representations of violence can we expose and dismantle the structures that support it.”

But, while developing critical thinking is a central goal of this pedagogy, we are also trying to reach students emotionally, or more specifically, provoke their sense of empathy and compassion, and then tap into their creativity to find ways, as Mark put it, to transfer emotional responses into moral and political ones.

In Mid-Stream: Exploring Classroom Dynamics

To explore the Resist Violence pedagogy, we spent much time reflecting on how to examine provocative topics constructively, in ways that opened up dialogue and personal reflection, rather than leading to silence, anger, and potentially a more polarized classroom. Supported by Anick’s understanding of social psychological research on cognitive dissonance and forms of psychological resistance, we discussed why such responses are common when people are confronted by ideas or information that challenge their own perspective. With Sue’s insights, we examined the power of language and reflected on how our choices of language can also trigger confrontations and shut down thinking; provocative terms, like “privilege”, “white supremacy”, and “rape culture,” can be brought into a discussion far too early and perhaps ultimately are not worth it as deep explorations of structural and cultural forms of violence can be done without them. Additionally, a poorly-prepared “let’s talk about this recent example of violence” approach can quickly get out of hand: references to certain comments being “racist” or “sexist” can ensue, leaving teachers trying to manage possibly passionate exchanges, but ones where students with strong ideas are not necessarily listening to each other and many others feel silenced and uncomfortable. These are also moments where teachers legitimately worry about the potential impact on students from socially marginalized groups. Alison expressed it well:

I think about them silent, sinking into their seats, perhaps hoping to disappear, worried (like me) that something awful or insensitive might be said, that they will be expected to weigh in, and that they might offend someone themselves.

Alison Loader

We discussed ways to frame violence to promote psychological safety for all, such as by providing a wider historical and cultural perspective, whether in terms of “pulling apart” the language to reveal how the meaning of words change in time, place and culture, or by looking at the deep historical roots of systems that continue to privilege some at the expense of others. We explored the value of drawing out interconnections between different forms of violence, shifting from the personal to safer academic discussions, and vice-versa, and using art and storytelling to bring in the element of surprise so that students’ psychological defenses are not already in place filtering out material that is too threatening. While we explore the harm inflicted by structural and cultural forms of violence in a Resist Violence classroom, we never assume who is privileged in our classroom and recognize that those most resistant to social justice issues, typically white, heterosexual young men, are often themselves feeling overwhelmed by their insecurities, shaped by such experiences as early abuse, relentless bullying, or family poverty, and buttressed by harmful expectations about masculinity. Essentially, we asked the CoP participants to wonder whether, as Alison phrased it, “I (would) become a more effective pedagogue if I made a greater effort to better understand why some students resist me?”

This was bringing everyone to what is perhaps most interesting, but also provocative, about the Resist Violence pedagogy, specifically its foundation in the theory and practice of nonviolence. Nonviolent theorists call for us to maintain a distinction between an individual and their actions or ideas, acknowledge the possibility for all of us to change profoundly, and inspire us to see ourselves in the “other”. In other words, to look for the “we” rather than the “us” and “them”.

As educators, this presents a real challenge: it asks us, for example, to think about how we can teach about rape culture, with the expectation that in our classroom we will have students who have been victims of sexual assault and others who have committed a sexual assault and perhaps are just becoming aware of it. It asks us to consider equally the well-being of all our students, seeking to expand their knowledge about the problem of violence, better understand their own personal experiences, as survivor, perpetrator, or silent bystander, for example , and at the same time, deepen their understanding of those with very different experiences. It requires us to never ignore the nuances – the extent, for example, that the categories of aggressor, victim and bystander, are never fixed, and may apply to each of us at different moments in our lives. And, as a nonviolent pedagogy, its impact is not always immediately visible as its methods are often subtle, seeking to gently persuade people to change, instead of openly calling them out and expecting public expressions of the desired change of heart. It is, as Mark so beautifully described, a call for us to address the realities of violence “with fierce honesty,” meeting “students where they are, considering their learning process (including all the discomforts along the way) with love and care at every step.”

