Is "Safety" Dangerous? A Critical Examination of the Classroom as Safe Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion that the classroom can, indeed must, be a safe space to promote student engagement and enhance academic outcomes is pervasive in the teaching and learning literature. Despite the prevalence of this claim, there is a dearth of empirical evidence documenting the effectiveness of safe space classrooms in achieving these goals. The purpose of this essay is to provide a critical examination of the classroom as safe space. I begin by deconstructing the common meanings of safety as presented in the pedagogical literature and provide an overview of the existing research on student perceptions of safe space learning environments. I then problematize the metaphor of the classroom as safe space through an examination of 1) the impact of safety on student intellectual development 2) the impossibility of safety for students in marginalized and oppressed populations 3) the challenges to assessing student learning in safe environments and 4) the ambiguity inherent in defining safety for students. I conclude by arguing that both educators and students are better served by the development of an alternative discourse of classroom safety, one that is predicated on the notion of classroom civility. Dans la littérature sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage, la notion selon laquelle la classe doit vraiment être un espace sécuritaire pour promouvoir la participation de l’étudiant et améliorer ses résultats scolaires est omniprésente. Malgré la prévalence de cette affirmation, il y a une pénurie de données probantes empiriques venant étayer l’efficacité des classes en tant qu’espace sécuritaire afin d’atteindre ces buts. L’objectif du présent essai est de procéder à un examen critique de la classe en tant qu’espace sécuritaire. Je commence par déconstruire la signification courante de la sécurité telle qu’elle est présentée dans la littérature sur la pédagogie et fournis un aperçu de la recherche existante sur les perceptions des étudiants relativement aux environnements d’apprentissage sécuritaires. Je considère ensuite la métaphore de la classe en tant qu’espace sécuritaire comme un problème et examine : 1) les répercussions de la sécurité sur le développement intellectuel des étudiants; 2) le caractère impossible de la sécurité pour les étudiants qui font partie des populations marginalisées et opprimées; 3) les difficultés liées à l’évaluation de l’apprentissage des étudiants dans des environnements sécuritaires; 4) l’ambiguïté inhérente à la définition de la sécurité des étudiants. Je conclus en expliquant que les éducateurs et les étudiants sont mieux servis par la création d’un autre type de discours sur la sécurité dans la classe, qui est basé sur la notion de civilité en classe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.086 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".