A Transformative Approach to Prevent Peer Violence in Schools

Abstract

The damaging consequences of school violence affect many children and society at large. An important part of it remains undetected by many professionals. Gender also significantly influences many conflicts that are perceived only as peer violence. To provide real solutions that can succeed in preventing violence, European researchers have used communicative methodology. This transformative research approach was implemented in a study conducted in three Spanish schools, two primary and one secondary. This article presents a dialogic model for school violence prevention and describes a procedure that encourages significant community involvement. We argue that this model’s dialogic approach to school violence prevention relies on some key principles from communicative methodology: overcoming an interpretative hierarchy and reaching consensus. This article demonstrates how the transformative approach of communicative methodology can be transferred to develop effective models of violence prevention.

Keywords

violence prevention community engagement deliberation communicative methodology

School violence affects a vast number of children and youth. In the United States, it is estimated that approximately 28% of students aged 12 to 18 are bullied during the school year (Robers, Zhang, Truman, & Snyder, 2012). This violence surfaces in a variety of ways, from physical and verbal violence to social and relational exclusion and humiliation; and it involves diverse profiles of both victims and perpetrators (Wang, Iannotti, & Nansel, 2009). Some groups are more likely to suffer peer violence, but gender is central to many violent situations albeit remaining mostly unexplored (Klein, 2006). Hence, research on school violence against women has increased over the last two decades (Dunne, Humphreys, & Leach, 2006; Khubchandani et al., 2012). This research exposes mocking and sexual harassment as common features in schools, often implicitly accepted by educators and families (Stein, 1995).

Consequences of that violence have been extensively researched. Studies analyzing school violence (Olweus, 1993) have demonstrated that exposure to violence damages victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Beyond physical and psychological harm, this exposure also results in student absenteeism, school failure, and leaving school early (Ramirez et al., 2012). The short- and long-term risks of school violence have triggered legitimate concerns among teachers and parents and have sparked increased interest in identifying effective solutions (Hinduja & Patchin, 2012; Marksteiner, Reinhard, Lettau, & Dickhäuser, 2013; Olweus & Limber, 2010). In recent years, researchers agree that familial and community involvement in violence prevention is crucial (Carney & Merrell, 2001; Meragivlia et al., 2003; Smith, Pepler, & Rigby, 2004). More specifically, the research indicates that effective participation requires the inclusion of all voices in the design and future implementation of preventive actions and policies (Guerra & Backer, 2011; Oliver, Soler, & Flecha, 2009).

Although research on school bullying and violence has primarily relied on quantitative methods (Hong & Espelage, 2012), this analytical turn toward stakeholder voices and participation coincides with an increasing volume of qualitative and mixed methods research (Thornberg, 2011). Along these lines, current field contributions come from studies developed with communicative methodology, in which scientific knowledge is created through egalitarian dialogue between scholars—theorists equipped with empirical knowledge and those conducting research—and possessors of knowledge from the real world (Gómez, Puigvert, & Flecha, 2011). More specifically, communicative researchers have already studied proven dialogic models of violence prevention that achieved success through strong community involvement (Martin & Tellado, 2012). For instance, Oliver et al. (2009) show the vital importance of involving women—mothers, sisters, and aunts—from different cultural backgrounds in violence prevention in elementary schools. Their on-going dialogue with teachers increased awareness of gender violence situations. Gómez, Sordé, and Munté (2013) focus on the valuable involvement of male community members, primarily volunteers, in schools, especially males from minority backgrounds. These researchers report a reduction in the prevalence of male cultural stereotypes and attitude shifts among young male students about their behavior and that of their peers.

