A collective biography of teachers’ experiences of school violence and its perceived consequences for curriculum delivery

𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 School violence is a frequent occurrence in many schools in South Africa and finds expression such as teacher on teacher, teacher on student, and student on student violence. It is argued that contributory factors of school violence relate to the poor economic, social, and cultural background of learners, poor parental guidance, and peer pressure. In this study, I explored teachers' experiences of school violence and its perceived consequences for curriculum delivery. This study is situated within the transformative paradigm as it sought to enable collective action towards transformation in responding to the prevailing occurrence of school violence. Furthermore, the study employed critical peace education as a grounding theory to inform such collective action. In line with the qualitative nature of the study, I employed narrative inquiry as a research methodology to interrogate how teachers make sense of their experiences of school violence and the perceived consequences for curriculum delivery. The inquiry focused on narratives as stories of experience, known as experience-centred narratives. As such, I specifically employed collective biography. Collective biography allows a group of people to share memory stories on a chosen topic through the technology of speaking, writing, and listening, thereby allowing participants to identify and unpack the discursive threads and mutual cultural narratives by which subjects shape and render themselves and others recognisable. This study was conducted in the Mashishing education circuit of Bohlabela District in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Five teachers were purposively selected to participate in the study due to their experiences of school violence. This study employed currere as both the analytical framework and the process of inquiry. Thus, the development of an analytical framework was a significant component of this study because it provided the data generation strategy. The analytical framework of currere allowed participants to engage in a complicated conversation about school violence. This study employed participant journals and two open-ended group discussions as data generation strategies. The participating teachers made use of their journals to recall their past experiences of school violence, capture it as it was, and how these experiences hover over and inform the present. During the open-ended group discussions, participants collectively shared their memories and, based on these, developed possible strategies to mitigate school violence. To interpret the generated data, thematic data analysis was employed, and to ensure trustworthiness, crystallisation was employed. In this study, emphasis was placed on the value of creating collective efforts to transform school communities by working toward and fostering a culture of peace that is conducive to curriculum delivery. Based on the analysis of the generated data, I argue that teachers face school violence, ranging from physical, cultural, and structural violence, daily, and that such manifestations of violence hold negative consequences for curriculum delivery. To mitigate the manifestations of school violence, participating teachers should collectively develop collaborative strategies that can be employed to mitigate school violence and the negative consequences it holds for curriculum delivery. ___________________________________________________________________