Negotiating violence prevention

Evaluation research typically treats standards of violence prevention programs, like other curricula, as unquestioned values of a good society, while identifying youth as the problem to be solved. This article explains how the evaluative gaze can, in contrast, be critically fixed on the interpretations of various stake holders in the violence prevention enterprise, including curriculum authors, teachers, and youth, whose social values are often under-represented. In the context of a yearlong literacy-based violence prevention curriculum focusing on racial and ethnic discrimination in 3(rd) and 5(th) grade urban classrooms, 5 teachers, their classes, and 36 individual students from these classes expressed contradictory and conforming values, suggesting to us the need to invite negotiation of social values as part of democratic education.