Discussions of structural violence in a debate space is key to increase social awareness and systemic racism

Educational literature has demonstrated the pedagogical potential of incorporating the notion of structural violence in the classroom. The following studies illustrate the value when educators embrace it either as a theoretical stance to select and frame knowledge or as curriculum content developed in tandem with students.

Studies that account for students’ interpretations of race-based inequalities in the classroom show that the concept of structural violence supports students in situating daily experiences of racial discrimination and the social causes that motivate it historically. This body of research analyzes the interpretations that students of color make of their own reality through learning experiences that prioritize a critical understanding of race-based social inequalities. For example,  draw from an eco-critical perspective—a critical interpretation of  ecological model that situates power differentials at multiple levels—to examine how students design plans for action that target the individual, the family, and broader societal arrangements through a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project. Hope et al. (2014) also combine an eco-critical perspective with YPAR methodologies to explore how Black high school students make sense of racial discrimination in their schools. Both studies highlight structural violence as a productive avenue to historicize exclusionary practices and decode personal experiences of racism and discrimination. In racial literacy workshops,  examine how three young Black women make sense of racism in the United States. Among other points, the study finds that in a space where girls thought and wrote collectively about “power, oppression and privilege” (p. 9), they recognized racism’s historic and systemic dimensions and the direct implications it had over them and people who looked similar to them. In a different educational scenario and through a longitudinal, mixed methods research design with more than 400 adolescents,  reveal that by the end of freshman year, students attending progressive schools with an explicit commitment to social justice ideals demonstrated an increased ability to analyze inequality in relation to race and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the study shows that students were able to examine the causes of racial inequality, particularly the role of systemic factors in reproducing race-based inequality. Contrastingly, through in-depth interviews with 35 lower secondary school students and a critical discourse analysis of 20 popular textbooks used in the Republic of Ireland,  finds that curricular silences about racism’s systemic nature create the conditions for students to assume racism results from individual attitudes and traits.

Aligned with current conversations about structural violence, studies have also analyzed the influence of structural thinking on curriculum. For instance,  investigate the ability of an undergraduate course, explicitly devoted to teaching first-year college students about the structural sources of group inequality and intergroup conflict, to increase students’ capacity to identify and think about structural causes. The authors show that course content that deals with historical patterns of inequality and engages with active learning enhanced students’ capacity to examine social inequality’s structural dimensions. Emphasis on structural thinking generated a decrease in individualistic thinking and an increase on students’ understandings of how structural arrangements reinforce social inequality. Furthermore,  show that students attending schools where racism and racial inequality are central curricula goals tend to demonstrate positive increases in their sociopolitical consciousness.

This body of literature reveals that a structural violence framework has great potential to shape inquiry. Through guided and explicit conversations young people can delve into theoretical concepts and use them to make sense of society’s systemic arrangements and participate in society’s most crucial conversations ().