Curriculum is Everything that Happens: The Lived Curriculum of the Lockdown Drill
Transcript of Curriculum is Everything that Happens: The Lived Curriculum of the Lockdown Drill
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Curriculum is Everything that Happens: The Lockdown Drill as Lived Curriculum
Margaret A Shane
University of Alberta, Department of Secondary Education
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School security literature often identifies the Columbine Massacre as the catalyst for the
modern school lockdown.1 Born of moral panic, it marks the beginning of the overt
criminalization of students and the fortification of schools. The unprecedented number of
casualties at Columbine (15 dead, 24 injured) persuaded many of its being different in kind rather
than in degree from antecedent incidences of school violence. The perception that Columbine
represented something new intensified efforts at prevention despite the rarity of such tragedies
and a steady decline in instances of school violence (Fuentes, 2012) and crime rates generally
(FBI, 2012, Statistics Canada, 2012).
What follows flows from a basic syllogism. Everything that happens in schools is
curriculum.2 Lockdown drills occur in schools. Therefore lockdown procedures are curriculum
where curriculum is understood as an artifact or process through which students learn something
by converting an accident (of chance encounter) into a learning event after Daignault (2011).
Columbine was an accident that educators, parents, lawmakers, and school boards converted into
the lockdown’s curriculum event. The lockdown drill is therefore problematic: it seeks to
preserve life by oppression and by criminalizing and victimizing youth. Moreover, in imposing
upon educators the impossible goal of hyper-vigilance, it becomes itself an instrument of
violence.
In the world of micro-politics, there is nothing wrong, in general, with effectuating
possibilities. The problem is when your goal, your dream, or your end point is
1 In this paper the term “lockdown” is used in context to refer to lockdown policies, drills, and actual crisis
situations. 2 California Children’s Academy’s Parent Handbook. “Curriculum is everything that happens to the child while he
or she is at the center and is generated from staff, parents, and other children.”
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impossible…if we don’t try to achieve the goal, [we enact] …passive terrorism or passive
violence. On the other hand, if we insist upon reaching the [impossible] goal … then we
become actively violent because we force people’s realities into directions that do not,
that cannot work (Masny & Daignault, 2011).
Critical pedagogy aids in the investigation of those lockdown-friendly “habits of thought” (Shor,
1992). Accordingly, we are interested in excavating the lockdown’s “root causes, social context,
ideology, and personal consequences” (Shor, 1992).
What is the deeper meaning of a lockdown drill? In policy? In practice? Ostensibly
lockdowns are thought necessary to protect students and teachers against any lethal threat. But
post-Columbine, that rhetoric isn’t fooling anyone. The lockdown exists to thwart the school
shooter: a body that places itself beyond the school authorities’ control. If generations are
defined by watershed events rather than birthdates (Lions, Duxbury & Higgens, 2007), then the
post-Columbine generation of students elicits a strange ambivalence from the education
establishment: a student’s body is simultaneously viewed as potential victim and potential
attacker. From this ambivalence flows demands for hyper-vigilance and preparedness involving
the precise control of bodies through drills. Seen this way, the lockdown’s deeper meaning
approaches Agamben’s state of exception; a suspension of the usual predictable mode of
governance based on the highest executive’s authority’s (school boards’) ability to impose
alternative rules to that of the law for the purpose of preserving the public good (2005).
I want to worry the lockdown as curriculum-neutral. I want to return the school shooting
to accident status so that it might result in an alternative, life affirming curricular event. This
project is complicated by the lockdown being enmeshed in the wider ideology of fear from
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which flow the discourses of risk, culpability, and legal liability.3 How can we break the death
grip of the lockdown’s morality and give room to ethical practices of care, concern, and
community? We can start by examining its connection to the political/law enforcement machine.
We need an artifact to excavate. We will rely in part upon the 2009 Ontario Ministry of
Education’s Guidelines for Developing and Maintaining Lockdown Procedures for Elementary
and Secondary Schools (“the Guidelines”) supplemented by reports and commentary by
education and security experts. The Guidelines are interesting for two reasons. First, nothing
therein indicates any awareness of the lockdown as lived curriculum (Aoki, 1993). Second, they
were produced absent of teacher consultation by an unusual (and telling) collaboration between
the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services with
input from the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police Lockdown Procedure Working Group.
