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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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