Research project In the postdoc project Danger in the Classroom?, Jenny Jarlsdotter Wikström investigates safety and “safe spaces” in higher education.
The project maps different ways of talking about safety in academia and puts the current discourse on “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” in the light of educational science and philosophy. What kind of safety is sought at the university, and by whom? What methods do educational scientists and philosophers, debaters, and student unions propose to create safety - and what does it mean when safety is set up as an ideal in the higher education environment? This project seeks to answer these questions from an intersectional and feminist perspective.
From the perspective of higher education pedagogy, the debate on safety is exciting because the pedagogical literature and research contains and is based on a paradox: studying and learning should be safe, but at the same time the studies should involve a personal development or forward movement that is not completely risk-free. By contrasting different sources, such as research, media debates and student union publications, the project examines the discourse of safety that is prevalent in higher education classrooms today. It focuses on notions of safety and “safe spaces” in teaching, as well as on “trigger warnings” and other warning systems that are supposed to prevent insecurity and students from being violated. In dialogue with, above all, philosophical, feminist, and intersectional thinkers, I try to understand what the university classroom has become today – and where we are heading.
In the first and second decades of the 21st century, the concepts of safety and consent have come to the forefront of public discourse about higher education, not only in terms of, for example, freedom from sexual harassment on campus and “trigger warnings,” but as an aspect of the faculty-student relationship. In universities in the United States, vocal discussions about curricula, faculty policies and training have resulted in student demands for social justice and trauma awareness on the part of university leadership. Teachers have also engaged in the debate, justifying student demands for a safer learning environment, but more often questioning them. Scholarly contributions on student-led proposals for increased safety often emphasize the “moralism” of students and their participation in the “victim culture”. Students should be treated as 'subjects' or 'citizens', not as customers or helpless victims. These questionings of what demands for different kinds of safety mean or entail have particularly flourished in the context of subjects in gender studies and intersectional perspectives courses, where the ideal learning situation is often described as a 'safe space' for students. In a 'safe' classroom, students can feel safe enough to take risks, honestly express their opinions, and share and explore their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors without risk of trauma or harm. Students' demands for 'trigger warnings' and teachers' initiatives for 'trauma-informed' teaching can be interpreted as means to make the classroom a space free of harmful or hurtful content. However, a call to make classrooms 'safe' implies a sense of the classroom as potentially dangerous, a dialectic that political scientist Jennie Brandén, in the context of public spaces, calls “(un)safe”. A desire for safety and security means constantly having to manage potential risk. The learning environment has also become a place for risk management in the same way that parks, streets, and shopping centers have become, according to research.
At the same time, relational feminist pedagogy and participatory learning as methods or ideals have continued to be influential in the field. The ideal learning situation is described as 'transformative' in nature; both students and teachers learn from each other and bear mutual responsibility for learning according to contemporary pedagogical theories. Drawing on feminist and intersectional pedagogy, it can be argued that learning should be dangerous because it has the potential to radically change one's personal view of oneself and society. This is also the aim of many gender studies courses, which follow 'consciousness-raising' methods dating back to the 1970s. Feminist pedagogy thus seems to be at odds with demands for a safer classroom. “Safety” from this critical perspective can even turn into ‘comfort’ and avoidance of talking about sensitive topics, which hinders learning, critical dialogue and social change. Another pedagogical tradition in a similar vein is norm-critical pedagogy, which draws attention to societal norms and expectations and focuses learning on becoming aware of harmful norms in order to change them. Safety could be understood as such a norm, although it is rarely formulated as such.
This brief overview of two idealized learning situations, one emphasizing freedom from harm and safety, the other transgression and transformation, raises questions about how contested paradigms of learning are experienced by both teachers and students. This is where this research project intervenes with the aim of mapping and trying to understand: How can the ideals that characterize contemporary higher education - creating a 'safe' learning environment where students are protected from harmful content while creating learning situations that are transformative - be understood, and what are the consequences of current pedagogical and societal discourses on safety, danger and vulnerability for university teachers and students? This project asks whether the conflict between what could be called two paradigms of knowledge creation in the classroom is not in fact an opportunity for critique, a tension that should be maintained rather than managed or defused.
This project focuses specifically on Swedish universities and pedagogical discourse, linking them to international conversations about theory and public discourse. I continue on a line of inquiry laid out by security researchers with a Gender Studies focus at Umeå University and extend it further, to the classroom of higher education. The focus is on pedagogical norms, tools and learning environment. Comparisons to other spheres, such as discourses on American campus activities and learning spaces, will be made when relevant.
Theoretically, this project is informed by recent feminist research on New Public Management and security creation in public space, with a particular focus on Swedish cases and Swedish pedagogy, as well as feminist pedagogies of transformation and difference, especially in a Swedish setting, and feminist intersectional theories of power and power structures/strata in research and education. Methodologically, the project mobilizes critical discourse theory and philosophy of education as well as gender studies ways of reading policy documents, debate texts in media and research.
The results of the research project will be presented as peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals in English and Swedish, and reviewed at international conferences of interest.