The idea of “finding the ‘we’,” or keeping alive in all situations our shared common humanity, proved to be more contentious than we had anticipated. A single excerpt from a chapter from Philosopher Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans, one of the readings we explored during the CoP, proved particularly troublesome to both Mark and Alison. Neiman describes an encounter with Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper in Mississippi, while she is in residence at the University of Mississippi’s Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. Disturbed at Cooper’s refusal to guide a white student seeking advice on countering the rise of Trump, she fumes afterward, when Cooper says to her “You keep saying “we”, but Trump is not my problem. He’s a white people’s problem. There’s no “we” between us” (2019: 148). For Neiman, the “we” though was obvious. She and Brittney Cooper were both women, writers, professors, Americans, possibly both mothers, and “certainly both human beings who could be blown to bits if an unstable commander in chief decides to play with nuclear codes” (148).

As a group, we revisited this encounter several times over the semester. Mark’s criticism, rooted in his willingness to reflect on his past mistakes and recognize his privileges – expressions of vulnerability that he courageously brings into his teaching, was the obvious lack of a real “we” in hierarchical and abusive relationships. He prefers the idea of “allying,” where those in more powerful positions need to be engaged in the “relentless” and “continual” work of “earning trust” from those long oppressed. A permanent or identity-based “we” that he saw in Neiman’s suggestion that she and Brittney shared much in common seemed to ignore their fundamental differences (although it should be noted that Neiman, a Jewish woman living, working, and raising her children in Germany, has first-hand experience with being a potentially dangerous outsider). At best, he could see those positioned differently within unequal systems as potential collaborators while confronting a shared problem, but these collaborations remain inherently unstable.

As for Alison, it was only recently that we learned the depth of her soul-searching. In her final reflection on her experiences over the semester, she expressed how she had found it odd “to be asked about “finding the ‘we’ in a classroom”, when “we” was the one pronoun she asked students to avoid:

“We” makes me suspicious…. When I hear or see that word, I worry about the elision of multiple points of view, the oversimplification of an argument…. But really my distrust stems from an article called “The Politics of We” by Marianna Torgovnick…. “the ‘we’ as a rhetorical device either ignores or demonizes individuals or groups it excludes,” [while]“‘repressive politics of inclusion’ obliges members to deny parts of themselves” (48).

Alison Loader

This “we” though is really the divisive “us”, far from the nonviolence ideal of a shared humanity. But as Alison’s explorations went on, she continued to think more about being an outsider, something she experiences in multiple forms, as a person of colour, a woman in a male-dominated field, and a part-time contract academic in a field dominated by full-timers linked with industry. She wondered if she had “too readily” self-identified “as an outsider,” noting that the binary of insider/outsider swept “away the many nuances of intersectional power dynamics, reinforces divisions and is perhaps not wholly accurate.” She concludes:

Still, we cannot assume that any “we” pre-exists, that “we” are in agreement and working to the same end, and that a “we” that will not recognize internal differences can or should be protected. Yet collective action is essential to effect lasting change. Restorative justice demonstrates that to build a “we” from disparate parts is a challenging, painful, courageous, and perhaps unending process.

Alison Loader

This captures beautifully the nonviolent theorists view of the “we”; although our common humanity is an existing reality, when broken by hatred, fear, prejudice, indifference, and physical acts of violence, it remains unrealized. But, for those committed to nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition, there is a deep faith in the possibility of transformative change, that lasting relationships of real trust and respect can develop between oppressors, their complicit but silent bystanders, and victims. We explored examples of this in the CoP, as we would in a Resist Violence classroom, juxtaposing examples of human cruelty with our very real capacity for peacebuilding and reconciliation. We watched a video of a major war criminal returning to his village in Sierra Leone to apologize and atone for his crimes and discussed a short article “Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering,” by psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, that spoke about individual Israelis and Palestinians searching for “the moral third”: a position where both sides acknowledge the harms they have committed and the suffering of the other, while fully recognizing the power inequalities at play.

Coming to an End: Finding Agency

A collective recognition that we all can do harm (or as Sue put it so well, “We are all a work in progress”) and are likely in some way implicated in the interlocking systems of exploitation that exist in our world creates a shared responsibility to work for social change. Our pedagogy strives to create this awareness, not by encouraging a sense of individual shame or collective guilt, but rather by building a collective sense of responsibility and inspiring a new habit of resistance. The use of the word “habit” is significant, as it links to the latest research in prejudice studies. Patricia Devine, the psychologist who thirty years ago first defended the idea that people could be unconscious racists, is calling for a new direction in this field. Skeptical of the significance of interventions that seek to directly change implicit, or unintentional biases as she refers to them now, she is calling for us to think of them as an unwanted habit to be broken through a combination of motivation, awareness and effort (Forscher, et al. 2017: 133). We think this offers further insights into the power of the Resist Violence pedagogy. As students’ awareness of the suffering inflicted by violence in its many forms increases, they are also encouraged to pay attention to the violence that shapes their lives, reflect on the possibility of change, and actively begin to find creative ways to resist violence; they are potentially developing an everyday habit of resistance.