In this article, we focus on the links between communicative methodology in research and the dialogic model of violence prevention. Particularly, we analyze its implementation in three Spanish schools. First, we review the key principles of communicative methodology. Second, we contextualize each case study and describe the communicative approach of data collection and analysis. After analyzing the dialogic model of violence prevention in these schools, we argue that two principles of communicative methodology can be observed in this process: overcoming the interpretative hierarchy and reaching consensus. Finally, we demonstrate how the dialogic model of conflict prevention succeeds in improving climate, reducing conflicts and peer-to-peer violence, and achieving unprecedented agreements. We conclude with additional developments and challenges for further research.

Communicative Methodology as a Transformative Approach

Communicative methodology has been characterized as a transformative approach to make research a powerful tool in overcoming inequalities (Gómez et al., 2011). It collects, identifies, and informs transformative practices and real solutions to address social problems, moving beyond simply describing difficulties. Thus, it is committed to providing useful findings that social actors can use to improve their lives. To achieve these ends, communicative methodology relies on egalitarian dialogue (Flecha, 2000) between researchers and research “subjects” as a means of constructing scientific knowledge. This egalitarian dialogue seeks to break with traditional hierarchy and place both actors at an equal epistemological level. In turn, both parties overcome the limitations of their respective points of view.

Using this egalitarian dialogue to create scientific knowledge, communicative research projects are not limited to gathering the participants’ voices but aim to construct a joint interpretation. This unified approach recalls the idea of deliberative democracy (Elster, 1998), which unlike the aggregation and competition of preferences foresees new alternatives emerging through dialogue. Hence, communicative methodology makes possible what Curato (2012) explores through qualitative interviewing: the translation of deliberative democratic principles into research methods. It also goes beyond regulatory practices of ethics in research (Cannella & Lincoln, 2007). Moreover, the process itself helps transform the realities being studied.

Breaking down the interpretative hierarchy, communicative research has advanced knowledge aimed at overcoming school violence. Particularly, these studies have highlighted the capacity building of families and non-academic actors and demonstrated their potential to discuss school rules, coexistence, and violence. Moreover, the communicative approach has reinforced their participation in these processes, thus contributing to the development of a dialogic model of violence prevention. However, less is known about how dialogic procedures are actually implemented, if they reflect the research principles of the communicative approach, and how those principles may contribute to peer violence prevention or reduction. In this article, we investigate whether the deliberative democratic principles of communicative methodology are translated and recreated in concrete dialogic procedures aimed at peer and gender violence prevention in schools.

Implementing and Analyzing Dialogic Model of Violence Prevention

The data analyzed and discussed below were collected in the framework of the European project “Building Peace Together: Community-Based Preventive Program to Stop Peer-to-Peer Violence” (Lebrón, 2007-2009) within an EU-funded program designed to prevent and combat violence against children, young people, and women and to protect victims and at-risk groups. The project involved four countries—Finland, Italy, Poland, and Spain—and aimed to analyze and promote collaborative practices in the struggle against harassment and for the prevention of peer-to-peer violence. Importantly, the project drew from a conception of peer violence understood as any aggressive behavior, intentional and unwanted, which involves a real or perceived power imbalance (Olweus, 1993). The project acknowledged the importance and frequency of gender-related violence among peers, and focused on community, whole school approaches for prevention. Accordingly and derived from this, any analysis of peer violence within the school context should at least consider the gender dimension in order to properly address this phenomenon.

Within this framework, three Spanish schools were selected that were already implementing dialogic procedures of violence prevention. These schools were part of the network of Schools as Learning Communities that focuses on improving both academic achievement and coexistence through dialogic learning and actively engaging families and community members, from regular classrooms to decision-making bodies (Ríos, Herrero, & Rodríguez, 2013). The selected schools had been in the network for at least 5 years, had started dialogic procedures for violence prevention, and were willing to explore this issue in-depth through their participation in the project. These school criteria enabled researchers to focus on procedural analysis to identify which communicative methodological principles, if any, were at work in the dialogic model to promote violence-free environments.