As a consequence, the Guidelines’ language represents values, beliefs, and presuppositions
appropriated from the penal system. “Lockdown” originally referred to “the confinement of
prisoners to their cells for an extended period of time, usually as a security measure…” (OED
online). Policies that adhere to these guidelines are remarkably similar in structure, tone, and
language. They bear the stamp of the value political and law enforcement agencies place on
control (of bodies) and beliefs about how best to achieve and maintain that control. In fact, we
can extrapolate a kind of creed from the Guidelines and the statutory/ regulatory and common
law contexts from which they emerge (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2010, Legislative
Assembly of Alberta, Bill 3, 2012) :
We believe bodies in schools have the right to be secure and safe.
3 The ideal lockdown procedure has become a commodity subject to capitalist exchange that helps fuel the $16
billion dollar security industry. (First Research, Security Industry Profile, http://www.firstresearch.com/Industry-
Research/Security-System-Services.html). See Edmonton’s own Hour-Zero™ Security Consultants specializing in
school security software and systems (www.hourzero.com).
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We believe the world is an uncertain and dangerous place.
We believe bodies in schools are vulnerable to sudden, unforeseen, and fatal attack.
We value order and discipline in schools and exert control of the body to achieve
both.
We believe we owe a heightened duty of care to bodies in schools based on statute
and common law (principle of in locus parentis).
We believe that the risks of attack and of actionable consequences can be managed
and mitigated through advanced preparation and detailed contingency planning.
We believe that lockdown procedures are necessary to mitigate risk.
We can further detect the presupposition that lockdown procedures are universally applicable
and effective and that teacher/student/administration assemblages are stable and therefore
interchangeable. Then there is the implicit belief that lockdowns (and drills) cannot help but
benefit students’ wellbeing and safety. Moreover, it appears the belief persists that learning falls
away during the embodied experience of acting as if your life were in immediate danger. The
image of frightened, silent, students huddled in the dark under desks with teachers as gatekeepers
between life and violent death is one of a state of exception (after Agamben, 2005) to what
school purports to be: a place of learning, of fulfilling potential, of life-affirming becoming. It
strips away the affect, connections, and richness encountered in schools down to “bare life”
(Agamben, 1998) reducing teachers and students to besieged victims. Consider the Guidelines’
recommended lockdown procedure for portable classrooms. Bodies in portables should eliminate
all light, assess sight lines, eliminate all sounds, lock and barricade all doors, and finally create a
fortified bunker or foxhole:
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Due to thin wall construction, … [tip] desks onto their sides with desk-tops facing
out, and all desks placed in a circle, with students/staff locating within the circle,
down on the floor below the top edge of the desk. (Guidelines, 6).
The lockdown drill functions to actualize a virtual, abstract concept of violence and render it a
concrete reality in the thinking, affect, and tissues of bodies. It is curriculum as lived (Aoki,
1993) but it is curriculum as imagined trauma. So in that sense the lockdown is something other.
It injects the ideology of fear’s “what if / too much at stake to risk it” discourse into education
and makes itself a priority without ever considering itself a curricular event. And this something
other discourse is reinforced intra and extra-murally to the school: by the media and among
legislators. An especially straightforward example of the latter occurred on June 12, 2007 when
Alberta MLA (Edmonton-McClung), Mo Elsalhy, rose in the Legislative Assembly and said:
School officials do an excellent job, Mr. Speaker, with their limited resources, but
too often when it comes to deciding between security considerations and
instructional spending, a school is most likely going to choose teachers,
textbooks, and technology. However, the issue of school security cannot be
ignored for reasons that can be tragic. Solutions could be as simple as a school
using a private security person to conduct patrols of the grounds, installing
security cameras… (Alberta Hansard, p. 1969)
The lockdown procedure functions to oppress bodies through the device of catastrophic
thinking and the deployment of the catastrophe as justification for suspension of all other
priorities and intensified control. The lockdown is not only oblivious to the lessons it imparts but
is regressive. It seeks to claw back successful lessons by saying “in this instance, forget what
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you’ve learned”. All learning and social interaction is bracketed and the interstitial space is
filled with fearful bodies in suspended animation. Worse still, the lockdown drill converts the
social into a threat to survival: silence and isolation become imperative. Students must even
forget what the body has been trained to do, say, in the case of threat by fire.
