What Do We Mean When We Talk about
“Safe Space”? A Philosophical Exploration of a
Contentious Metaphor in Education
by
Bhuvinder Singh Vaid (he, him, his)

M.A. (Education), Simon Fraser University, 2008
B.A. (English Literature), The University of British Columbia, 2002

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the
Educational Theory and Practice: Philosophy of Education Program
Faculty of Education

© Bhuvinder Singh Vaid 2021
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
Fall 2021

Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or reuse is done with the relevant national copyright legislation.

Declaration of Committee
Name:

Bhuvinder Singh Vaid

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis title:

What Do We Mean When We Talk about “Safe
Space”? A Philosophical Exploration of a
Contentious Metaphor in Education

Committee:

Chair:

Lannie Kanevsky
Associate Professor, Education

Kevin O’Neill
Supervisor
Associate Professor, Education
Mark Fettes
Committee Member
Associate Professor, Education
Sean Zwagerman
Examiner
Associate Professor, English, Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences
Trevor Norris
External Examiner
Associate Professor, Department of Educational
Studies
Brock University

ii

Unceded Territory Acknowledgement
This work represents a journey that took place on the unceded territory
(legally, socially, and spiritually) of countless Indigenous nations, bands, groups,
and peoples throughout what is today known as Canada and the United States.
Most of this work’s writing took place on the unceded territory of the Coast
Salish peoples including the Stó:lō, Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ
(Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), as well as the Syilx
(Okanagan), x̣àʼisla (Haisla) and Ts’msyen (Tsimshian) peoples.
This work is part of my attempt to recognize my responsibility as a teacher
to understand the central role my chosen field of education played in the forced
assimilation and cultural genocide of these Indigenous peoples. This is a
recognition of history necessary for any teacher who wants to equitably serve the
educational needs of others in a diverse community. It is my hope that I can bring
this recognition to the learning relationships I form with my students and the
readers of this work, so that we can continue the work of reconciliation needed to
heal our shared community.

iii

Abstract
Educators have described their classes and institutions as “safe spaces” with
increasing frequency and certainty since the 1990s. However, philosophers of
education such as Eamon Callan, Cris Mayo, and Sigal Ben-Porath have found
“safe space” to be conceptually and pedagogically lacking when interpreted from
intersectional positionalities operating within the hegemonic white, masculine,
and consumerist discourses permeating a modern educational system that
strives for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion.
This work operationalizes “safe space” by recognizing it as what linguists Max
Black, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and philosopher Paul Ricoeur would
term a conceptual metaphor, which structures thinking about education. Critical
pedagogues such as Michael Apple, Raymond Callahan, Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich,
Herbert Kliebard, and Peter McLaren have argued how this type of structured
thinking can influence pedagogical practices; but to date, no in-depth
philosophical analysis of “safe space” exists in the literature. Interrogating
modern debates about the nature of “space” inherited from Isaac Newton (who
viewed it as an absolute container filled with independent subjects/objects), and
Gottfried Leibniz (who viewed space as an infinite set of relations between
subjects/objects), the implications for any educationally worthwhile understanding
and practice of “safety” or “safe space” are shown to be suspect due to the
Newtonian inheritances.
Ultimately, I posit that “safe space” is unavoidably Newtonian – assumed to be
capable of formulation a priori such that students are entitled to a guarantee that
a class space will be safe in some sense that can be unambiguously stated,
irrespective of who is taking the class, what the class is about, and what is going
on in the world. This a priori safe space is then one that institutions feel
responsible for guaranteeing, teachers feel responsible for creating and
maintaining, with students feeling no responsibility other than reaping its benefits.
Linking this work’s conceptual analysis of the Leibnizian inheritances to “space”

iv

and “safety” (understood as infinitely relational) to that of critical pedagogues
such as bell hooks, I argue for a more philosophically grounded and
educationally worthwhile understanding of “safe space”.

Keywords: Safe Space; Philosophy of Education; Paul Ricoeur; Isaac Newton;
Gottfried Leibniz, bell hooks; Conceptual Metaphor; Equity, Diversity, and
Inclusion (EDI)

v

Dedication
Seeds can put down roots... whether they flower or not.

