17 What is a safer space?

The concept of a “safe space” has become a popular and contentious topic among educators. While many have appreciated it for its attempts to address harms happening in classrooms, others have felt that it “coddles” students and protects them from real-world events. The argument that is frequently articulated by faculty is that, in the real world, there are no “content/trigger warnings” and that students should prepare for anything by engaging openly in difficult classroom dialogues. While we appreciate that we are often exposed to difficult topics and events without preamble, we also see the classroom as a simulated environment where we can – and should – challenge social dynamics that inevitably shape the classroom space in ways that replicate societal inequities. Here, the classroom can actually be an entry point to identifying, challenging, and changing inequitable and exclusive practices that happen in our everyday work, school, social, and personal lives.

Our team takes the stance that an educational space cannot ever truly be “safe,” not as long as academic institutions continue to be Eurocentric and predicated on specific ways of knowing that subvert, dismiss, and invalidate non-Western epistemologies. Instead, we propose that classrooms can be made “safer,” where instructors, teaching assistants, student-facing staff, administration, and students can work collaboratively and intentionally to redress existing elements of the current classroom environment that reflect larger projects of oppression and marginalization. When instructors and students make a concerted effort to facilitate safer classrooms, we believe that it enhances and bolsters student learning, engagement, and participation. When someone feels safer, they might absorb more information, engage more actively with course content, and apply the learning that happens in the course to their broader personal and social contexts.

These traits are juxtaposed against unsafe class traits, including a space where instructors and peers were judgmental, biased, apathetic, disengaged, overly critical or accusatory of each other, and closed-minded (Holley & Steiner, 2005; Barrett, 2010; Garran & Rasmussen, 2014). According to a survey conducted by Holley and Steiner (2005), 97% of student respondents indicated that having a safe(r) classroom environment was very or extremely important to their learning.

In a study exploring and comparing students’ perspectives of safe(r) spaces in the classroom, Garran and Rasmussen (2014) found that students from dominant social groups and positionings (e.g. those who were white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, etc.) defined safety in much different ways than students from nondominant positionings (e.g. those who were racialized, disabled, trans or non-binary, queer, etc.). Namely, nondominant students suggested that the classroom could never be safe for them as they were frequently put on the spot, told that their emotional reactions were irrational or overly-sensitive, forced to educate others and speak on behalf of their marginalized identity marker, and stereotyped. In contrast, students from dominant positions framed safety as the ability to make mistakes, take risks, and avoid being attacked, judged, misunderstood, or shut down by their peers (Garran & Rasmussen, 2014). As Garran and Rasmussen (2014) conclude, “[t]he very nature of the dominant group of students’ concerns reflects privilege, that is, an unexamined quality to their spontaneous comments” (p.407). Here, creating a space where taking risks and self-expression are prioritized and celebrated will likely occur at the expense of or “on the backs of” marginalized students. In this process, safety is predicated on preserving and protecting dominant students’ empowered positions rather than challenging them (Barrett, 2010; Garran & Rasmussen, 2014).

We want to make a distinction here: there is a difference between feeling “unsafe” and feeling “uncomfortable.” While discomfort certainly can be a symptom of a lack of safety, the discomfort we are discussing refers to having our values or beliefs challenged in a thoughtful, respectful, and specific way. For example, when we learn about the realities of colonial violence, anti-Black racism, and other forms of racism, we may feel uncomfortable: e.g.) thinking about our own whiteness, how we might contribute to these issues in a contemporary context, how we might have been taught false things about these issues, etc. When we hold a belief that is proven to have racist origins or links, we might feel troubled, distressed, guilty, sad, or concerned. These are normal feelings that are part of active learning and can push us to a place of better, more inclusive, and more fulsome understandings of social problems. However, when a racialized student is told that “race is biological,” their experiences “aren’t real,” they are “too sensitive” during conversations about racism, or they should give an “example” to “prove their point” about racism, they might feel unsafe: e.g.) distressed, scared, excluded, violated, scrutinized, tokenized, put on the spot, and unwelcome. There is a key difference here: while discomfort can move us forward in our learning, feeling unsafe can hold us back; racialized students who feel unsafe might feel like they cannot return to class, participate actively, or be successful in their education at all. When white folks equate their own discomfort with a lack of safety, they might perpetuate some of the things that Garran and Rasmussen identified in their study, such as suggesting that being called “racist” is the same as experiencing racism (when, in reality, it’s not!).

Instructors from dominant social positions are not immune from efforts to preserve their own comfort as well. When confronted with difficult dialogues, challenging questions, and constructive criticism from students, instructors, and TAs may feel the urge to defend themselves, dismiss feedback, or end the conversation altogether.  These impulses tell us a lot about how we might have been conditioned to dodge accountability and avoid difficult conversations that demand change or action. While instructors and TAs are also entitled to safer classroom spaces, there is a difference: white instructors and TAs that are challenged on omissions, missteps, and/or limitations in their coverage of social issues might feel uncomfortable, whereas racialized instructors and TAs who have their qualifications, intellect, identity, and deservingness called into question might feel unsafe.

Instructors play a pivotal role and shoulder much of the responsibility in establishing safety in the classroom. As the studies above indicate, many students mimic the instructor’s approaches; if an instructor is judgmental or closed-minded, then many students may act in the same way. Instructors may be active contributors to setting the stage for the classroom climate, which directly shapes the safety and engagement of students. However, this relationship is further complicated by the instructor’s identity, where many racialized instructors may be faced with precarious safety in parallel with racialized students’ experiences. For the purpose of this section, we will be focusing on how white instructors shape safety.