Tag Archives: Doctoral Colloquium

Not Free Inside, Not Free Outside: School Expulsion And The Problem Of Freedom

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In this blog post:

Yotam Ronen recaps Addyson Frattura’s EDST doctoral colloquium on the link between school expulsion and freedom. Frattura’s work explores how expulsion disproportionately impacts marginalized students, and argues for a vision of freedom rooted in love and liberation, challenging punitive educational systems.

What happens to a student when they are expelled from school? What happens when they are expelled from a classroom? What does the experience of being expelled mean for a student’s sense of freedom?

These are the vital questions that Addyson Frattura grapples with in her work.

Her project examines the relationship between expulsion and freedom and argues that school expulsion exposes the existential problem of freedom.

Looking beyond expulsion as a punitive tool, Frattura differentiates between three forms of expulsion:

  • expulsion within the school
  • expulsion outside the school
  • self-expulsion

While each has distinct characteristics, Frattura recognizes that each effects different students differently, as students with disabilities and racialized students are disproportionately expelled not only from schools, but from other places in society as well.

Freedom, too, is problematized. For Frattura, drawing on Maxine Greene, the human experience is a constant search for self, where individuals confront nothingness and are destined to seek meaning. While often seen as a positive, absolute freedom can be overwhelming and create a sense of anguish, akin to that experienced during school expulsion.

Here, the relationship between expulsion and freedom reveals itself as complex. While they may appear as opposites, they do not behave as such, nor do they carry equal risks.

First, a student being expelled might be told they are free to choose another school, but the reality is they lack the freedom to return to the place from which they were expelled, and they also must still choose a school (and thus are still forced to be part of the same system that rejects them).

Second, expulsion and freedom do not carry equal risks. The risks of extreme expulsion are far more severe than those of extreme freedom, and both are experienced more severely by students with disabilities or racialized students.

Frattura examines this relationship and frames freedom as an “existential and abolitionary problem.” As she writes:

“The relationship between the anguish of freedom and the anguish of expulsion makes freedom appear more distinct. The possiblity of freedom makes school expulsion more severe. Students are confronted with these limits of freedom and school expulsion which are found in the danger of either extreme; complete freedom and complete school expulsion.”

Frattura explores these themes through philosophical and historical analysis and the careful use of metaphor. She analyses the experience of being free through the imagery of pollen, and argues that freedom in this sense is a negative form of being seemingly free. It is negative because it is freedom from control, but it is only seemingly freedom because the student is still required to attend the compulsory school system.

Frattura also delves into the history of school expulsions in the United States, drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ argument on the propaganda of history. She argues, through De Bois, that the U.S. falsifies its history to defend the white race, and that historical truth emerges only when truth is prioritized over this defense. Frattura applies this argument to school expulsions, not to tell a historical narrative, but to illustrate how school expulsions expose the problem of freedom.

Lastly, Frattura presents a promising discussion on positive freedom as a counter narrative to a libertarian sense of freedom (that often underlies discussions of education and expulsion). In her account of positive freedom, freedom is—following James Baldwin and bell hooks—rooted in love and liberation. 

She emphasizes that abolishing punishment must align with an abolitionary ethic of love. To underscore this point, Frattura analyzes Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, focusing on Justine’s punishment and framing punishment itself as the monster in the story.

Frattura’s work offers a compelling critique of punitive systems, revealing how the anguish of expulsion and the complexities of freedom intersect. Her ideas about education rooted in love and liberation offer new questions and discussion about ideas of freedom, punishment, and expulsion in educational research.

In October 2023, EDST began hosting a Doctoral Colloquium. Once a month doctoral students and candidates present their research to EDST students, staff and faculty.
 The next EDST Colloquium is:

Click here for additional information and to RSVP.

See the full doctoral colloquium calendar.

Check out our Doctoral Colloquium page for more blog posts from this series.

