'And I can get anyone into Hamlet.' Using humanities-based approaches after expulsion for school violence: A hermeneutical transformation of Safe Schools

This dissertation is a study of humanities-based approaches to school violence. It invokes Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy and Nussbaum's literary imagination to build a model of humanistic education that centralizes literary texts and compassion in teaching and learning following expulsion for school violence. This research uses interpretive ethnography to examine humanistic possibilities in Ontario's Safe Schools Act and local expulsion programs. It discovers only marginal humanistic spaces or sensus communis constituted by educators, students, and literary texts. Humanistic strategies open up traditional democratic possibilities to teach for ethical reasoning, social responsibility, and civic duty. Humanistic strategies cultivate deepened sensitivities to the violent sufferings of others, thereby reducing the likelihood of future violence. Educators choose appealing and meaningful literature to foster student engagement, a sense of belonging, meaningful dialogue, compassion, and critical thinking. This research discovers hermeneutic relations that play a discursive role in education. Pedagogies of the imagination cultivate hope and possibility for expelled students to reengage as world citizens. By developing humanities-inspired curriculum, local expulsion programs provide opportunities for students to think critically about violence in their personal lives and the larger social world. Safe school expulsion programs are hermeneutically transformed into marginal pedagogic spaces of promise and possibility. Humanities-based approaches offer renewed hope for transformational learning and democracy in education.