vi

Acknowledgements
As any reader of this work will soon discover, using words to describe
metaphoric concepts and abstract experiences has its limitations. In fact, words
alone are not enough to fully honour the complex relationships that contribute to
a work such as this thesis. Therefore, the immense sense of gratitude I owe to
the people named in these Acknowledgements, for their countless hours of
generosity toward me, cannot be captured by these words alone.
One way to consider this sense of gratitude within the complexities of
these relationships is to search for and locate it in the thesis: every idea, citation,
example, consideration, and implication in this work was developed in
relationship with these people. However, as a reader, considering who helped
Bhuvinder with a specific point, sentence, paragraph, section, or chapter is a
useless exercise as it is impossible to disentangle all the relationships from all
the learning that contributed to this work. Instead, consider how the ideas
presented in this thesis could enable new possibilities for the relationships in your
life. Ask yourself, “how could I be generous to others with whom I enter into
[learning] relationships?”
Locating this act of generosity in a particular relationship is often a
necessity to better understand the source of one’s gratitude. This thesis
represents my countless relationships with others as we strived to understand
what is meant by safe space. A hallmark of almost all these relationships was an
unconditional generosity toward the topic and toward my attempt to explain it to
others through this thesis.
First, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the generosity extended
to me through familial relationships. Without Kuldip, Mohinder, Kuljeet, Moninder,
Negin, Ashlee, Dawn and Jamie, fear of failure and not completing this thesis at
times overwhelmed my forward progress. Each, in their own way, offered a
simple yet generous reminder that their love and support was not contingent
upon success.
vii

Second, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the generosity
extended to me through personal and professional relationships. Greg Scutt,
Chloe Simone Humphreys, Chris Peters, Robert Dowding, Douglas Zacker, Darin
Cohen, Duncan Miller, Glenda Wallace, Lara Neto, Chad Watts, and Bryan
Jones generously found time for me when I was most in need to be reassured
and reminded of my passion for the ideas in this work. Abigail Kolb and Gerald
Walton for always reminding me of the importance of these ideas in work beyond
my own. Rob Manery, Stephanie Burdick Shepherd, and Cristina Cammarano for
always being patient toward my sharing underdeveloped thoughts. Jason Manuel
Carreiro for his unwavering friendship and encouragement. Milena Droumeva for
her faith in the value of my ideas and her steadfast support in my ability to
complete this work. Finally, David Burns, the epitome of a philosopher of
education, for his boundless patience and care listening to newly formed ideas
and offering connections which I had yet to consider.
Third, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the generosity
extended to me through learning relationships. Heesoon Bai, Ann Chinnery,
Claudia Ruitenberg, Sean Blenkinsop, and Elizabeth Marshall generously offered
me countless hours of dialogue, feedback, and support as my teachers. Lannie
Kanevsky, Sean Zwagerman, and Trevor Norris offered a generous reading and
thoughtful questions about this work as the members of my thesis committee.
However, there are four teachers for whom I am especially grateful.
Charles Bingham was always generous with his encouragement. He encouraged
me to recognize my discomfort during conversations about space as a potential
motivation to begin further exploration. Robin Barrow was always generous with
his questioning. He questioned the value of exploring only this discomfort about
space because it alone could not offer a philosophically grounded investigation.
Instead, he encouraged me to situate this study within established conversations
about space between philosophers. Kevin O’Neill was always generous with his
ability to link the implications of this study to current educational concerns such
as safety. It was Kevin that committed to seeing me through to the end of this

viii

work, offering me countless hours of mentorship and quiet support, while
advocating forcibly on my behalf to others. Mark Fettes was always generous
with his patience. Slowly, he taught me how to systematically share my thinking,
through organization and clarity of writing, so my audience could determine itself
their next steps for the explanation about safe space offered in this work.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the generosity my
partner Robyn Hill has taught me to extend to myself. Before we met, I had little
patience for my own shortcomings and this would result in no thought, no idea,
and no writing, ever being good enough to continue the methodical work needed
to finish this thesis. Through her generosity toward my shortcomings, some real
and many perceived, she taught me how to be gentler with myself. With this
gentler view toward myself and my thinking, I found that for the first time in my
life I had a partner with whom to build ideas with together. This thesis is therefore
our ideas, our citations, our examples, our considerations, and our implications. I
am truly grateful for all that she has shared with and taught me, and I know that
these words, any words, will never do justice to this generosity. Thank you.
Last, but not least, thank you Deva for the generosity only man’s best
friend can offer.