Research Site

The participating schools vary in terms of education level, geographical location, and student characteristics. School 1 is an urban elementary school located near Barcelona in northeastern Spain, with high cultural diversity among students and a low socioeconomic status. School 2 is a rural elementary school in northern Spain’s Basque Country. About 70% of students receive an economic scholarship, and up to 50% apply for welfare. With few Romani and immigrant students, cultural diversity is low. School 3 is an urban secondary school in the Basque Country that offers compulsory and post-compulsory secondary education and vocational training. More than 20% of students have a minority background, and there are more than 20 nationalities represented in the student body.

Data Collection Techniques

From 2007 to 2008, the research team visited the selected schools and conducted three qualitative data collection techniques. On one hand, a minimum of five communicative observations were done in every school. These observations focused on how students, teachers, and community members—including relatives, community educators, and health services workers—discussed about peer violence and how to prevent it. To explore how deliberation was implemented, we collected data on the topics discussed, the participating agents, and communicative dynamics. On the other hand, documentary analysis examined in every case school policies, curricula, and coexistence plans. The number of documents varied according to each one of the realities. Finally, in all three schools, one communicative focus group was conducted of 7 to 9 (mostly female) instructors, who taught different subjects and grades.

According to the nature of relationships in the communicative research approach, researchers not only explained the purpose of the project to the “researched” but also shared and discussed with them the existing scientific knowledge relating to the topic. Hence, researchers presented teachers with evidence of community approaches to combat peer and gender violence in schools. In one communicative focus group, the conversation was introduced alongside an academic text on the dialogic procedure of school violence prevention. Communicative methodology’s transformative approach shapes the relationships between researchers, the reality studied, and the subjects involved. Notably, this is not performed in a vertical, top-down manner from experts to executants and beneficiaries. Instead, the traditional interpretative hierarchy—between those providing information and those able to interpret it—is progressively replaced by egalitarian dialogue in all stages of research.

Data Analysis

Data analysis with communicative methodology examined both exclusionary and transformative elements. On the one hand, we identified barriers and difficulties in tackling and preventing peer violence in schools; on the other, we highlighted potential tools to overcome such difficulties and to succeed in violence prevention. The focus on transformative elements allowed researchers to observe the daily efforts of teachers, parents, and students to create better educational settings, better relationships, and better lives. These observations became a crucial dimension of communicative methodology in this research: to identify those transformative elements of the dialogic model of violence prevention. The links between the communicative methodological approach to the research and the nature of the dialogic model of conflict prevention are discussed in the following sections.

Situations for Deliberation: The Dialogic Model of Violence Prevention in Practice

The schools studied in this project promote conflict prevention through deliberative processes aimed at obtaining consensus with the entire community about rules. To that end, the schools create specific formal structures and step by step procedures. In some cases, schools only tried to reach a one-rule agreement. In other cases, centers were reaching community consensus on a series of rules for living together.

One structure used in the schools is the mixed committee on coexistence. The name “mixed committee” reflects the diversity of participant profiles: teachers, parents, students, and other community members. As one teacher explains, having this diversity responds to the aim of sharing beliefs, feelings, and reactions from different perspectives, in and outside of school:

[In the mixed committee] we are people from very diverse environments. From outside school there is also Miguel working as an educator on the streets, because he goes beyond school if there is something to do. If we can do anything, it has to be done collectively ( . . . ) we cannot provide one model in school only and provide a completely different one to the families, right? ( . . . ) If we are doing a preventive work, must go hand in hand. (Lebrón, 2007-2009)

As noted, teachers cannot expect to ensure violence prevention by themselves, and the perception is that there is only one way to work—together. The mixed committee on coexistence meets regularly, usually about once a month, to agree on actions for improving school climate and suggest new rules.

These rules should meet specific criteria: They should be relevant to children’s lives and potentially applicable to people of all ideologies and ages. These rules should also apply to a behavior that, despite repeated failures, could be eliminated and should avoid overly general descriptions like “offending” that apply to a wide variety of situations.

