Ethnography of School Violence: A Cultural Perspective

Abstract

School education is largely universalised in Nepal, but schools are not yet free from different challenges like violence. This study aimed to understand how school violence is experienced, how it affects the school life and teaching learning, and how Nepali public schools respond to such violence. This study revealed that the aim of achieving quality and equity in education cannot be realised without addressing the violence in school. Further, it emphasised that school violence cannot be effectively understood and prevented unless realising the intricacies and complexities of violent practices rooted in school’s culture. Using a new methodological approach – the ethnography of school violence, this study revealed that the adolescent students in the study schools are more or less exposed to direct form of violence such as corporal punishment, discrimination, bullying, and different forms of harassments. Majority of the students also experienced some forms of structural violence such as making public school suitable for economically poor students, not addressing the issues such as overcrowded classrooms, poor physical infrastructure and poor access to educational materials. The direct and structural violence have unequal consequences on the basis of student’s ii cultural and academic merits. School, through the othering process, makes more suffering for those students who are economically poor, culturally less priviliged, and academically weak. The risks to the vulnerable student increase when the school is suituated in a fragile context. The adolescents, who experience violence lose the sense of safety, get deprived of academic freedom, lose their potential life opportunities and increase the risk to be involved in violence. However, the students together with other stakeholders and policy makers are actively responding to school violence. Nevertheless, most of response actions are targeted against the direct forms of school violence. Hence, such response actions are not effective to challenge the structural and cultural forms of violence. In this study I derived my theoretical perspectives mainly from the idea of cultural violence (Galtung, 1990) and critical theory of othering (Kumasiro, 2000). Similarly, some of the locally practiced power perspectives provided a frame to gain better analysis of the root causes school violence. To make the study grounded into the local cultural context, this study proposed to include spiritual violence aspect into the Galtung’s violence triangle. Inclusion of spirituality in violence triangle made Galtung’s theory more useful to interpret and analyse information gained from the context that is influenced by the participants’ spiritual lifeworld. The fieldwork for this study was carried out when overt political violence and conflict were at peak and thus the fragility was high than other contexts. The overt political violence and conflict are not prevalant at the same level in and around the school setting. iii This study revealed that school violence is one of the major challenges to the school education system in Nepal. The diverse cultural contexts demand more intensive studies about different forms of school violence such as cyber bullying, use of arms, drugs and substance abuse, violence against teachers, and political intereference.