ix

Table of Contents
Declaration of Committee ................................................................................................ ii
Unceded Territory Acknowledgement ............................................................................. iii
Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ...................................................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... vii
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ x
List of Tables ................................................................................................................. xii
List of Figures............................................................................................................... xiv
Glossary ........................................................................................................................ xv
Chapter 1.
Why are discussions about my classroom as a “safe space” so
difficult? ............................................................................................................... 1
1.1. Locating the difficulty ............................................................................................. 1
1.2. Organization of this work ....................................................................................... 8
1.3. Safe space as metaphor in the practices of educational institutions, teachers, and
students............................................................................................................... 12
Chapter 2.
Why is safe space a problematic metaphor when discussing
education? ......................................................................................................... 14
2.1. Metaphors in educational discussions ................................................................. 14
2.2. Substitution, comparison, and interaction theories of metaphor ........................... 18
2.3. Problems in education and meaning when metaphor functions through
substitution, comparison, or interaction ................................................................ 22
2.4. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor ....................................................................... 30
2.5. Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and interaction at multiple levels to develop meaning
............................................................................................................................ 38
2.6. Safe space as a conceptual metaphor in education ............................................. 40
Chapter 3.
How can we consider safe space at Ricoeur’s level of the word, and
at the level of the sentence (statement)? ......................................................... 44
3.1. Mapping the conceptual metaphor for safe space and “my class” ........................ 45
3.2. Space at the level of the word.............................................................................. 48
3.3. Space at the level of the statement ...................................................................... 62
3.4. Considering space at the level of the word and statement ................................... 86
3.5. Safe at the level of the word ................................................................................ 96
3.6. Safe at the level of the statement ...................................................................... 108
3.7. Blending safe at the level of the word and statement, with the space of my class
.......................................................................................................................... 118
3.7.1. Location ............................................................................................... 121
3.7.2. Boundedness / Boundary ..................................................................... 122
3.7.3. Possibility for movement / Free of Pain ................................................ 123
3.7.4. Positionality .......................................................................................... 124
3.7.5. Evaluation ............................................................................................ 126

x

3.8.

Safe space at the level of educational discourse ............................................... 127

Chapter 4.
What can we learn when considering safe space at the level of
current educational discourses?.................................................................... 136
4.1. The conceptual metaphor: Safe Space of My Class .......................................... 136
4.2. Practicing safe space: Institutions and Students ................................................ 143
4.2.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Institutions and Students ............. 147
4.2.2. Considering positionality for Institutions versus Students ..................... 155
4.3. Practicing safe space: Institutions and Teachers ............................................... 156
4.3.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Institutions and Teachers ............ 157
4.3.2. Considering positionality for Institutions versus Teachers .................... 163
4.4. Practicing safe space: Students and Teachers .................................................. 164
4.4.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Students and Teachers ............... 165
4.4.2. Considering positionality for Students versus Teachers ....................... 171
4.5. Leibnizian relational safe space and inclusive pedagogy ................................... 172
Chapter 5.
How can a richer understanding of safe space inform our practice in
educational spaces to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion? .................. 173
5.1. Safe space, EDI, and our educational spaces ................................................... 173
5.2. Safe space as pedagogy and practice ............................................................... 179
5.2.1. Explaining one’s philosophy, strategy, and intent ................................. 180
5.2.2. Sharing a confessional narrative to demonstrate the positionality of
learning ................................................................................................ 181
5.2.3. Recognizing that the acknowledgment of positionality is not dependent
upon presence in the classroom ........................................................... 184
5.3. Why this matters for educational practice and future scholarship ....................... 186
Reference List ........................................................................................................... 191

xi

List of Tables
Table 2.6-1:
Table 3.1-1:

Location Event-Structure metaphor ........................................................ 42
Location Event-Structure metaphor ........................................................ 45

Table 3.1-2:
Table 3.1-3:

Space of My Class conceptual metaphor ............................................... 46
Safety of My Class conceptual metaphor ............................................... 46

Table 3.1-4:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ...... 47

Table 3.1-5:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ...... 47

Table 3.2-1:

Space-location of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor ................................................................................................ 51

Table 3.2-2:

Space-location-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor .............................................................................. 52

Table 3.2-3:

Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ....................................... 56
Absolute Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ....................................... 59
Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ....................................... 65
Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ....................................... 67
Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality-evaluation of
My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ..................... 70

Table 3.2-4:
Table 3.3-1:
Table 3.3-2:
Table 3.3-3:
Table 3.3-4:
Table 3.3-5:
Table 3.3-6:

Absolute Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ....................................... 73
Absolute Perceived Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of
My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ..................... 77
Perception-Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality of My
Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ........................... 85

Table 3.4-1:

Perception-Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality-evaluation
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ................. 88

Table 3.4-2:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ...... 96

Table 3.5-1:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ...... 97

Table 3.5-2:

Safety-location-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor .............................................................................. 99

Table 3.5-3:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-fear of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor ............................................................................ 102

Table 3.5-4:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-fear of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor ............................................................................ 105

Table 3.5-5:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-positionality-fear of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ..................................... 107

Table 3.6-1:

