A Semiotic Analysis of School Stakeholders’ Conceptions of Safety

• In Event: The Interplay of Discourse, Policy, and Perception in Education Inequities

Abstract

The concepts of safety and data vary over time, respond to individuals’ experiences, and are deeply culturally informed. This semiotic analysis explores what school stakeholders conceive of as school safety data. In semi-structured interviews including use of a stimulus text, participants discussed safety, data, and safety data. A series of Greimassian squares were composed to explore the undergirding structures of the concepts: safety, data, and safety data. In addition to describing the range and complexity of stakeholders’ conceptions, we describe how stakeholders make sense of new and outside influences on those conceptions. We also investigate how stakeholders wrestle with tensions among different data stories, data skepticism, and an implicit trust in the objectivity of numerical data.

Authors

• Ann Marie Cotman, University of Texas Austin

• Chris Curran, University of Florida

• Katharine Taylor Harris, University of Florida

• Morgan Lei Killingsworth, University of Florida

• Caleb Hunter, University of Florida

• Emma Rieser, University of Florida