One Example: No Child Will be Harassed Because of the Clothes He or She Wears

In School 2, participants adopted the rule that “no child will be harassed because of the clothes he or she wears.” This precept challenged sexist behaviors like “lifting skirts” and also racist remarks to Muslim girls wearing hijabs. Once the mixed committee raised a proposal, the debate was extended to other instances and deliberative spaces. Each class group dedicated assemblies to discuss the specific situation to be transformed, the desired improvements, the advantages such improvements entail, and how this transformation is important to all involved. After that, group delegates met with the mixed committee on coexistence and shared all peer feedback. Then, the mixed committee and the pupils informed the general assembly of parents and community members about their deliberation. All these discussions accomplished plurality, dialogue, and public interaction, three core elements of democracy (Sen, 2009).

Overcoming Interpretative Hierarchy: A Key Element of Communicative Methodology and the Dialogic Model

However, committee’s diversity and differences of opinion do not ensure deliberative democracy or better rules. Multiplying spaces for dialogue cannot promise these desired results either. As teachers and other participants express, it is more challenging to ensure that—according to the ideals of discourse ethics—all contributions are judged by the merits of the argument (Habermas, 1984; Rawls, 1995), not by the speakers’ status in the social structure. The principle of equal epistemological levels (Gómez et al., 2011) has thus emerged as a crucial component for discussions in mixed committees on coexistence. This principle guided our presence in the mixed committee at School 2.

We illustrate this process through a particular example. In a communicative observation, we as researchers sat alongside the participants; they knew our role and the aim of our visit, and we shared our impressions with them after the observation. Group participants were two researchers, two teachers, the principal, Muslim mothers and fathers, and the students involved in the violent incident. According to the dialogic model of violence prevention, all participants previously agreed that a meeting was necessary to find an effective solution together. The problem involved a small group of 9-year-old children, in which one among them was leading the others in intimidating another student. All committee members contributed their own knowledge. Parents of one perpetrator asked to him if he would promise to not do it again and to think about how they could solve the problem. The mother of the intimidated child asked how they could guarantee that it would not happen again. The principal restated the arguments of parents and children, and she did not impose her views based on her status as a teacher or principal. She followed the dialogical procedure, and as an equal partner in the conversation, she asked for any other contributions. The victim’s mother said that if parents were more present in school, these problems could be avoided. The principal reminded the group that the school provided opportunities to participate in classrooms and other learning spaces. She presented herself on an equal epistemological level with the Muslim mother. Some other women there had already volunteered at school and knew how effective their presence was. They suggested that other parents participate in the same way. There was no immediate consensus, but they had the time and space to talk. We observed that a dialogic space was created there, wherein everyone spoke freely and without fear or embarrassment. That interpretation was conveyed to the participants after the meeting. Based on that deliberation process, some fathers also decided to volunteer in their children’s classes to help prevent this problem and make relationship and climate changes. Teachers promoted dialogue and explained their classroom perceptions in the debates, but they also respected and valued every single contribution.

This case shows how principals and teachers in the mixed committee enact the equal epistemological position promoted by communicative researchers. Parents and children place themselves at the same level and are able to express their thoughts and interpretations equally. The disappearance of interpretative hierarchy, which is an essential component of communicative methodology, can facilitate the dialogic model of violence prevention. According to the principal of the school, “It is such a relationship that can be hardly be more open, it’s never a pyramidal relationship that school is above parents, no, we work in equality, both school and parents” (Lebrón, 2007-2009). Of course, renouncing status and accepting such equality requires a concerted effort from teachers. In one discussion group, an early childhood teacher reflected on this shift: “Well, one has to learn. That the parents can be inside school and work together with the teachers” (Lebrón, 2007-2009).