Relative Safety-location-boundary-pain-positionality-fear of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ..................................... 113

xii

Table 3.6-2:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor .... 117

Table 3.7-1:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor .... 119

Table 3.7-2:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor .... 120

Table 3.7-3:

Safety-location of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 121

Table 3.7-4:

Space-location of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 121

Table 3.7-5:

Safety-location blending with Space-location for Safe Space of My
Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ......................... 121

Table 3.7-6:

Safety-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 122
Space-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 122
Safety-boundary blending with Space-boundary for Safe Space of My
Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ......................... 122

Table 3.7-7:
Table 3.7-8:

Safety-pain of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor
............................................................................................................. 123
Table 3.7-10: Space-movement of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 123
Table 3.7-11: Safety-pain blending with Space-movement for Safe Space of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ..................................... 124
Table 3.7-12: Safety-positionality of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 124
Table 3.7-9:

Table 3.7-13: Space-positionality of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 125
Table 3.7-14: Safety-positionality blending with Space- positionality for Safe Space of
My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ................... 125
Table 3.7-15: Safety-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 126
Table 3.7-16: Space-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 126
Table 3.7-17: Safety-evaluation blending with Space-evaluation for Safe Space of My
Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor ......................... 127
Table 3.8-1:
Table 4.1-1:

The Safe Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor .............................................................................................. 128
The Safe Space of My Class conceptual metaphor .............................. 140

xiii

List of Figures
Figure 1.1-1: Convocation Mall as viewed from the Academic Quadrangle ................... 4
Figure 3.2-1: Descartes description of Euclidean geometric space.............................. 54
Figure 3.3-1: Author’s approximation of Kant’s analogy of the spectacles ................... 83

xiv

Glossary
Anthropomorphism

The attribution of human characteristics or
behaviours to non-humans (i.e., animals, objects,
etc.).

a priori

Knowledge or reasoning which is known to be true
through theoretical deduction rather than through
concrete observation or experience in the world.

Archetype

The unintended and/or concealed structure of
thinking a metaphor imparts.

Conceptual domain

The range of experience and knowledge evoked by
a particular linguistic term or expression.

Conceptual metaphor

A metaphor considered as a mapping between
conceptual domains.

Entailment relationships Implications based upon the connection made
between two subjects, objects, or experiences in a
metaphor.
Essentialism

In education, the view that certain ideas or practices
are foundational to all further understanding.

Ethereal

Ideal or seemingly too perfect.

Gestalt

An organized whole that is perceived as more than
the sum of its parts.

Hermeneutic

A theory and method for the study of interpretation.

Intersectionality

The overlapping nature of social categorizations
such as race, class, disability, sexual orientation,
and gender identity as they apply to an individual or
group.

Metaphysics

Consideration of existence beyond the physical,
tangible world and its experience.

Metonymy

Figure of speech in which a thing or concept is
referred to by the name of something closely
associated with that thing or concept.

Microaggression

An indirect, subtle, and often unintentional
reproduction of a repressive social or cultural norm.

Mimesis

The ability of art or literature to represent or imitate
the real world.

Nominalism

A philosophical view which denies the existence of
both universalities and abstract objects.

xv

Ontology

Considering the nature of being, reality, and
possibility.

Paradigmatic

A typical or canonical example of something.

Polysemy

From Greek, the ability of a word or phrase to have
multiple meanings.

Positionality

The social or political context that creates your
identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality,
etc.

Semiotic

Any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs,
where a sign is defined as anything that
communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to
the sign's interpreter.

Semantic

Meaning derived in language and its logic.

Sign

Anything the communicates a meaning not
pertaining to itself.

Source domain

Conceptual domain on which a metaphor draws to
illuminate another conceptual domain.

Target domain

The conceptual domain illuminated by a metaphor
that draws on a better understood source domain.

Transpose

To exchange locations or meaning.

Utilitarian

Something that is useful or functional.