In the event that a fire alarm is pulled once a lockdown has been called, staff and
students shall not respond as they normally would to a fire alarm, but shall
remained locked down (Guidelines, 8). [Emphasis added.]
The lockdown as curriculum event excludes any meaningful inquiry into the lessons it conveys at
considerable cost to students and teachers’ wellbeing and sense of community. The fact that the
Guidelines are the product of law enforcement and ministerial mechanisms of authority and
control occludes lockdowns’ function as curriculum. What is the nature of the learning event that
arises from the lockdown drill? Critical pedagogy provides a theoretical framework suitable for
such an investigation which, I contend, is both absent from the literature and long overdue.
One line of inquiry might examine the counterintuitive way in which lockdowns
reinforce, albeit through the extreme negative example, schools’ status as safe and secure
environments. In rehearsing the state of exception – violence, death, chaos – the lockdown
procedure highlights the value of order, discipline, and control which is complicit with political,
economic, social mechanisms of power governing connections among students, teachers,
administrators, and parents. The foray into chaos reinforces the value of order and control; a
very old idea dating back to Rome’s Saturnalia and medieval Europe’s Feast of Fools (Harris,
2011). For, at least part of the lesson imparted by the lockdown event is that unwavering
obedience to the teacher and principal (agents of the centralized authoritative power) will save
your life. Survivability is the privilege of the “docile body” (Foucault,1979). In short, the
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lockdown drill is embodied and internalized by students and teachers as necessary and therefore
function as a mechanism of the wider society of control.
The Columbine massacre was progenitor to school lockdowns and, in the fullness of
time, another offspring – the zero tolerance policy marked by increased police presence in
schools and the systemic criminalization of students who exhibit any behaviour considered a
likely precursor to a violent act. Zero-tolerance policies have prompted the expansion of
surveillance, oppression, and racist and ageist discrimination (Tanner, 2009) that move student
bodies into early and frequent contact with the criminal justice system (Fuentes, 2012). In the
United States, for example, consequences for even the most minor of violations of the zero
tolerance policy result in arrests, court appearances, fines, and criminal records that often
disproportionately impact Black or Latino students. Students are routinely suspended or
expelled en masse. In 2010, the State of Texas, for example, registered 1.6 million suspensions
and expulsions for 4.7 million students (34%) (Fuentes, 2012).
So there is a perception that lockdowns are more likely to be actual in economically
disadvantaged schools: a perception unsupported by the facts. Security agencies, for example,
state explicitly that these events are unpredictable in every aspect - location, severity, duration,
or motivation – save one: gender (Secret Service, 2002). According the US Secret Service
(2002), there exists “no accurate or useful ‘profile’” of the school shooter. Nevertheless, the FBI
(1999) includes the fact that most attackers are male in its practical “what to watch for” advice to
educators.
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If we accept that lockdowns are curriculum events then we will want to better understand
the lasting and real consequences of their regular occurrence in schools.4 We need to return the
lockdown to the status of accident in order to reshape the nature of its learning event into
something life affirming and community building. There is one conspicuous site of resistance to
the imperatives of fear that drive the lockdown and zero-tolerance logics. Once more we return
to Columbine High School where metal-detectors and zero-tolerance measures were rejected in
the aftermath of the massacre in favour of counseling, dialogue, care, and concern (Kupchik,
2010). Columbine changed the nature of the curricular event. If they can do it, we all can.
4 One principal shared with me that he conducted six lockdown drills each year in a K – 12 school in rural Alberta
(Kalis, 2012). Another classroom teacher related that his principal, in an effort to enhance the “realism” of the drill,
walked the elementary school’s halls firing a starting pistol (Teghtmeyer, 2012).
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