And Dialogue Works: Improvements in Peer and Gender Violence

Data collected from these three schools demonstrated that all of them improved in terms of violence prevention. Community members identified and reflected on these improvements. A teacher from School 1 summarized some of the experienced improvements in school climate and violence reduction, resulting from deliberation procedures and the absence of interpretative hierarchy:

We solved a problem of bullying at class thanks to the collaboration with the parents. We also have significantly reduced the number of insults and disputes among children. During classrooms and in the playground, which is much more difficult. (Lebrón, 2007-2009)

A colleague from her communicative focus group reflected that they now acknowledge many more situations than they did before. She gave the example of a boy “touching the ass” of a young girl. While she recognized that it previously would have been treated as “silly things” or children’s games, the school has now expressed disapproval of this specific behavior to the wider school community (students, teachers, parents, and other relatives) and has consequently dramatically reduced it. Dialogue has allowed the school to make many daily gender violence situations visible (Klein, 2006) and, then, to combat them.

These results demonstrate how, in the dialogical model, participation in the public discussion increases the likelihood that everyone follows the rules (Aubert, Serradell, & Soler, 2013). This participation is very different from the weak commitment in most Spanish schools, wherein the teachers just ask parents to sign a “letter of coexistence” at the beginning of the school year. Egalitarian dialogue makes it easier to exact changes in the reactions of bystanders—whether peers/students, siblings, or other adults—who witness peer or gender violence, incidents these teachers attest happen at school. In addition, the dynamics of deliberation are translated to other spaces outside school. One teacher at School 2 described such a translation when parents decided to elaborate and agree on a series of norms:

I was in a class where the majority was migrant parents. They participated a lot! [in the family assembly] We discussed about the Decalogue and the continuity we should give to it at school and at home. They could see the specific application of the Decalogue at home and they proposed to create a familiar Decalogue through the same process, it is to say, talking together. (Lebrón, 2007-2009)

This example illustrates that group discussions can be transferred and multiplied from class to assemblies, from mixed committees to parents’ daily dynamics. In the end, dialogue succeeds in making the dream of a safe environment for learning and living a reality.

Conclusions and Final Remarks

Many current programs of conflict resolution and prevention already advocate for collective efforts among staff, parents, and students. We have argued that in the dialogic model, this approach becomes real in several configurations, including mixed committees and assemblies attended by diverse community members. This model recreates two principles of communicative methodology to realize community involvement and to prevent peer and gender violence in schools. Overcoming interpretative hierarchy is the basis of this model’s success. Whereas some programs suggest training parents and students to create common norms (Limper, 2000), the dialogic model recognizes the validity of everyone claim’s from the beginning regardless of their position, educational level, language, or experience. As with communicative methodology, specialized and real-world knowledge from various actors is examined on the basis of equality. Moreover, the dialogic model of violence prevention tackles school violence of all types, but dialogue makes it easier to identify gender violence and harassment and to reject it.

The dialogic model of violence prevention illustrates the transformative power of communicative action (Habermas, 1984), as it was a conversation among parents (including perpetrators’ and the victims’ parents) and teachers, what allowed the finding of a solution beyond punishment or playing down the conflict. All other examples collected shared this mechanism of dialogue for preventing and tackling initial situations of peer-to-peer violence. Moreover, the equal epistemological level was present in both the spaces of dialogue for data collection and the actual spaces of dialogue that we observed. Therefore, the dialogic model shows also the ability to transfer the egalitarian dialogue and dialogic creation of agreements of the communicative approach of research into social action.

The transformative approach of communicative methodology also opens the door to further research to gain an in-depth understanding of how participation in this dialogic model can be translated to students’ domestic and familial dynamics.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) declared the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Commission. Daphne Programme [grant number JLS/2006/DAP-1/269/YC30-CE-0095247/00-60].

Author Biography

Maria Padrós, PhD in pedagogy, is an assistant professor in the Department of Didactics and Educational Organization in the University of Barcelona. She has participated in researches under the 5th and 6th European Framework Program and was the main researcher in a research on gender violence prevention in secondary schools. Among her publications, she has co-authored an article in the European Journal of Education regarding communicative research and overcoming of poverty.

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