 

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Doctoral Colloquium Series, Blog Post series

Cognitive Violence in Pedagogy: A Philosophical Approach— Silas Krabbe, Doctoral Colloquium

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In October 2023, EDST began hosting a Doctoral Colloquium. Once a month doctoral students and candidates present their research to EDST students, staff and faculty.

In this blog post:

Colloquium coordinator, Yotam Ronen, recaps Silas Krabbe’s Colloquium.

Silas Colloquium Banner for Post

What is cognitive violence in education? Is it a necessary part of learning? Can we imagine and work towards education without cognitive violence?

These are the timely and vital questions that Silas Krabbe confronts in his doctoral project. In his dissertation, Krabbe aims to describe and understand the phenomenon of cognitive violence in education, and to offer alternatives to it that are firmly situated in the intellectual traditions of those communities who are most affected by violence in education and elsewhere. Using a multi-centric and iterative approach, Krabbe engages with political black theology, phenomenological accounts of violence, encounter in pedagogical theory, communal epistemic violence in literatures on colonialism, and non-violence in political education.

Krabbe’s first claim is that we often associate education as the cure for violence, yet education is itself often violent. Therefore, expecting more education to lead to less violence is a futile exercise. Here, a consideration of violence in education is especially problematic because both violence and education are seen as acts of change: the person changes when they learn, and violence is the experience of harm (change in felt experience) occasioned by one person on another.

The crux of the matter here is that the language we use to describe violence is insufficient in approaching the phenomenon of violence. This is a significant gap that cannot be easily accounted for. Instead of attempting to bridge this gap, Krabbe offers a multi-centric approach that considers the possibility of a multitude of understandings and ideas, and that approaches the topic of cognitive violence through constant iteration as an explicit resistance to logics of linearity.

This approach lends itself especially well to the problem of naming violence. The act of naming requires stretching our imagination towards a phenomenon that exists outside our purview, and in that becomes a problem of theology. Instead of rehashing the common arguments of violence as the right of the sovereign, who both enacts violence and defines it, black theology interrogates the question of violence from multiple directions through discourses on relations to god, the cosmos, and the self. By iteratively observing violence through these multiple discourses, Krabbe aims to identify the moment where the language of violence breaks down.

observation clipart

These moments of breakage can reveal both ontological assumptions that are at the basis of our definitions, and account for the significance and mechanisms through which naming happens. Violence is a singular phenomenon that appears in a flow of phenomena. Its naming is a moment of distortion that must be accounted for because it requires making the phenomenon dead enough for it to be observed.

This process creates a maximal and minimal definition of violence, both problematic for a serious consideration of violence in education. These two definitions are insufficient for an understanding of violence, because they don’t account for the fact that we are changing and are a part of a world that changes constantly. Phenomena are with us and part of us, they move with us and through us, and thus require us to be able to understand them as such.

After critiquing our modes of seeing, defining, and isolating violence as a phenomenon, Krabbe moves to thinking of violence in the pedagogical encounter. He argues that there is asymmetry in pedagogical relations, but that such asymmetry is not inherently violent. It can be, and indeed tends to move towards violence, but does not have to.

Krabbe works through these interrogations of violence to question and understand the phenomenon of cognitive violence and to offer paths towards a less violent, or perhaps non-violent political education. Here violence as a problem of change will meet Krabbe’s tentative claim: that education, learning, and world building can occur without violence. For Krabbe, a multi-centric approach to worlding will address the concern that the imagination of possibilities can take on a colonial framework. Instead, Krabbe will offer pedagogical alternatives that center the role of the educator as one that warns against harm, but that does not predetermine the path forward.

 

Interested in more from EDST’s Doctoral Colloquium Series? 

Check out our Doctoral Colloquium page for more.

PhD candidate, Yeonjoo Kim, will present on the topic of “Exploring learning in leaving and career-transitions: A multiple-case study of Korean millennials voluntarily quitting workplaces.”

Thursday, March 7, 2024, 12-1:30pm in PCN 2012.

 

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