“Far from being passive, the nonviolent pedagogue understands the power of acknowledging felt emotions, intellectual processes, and the necessity for establishing a safe place in the classroom for the sharing of conflictual discussions. A nonviolent pedagogue is courageous, sensitive, empathetic and honest.”

Anick Legault

The Resist Violence project encourages students to use artistic forms of resistance, and embeds art and storytelling into the classroom to develop critical thinking and foster empathy and compassion, but Kim, Alison and Sue, all teachers in creative fields, have also recognized the capacity of art to build an empowering sense of community – or what we call the “we.” Each shared stories illustrating how the critique of art and literature can bring a class together; the necessity of finding common ground in the analysis and creation of creative work puts everyone, including the teacher, in a position of shared vulnerability. Engaging in a process like writing poetry, making a short video or simply looking at art that is “courageous, sensitive, empathetic and honest”, to paraphrase Anick, can cultivate a space where similar principles are welcome, and in many cases practiced. When a collective effort is made to understand an artistic piece, many can become involved, share their feelings, understand what it was that affected them so much or so little. The work can be used as an entry point for examining the realities that inform terms such as “privilege” or “white supremacy” and create opportunities for constructive discussion. This can include historical context, information about the artist, and reasons why it is so provocative. But more importantly, it can help a student understand themselves, their own (mis)understanding of a history, the theme or people, while silently witnessing some street art (or film, painting, poem, etc.), hearing others talk about how the work resonates with them, or reading about the work.

Using stories and art in the classroom offers spaces for silent contemplation and personal growth without public exposure, while engaging in the creative process itself fosters a shared vulnerability among students; when students have gained insights into how social change happens, creative work that addresses social issues that matter to them goes even further in offering the empowering sense of making a difference. Suddenly a student who felt anger or powerless about a certain issue is compelled to make work that will get people to think about it in a different way, or in some cases act towards a shared goal. There is strength in creating that “thing”, and even more in learning how to express one’s truth in a space where others are doing the same. By doing that with students, we all explore our agency, creativity, vision and vulnerability as a team, admitting when things are not where we might want them to be.

We are leaving our newest CoP members with many challenges, but the central one will likely be to find ways to engage students and disciplines creatively in the work of resisting violence. Sue intends to inspire her students to use poetry to resist violence and will be developing resource materials to help teachers in other departments use this powerful medium to expand their students’ understanding, activate their empathy and engage them in artistic activism. Alison will be integrating the idea of resistance more deeply into her course content and in the 3D Animation Department’s frameworks for student work. Mark already finds ways to motivate his students intellectually to participate in activism but will be striving to find new ways to reach them emotionally and creatively. During this CoP, Anick unexpectedly realized how she was working to resist violence in important ways through her psychology classes and will now do this much more deliberately. She will also expand the resource materials of Resist Violence by having her students create videos/mini-lectures that explore the psychological processes at play when people interact with violence and nonviolence. As we mentioned, our collaborations have only just begun.

We end with a few final comments from our CoP members.

Most importantly, I have learned—and I didn’t know this before—that resisting violence doesn’t just mean being peaceful / anti-violence; it means doing anti-violence. It means instead taking positive nonviolent and possible creative action against violence to counter it with positive resistance…. Rather, what is required to resist violence is an active sort of counterpoint to violence, to work to change the structures that support violence. And there is an appealing sense of agency in that.

Susan Elmslie

Still, the only “we’s” that attract me (or that I consider possible) are polyvocal, self-making, transformative and transforming arrangements of diverse actors that respect, listen, challenge and learn from one another. So, the we’s without quotation marks that I use in this final paragraph is the We built by the Resist-Violence Community of Practice—a We that I intend to continue cherishing, nurturing, and expanding.

Alison Loader