Abstract
Here I shine light on the concept of and call for safe space and on the implicit argument that seems to undergird both the concept and the call, complicating and problematizing the taken for granted view of this issue with the goal of revealing a more complex dynamic worthy of interpretive attention when determining educational response. I maintain that the usual justification for safe space covers rather than clarifies the logic of safe space and makes it difficult for an educator to respond to harassment in a constructive and fitting way. I also claim that calls for safe space can only be properly interpreted—and responded to—when the link between fear and safety is uncovered and deconstructed. In the process, I note that the assumption of “safety” as a “positive condition” for education is problematic and warrants careful consideration.
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Notes
The original proposal to add a separate Pride campus followed the model of the Social Justice School at the Greater Lawndale Little Village High School, http://www.lvlhs.org. A description of the proposal, decision-making process and eventual withdrawal of the proposal can be found at http://www.365gay.com/news/anger-frustration-over-shelving-chicago-gay-school/.
In the argument that follows, students’ fears as projected by the teacher are represented in italics and teachers’ feelings are represented in bold.
I have been asked whether Dewey’s pragmatist analysis is needed here, whether Ahmed’s poststructuralist insight is enough to shed light on fear and safe space as political experiences and political concepts. For some readers, that is, for those whose theoretical worldview is rooted in the recognition that meaning (including the meaning of feelings) is discursive, invoking Dewey adds little and may be a distraction from my main point. But personal observation suggests that an individualistic, instinctual view of affect—marking emotion solely as instinctual stimulus to action—holds taken-for-granted status in everyday human behavior and needs to be disrupted before Ahmed’s approach and larger point can be fully appreciated. Ahmed assumes a functional, relational and discursive starting point; Dewey clears the ground for that effort in my opinion and so I marry the pragmatist with the poststructuralist in successive moments with that in mind. I’ll leave it to the individual reader to determine whether this is a distraction or a needed turn in the path of my argument.
Remember that for Dewey, stimulus and response become stimulus and response by virtue of the action that renders itself a response and some idea a stimulus. Were there no response, there could be no stimulus.
Note that suppression is not annihilation. “Psychic” energy is no more capable of being abolished than the forms we recognize as physical. If it is neither exploded nor converted, it is turned inwards, to lead a surreptitious, subterranean life.
I am grateful to Barbara Applebaum for reminding me to state this clearly.
It is worth noting that Dewey, like Ahmed, is ultimately interested in the function of emotions in social interaction but that his analysis is limited because of his focus on the behavior of the individual organism rather than on sociocultural patterns of action as well as his previously mentioned blind spot with respect to power and privilege.
Note that this simple question opens the educator up to both subtle and overt forms of harassment and exclusion experienced by a full range of students. By attending to behaviors of shrinkage and separation, one may come to recognize feelings worthy of careful consideration and acknowledgement even when one does not observe either harassing behaviors or obvious expressions of emotion.
It is important to note that the choice facing educators is not a choice between insuring safety and allowing danger for students. Educational experience always incorporates greater or lesser degrees of danger, sometimes even physical danger. The educator’s judgment—professional judgment that must be applied relentlessly—always involves pedagogical payoff and personal, physical, psychological and cultural costs. And attention must be paid to the distinction between students’ feeling unsafe and being unsafe. The teacher who errs on the side of too much comfort (consider the educators who insist that learning should be fun) is as ineffective as is the teacher who takes a cavalier view of the risks (consider the Robin Williams character in “Dead Poets Society”).
References
Ahmed, S. (2003). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.
Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York: Routledge.
Dewey, J. (1894). The theory of emotion. (1) Emotional attitudes. Psychological Review, 1, 553–569.
Dewey, J. (1895). The theory of emotion. (2) The significance of emotions. Psychological Review, 2, 13–32.
Dewey, J. (1922). Human nature and conduct. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Dosemagen, S. (2008). Chicago proposes Pride high school for gay students, Medill Reports. Available on-line at http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=100437&print=1.
English, A., & Stengel, B. (2010). Exploring fear: Rousseau, Dewey and Freire on fear and learning. Educational Theory (forthcoming).
James, W. (1983). The principles of psychology. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Mayo, C. (2001). Civility and its discontents: Sexuality, race and the lure of beautiful manners. In S. Rice (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2001. Champaign, IL: The Philosophy of Education Society.
Walker, A. (2004). In search of our mothers’ garden. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Fulbright Commission, Universidade de Èvora and Millersville University for the time, space and place to think through the issues outlined in this essay. I also appreciate the generous and quite helpful comments of Barbara Applebaum who reviewed this essay for the journal, of graduate students and faculty, especially Gert Biesta, at University of Stirling who responded to an earlier iteration of this essay, and of members of the Edinburgh branch of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, especially David Carr, who invited me to think through these ideas with them in fall 2008. It is a richer offering because of them.