Violence in schools: Is it the school’s problem? What do teachers from a public school in Brazil think?

Abstract

The current article analyzed how violence in school is viewed by teachers in a public school, based on a qualitative study in Florianópolis, state capital of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The findings are from the second stage of data collection in the study entitled Violence in schools in Santa Catarina: educational innovations in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, financed by the Santa Catarina State Research Support Foundation (FAPESC) ⁴ through grant number: UNI2020121000240, under the public call for projects FAPESC no. 12/2020, Universal Research Program. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, with content analysis for the data’s organization. The first stage involved transcribing the interviews, a preliminary analysis, and formulation of hypotheses. The second stage featured categorization according to the central aspects examined in the interviews. Two findings stood out. First, interventions in violence in the school depend on the problem’s severity and intensity. Second, the strategies for preventing and dealing with violence are directly related to the way the issue is addressed in the management plan for educational policy at the municipal level. Importantly, violence in the school cannot be analyzed outside the school’s social and cultural environment, because schools are intrinsically related to the context to which they belong.