A Proposal for a Teacher Training Curriculum on School Violence and Violence in Schools

Abstract

The school violence question is examined in the first part of this study, whether it is violence that occurs at school as a result of external pressures (cultural, social, and familiar) or violence that occurs within the school's organisational structures (institutional violence), and is then reflected in all those who are involved in the school. Violence is also characterised by an inherent intricacy once it can be explained by individual, pathological, and behavioural factors, besides familiar and social ones, and also by the interaction of each of these factors. Nonetheless, since school violence is unlikely to disappear in the near future, it is critical that teachers-in-training be prepared in advance to deal with various levels of violence; to this end, a specific subject titled Violence in School: Educating to Intervene, Intervening to prevent was created for teachers-in-training of Infant and Primary School. In the second half of the article, some teachers from the University of Aveiro's Educational Department (Portugal) describe how they devised a curriculum for reducing school violence as part of the European Project NOVAS RES. We believe that our curriculum will motivate other institutions to give teachers-in-training with the tools they will need to cope with violence in the future.