Safety above all! Pedagogical tensions in Aotearoa, New Zealand, during Covid-19

• In Event: Education and the Making of Democracy: Attitudes, Perceptions, Tensions, and Educational Imaginaries

Proposal

In the last few decades, notions of "safety" have become increasingly relevant in educational policies and debates (Powell et al., 2021). Gaining new momentum during the Covid-19 Pandemic, perspectives about safety frame a broad range of educational issues, from concerns about students' physical health and well-being to children's learning about controversial classroom topics. See, for example, the numerous reports and guidelines published by international organizations using "safe" as the keyword (e.g., WHO (2020) "Return to schools safely after lockdowns"; UNESCO (2020), "Safe online learning in the times of Covid-19"; UNICEF (2020) "Safe to learn during Covid-19".
Despite its frequent use and benign overtones, 'safety' meaning is not well-defined for educational contexts beyond concerns about security and physical harm (Sullivan, 2014). Moreover, while evoking notions of respect, freedom of expression, and lack of discrimination, ideas of "safety" appear to take on an almost sacred quality (Smith, 2014). As shown during the Covid-19 crisis and the heated debates about what schooling was possible in times of crisis, 'safety' remained vaguely used and, at worst, a reified notion (Browning & Romer, 2020).
Current calls for better safety in schools have not been exempt from critique. Some scholars, for example, have shown that the idealized goal of protecting children from all possible risks often diminishes their participatory rights (Warrington & Larkins, 2019), and encouraging a "pedagogy of comfort" (Amsler, 2011) could suppress learning about conflicts (Flensner & Von der Lippe, 2019). Others have even questioned the possibility of creating safe learning spaces (Leonardo & Porter, 2010), and Barret (2010) argues that a fool-proof "safe" learning space is a dangerous myth. Classroom interactions cannot be detached from broader social dynamics and hierarchies that would be reinforced if hidden in the safety discourse.
In this paper, we aim to address subtheme 3 of the CIES CFP “How should we go about preparing teachers to educate students in uncertain, insecure moments, where competing values, pressures, and agendas exceed the traditional scope of the profession?”
This project uses Biesta's (2010; 2020) theory of the three domains of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. As Biesta explains, these domains articulate an “educational vantage point” to discuss the “goods of education” and question the common sense of the latest fashions in contemporary education, such as safety, by examining “what is on offer and what is actually needed” (p. 1025).
Using qualitative data collected in five schools during the Covid-19 crisis in Aotearoa, we explore the educational and political tensions created by school safety concerns in these unprecedented times. Our methods for data collection included semi-structured interviews with nine teachers and principals, five focus groups with thirty senior students (16-18 years old), analysis of school public documents, and observational field notes of school settings. This research has the ethical approval of The University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee.
After presenting the context of the study (5 schools during Covid-19 in New Zealand) and describing our case studies approach (Stake, 1995), we present the findings which highlight the nuanced ways in which the discourses of safety have generated powerful narratives that while encouraging teachers and principals to adopt cautious attitudes and consider the students' well-being, simultaneously drastically limited their pedagogical options and expectations. Our data shows that an overtly careful and ill-defined idea of safety entered into direct tension with the students' rights to schooling and citizenship. In the focus groups, participants pointed to the tensions between educators' good intentions —creating safer environments—and the imposed restrictions on students to express doubts, voice needs, and make their own decisions in the schools, resulting in fewer learning opportunities to understand a complex social world.
In the qualification domain, the focus on safety in the schools during the Covid-19 Pandemic encouraged the development of a curriculum focused on an overly romantic idea of students' fragility and the need to provide a "comfortable learning environment." This good-intentioned notion of comfort presupposed students' frailty and required intentional efforts to avoid learning about social and political conflicts.
Teachers' emphasis on creating comfortable learning environments in their return to school after lockdowns led them to use arts-based pedagogies to provide opportunities for the students to "have fun" and "express their emotions.” While we agree that playing, having fun, and allowing the expression of students' emotions should always be important considerations, they should not be used to avoid teaching about current affairs explicitly. Students were aware of many Covid-19 traumatic dimensions as well as the BLM protests, problems with public policies, and rising socio-economic inequalities. Still, engaging with current affairs and issues that worried both students and teachers did not have any educational space within the schools.
Similarly, analyzing the socialization domain showed that the safety rationale implied avoidance of students' physical-emotional discomfort as one of the highest goals of school life at the expense of other values like learning to accept others' perspectives, critical inquiry, and social justice. Finally, concerning the subjectification domain, our findings show how the educational discourses of security and safety operated as forms of control and restriction of students' exercise of civic rights. To protect students' safety, paternalistic pedagogical measures, such as limiting students' social action projects or access to social media content, were imposed without much discussion and consultation with the students. These measures hindered students' participation in social and digital spaces, both perceived exclusively as dangerous and without any potential educational benefits.
We conclude that the pedagogical tensions emerging from the notions of safety, education, and citizenship in New Zealand, which produced a 'regime of truth' (Foucault, 1980) in which anything that threatens a reified and underexplored conception of safety (risk, conflict, dissent) needs to be erased from the culture of schools. While desires to protect children in schools are understandable and necessary, our research indicates the relevance of adopting a more critical perspective. Safety in schools is an important dimension that must be accompanied by acknowledging the agency of the students to avoid creating impoverished educational landscapes that may not be desirable for the great majority of teachers, students, and families.

Authors

• Marta Estellés, The University of Waikato

• Gustavo E Fischman, Arizona State University