xvi

Chapter 1.
Why are discussions about my classroom as a “safe
space” so difficult?
1.1. Locating the difficulty
Before graduate school I had never worked as a teacher. The first time I
stood in front of a classroom full of my undergraduate students, I drew upon one
ability that had aided me through my own learning experience: mimicking my
teachers. This ability had been a godsend when my elementary school special
education teacher, Mrs. J., had recognized the many difficulties I faced: speaking
no English when I began kindergarten; a severe speech impediment when asked
to speak English; and confusion when asked to read or write due to dyslexia.
When Mrs. J. tried to explain these difficulties to my parents, they grew
defensive and replied there was nothing wrong with their son. They told Mrs. J.
that I had to simply work harder. At home, not seeing immediate progress, a
pervasive shame was directed toward me. My parents would constantly say to
my younger brothers: don’t be like him. Near the end of grade 1, fearing that I
might need to be held back a year, Mrs. J. sat down with my mother and
explained that there was nothing wrong, or broken, with her son. Instead, she
explained that I simply needed to learn in a different way, and once successful, I
could excel in my studies.
For the next three years, I spent two half-days every week with Mrs. J.
doing speech drills and practicing reading strategies that corrected for the
dyslexia. Through this experience, I learnt how to mimic Mrs. J. She showed me
how I was supposed to speak with my teachers and classmates, and how to read
and understand new ideas. I mimicked everything she showed me, and
eventually, began to mimic my other teachers. My confidence grew as I went
from the student always silent and afraid to share, to being the first to raise my

1

hand and always with something to say or add to the discussion. The
compliments from my teachers ranged from telling me how well-spoken I was to
their belief that I would one day join the teaching ranks because I already spoke
as they did.
However, not everyone in these classes was able to mimic the teacher as
well as I. My indigenous classmates, as well as others from visible minorities,
were rarely called upon by our teachers, and when called upon were unwilling to
speak up in class. Kind words of encouragement and praise, to which I had
grown accustomed, were rarely directed to these classmates. Gradually, I
stopped noticing the different way I was treated compared to other racialized
children.
My mimicry ability had allowed me to belong with the teacher and the
white students in my classes. So, on my first day as a teacher in front of a class
of my undergraduate students, I mimicked how my teachers had acted and
spoken. Most significantly for the present work, I repeated a phrase that I had
heard over and over again: this is a safe space for us to learn together. This
declaration — that my classroom would be a safe space for my students — was
something I repeated in subsequent semesters to fellow teachers, new students,
and in writing so often that I would have been hard pressed to describe my
classroom any other way.
In my mind there existed a direct relationship between safe space and
positive learning outcomes. However, I could not clearly elaborate what exactly
this relationship looked like or how it functioned. Though I sensed it was an
important correlation worth considering in educational theory, I could not explain
to others in any definitive way what “safe space” meant. As I continued to
awkwardly define the qualities of my class as a “safe space”, I quickly discovered
that no matter my wording, others would leap to conclusions about what I was
describing. These misunderstandings were my first indication that perhaps the

2

meaning imparted by the phrase “safe space” was more complex than it first
appeared.
As I considered what “safe space” could mean more deeply, further
questions kept arising: what exactly does it mean to describe the complex set of
teaching and learning relationships in a classroom as a safe space? Does this
“space” exist in an absolute sense, or is it in flux? Is safe space a place, a
relationship, or a state? Is it an intention for practice? Is it a specific set of
pedagogical practices?
Central to this inquiry was something more basic: what did I mean by
“educational space”, and in what ways might this concept of “space” be important
for student learning? I held the belief, in part from my experiences as a student,
that the physical design of some classrooms made teaching and learning more
difficult. If the physical design lacked specific affordances, for instance moveable
seating to allow for student-student interaction, or if it included a lectern that
tethered the teacher to a specific part of the room, it imposed limits on
meaningful pedagogical relationships. But could the opposite also be true?
Would an educational space designed in a particular way make teaching and
learning easier?
This was the genesis of what eventually became my master’s thesis (Vaid,
2008) about a specific educational space that had always fascinated me: Simon

3

Fraser University’s Convocation Mall.

Figure 1.1-1: Convocation Mall as viewed from the Academic Quadrangle
(RestfulC401, 2012)
I spent months pouring over any source which would aid me in better
understanding this space. I reviewed articles and personal journals in the
University’s official archives that described how the mall had been envisioned by
its original architects and designers, Arthur Erickson and George Massey
(Macdonald, 1962; Shrum, 1986; Stainsby, 1964):
…the campus heart – “The Mall” flanked by the library and the
bookstore on one side, the auditorium, playhouse, exhibition area,
cafeteria on the other side. The Mall, furnished with notice boards,
speaker’s lectern, benches, etc. is open to the air but covered as a
“galleria” with a weather fast translucent roof. This is the meeting
place of the university, the point of arrival from the bus stop, the place
for rallies, and in spring and fall, the termination of the convocation
procession from the Academic Quad (Erickson & Massey,1963,
p. 2).
Exploring further, I reviewed how the design had been received by other
architects (Rogatnick, 1968), educational experts, historians, and the community

4

after completion (Johnston, 2005). There were not-so-subtle allusions to ancient
Greek and Roman forums and squares, imbuing it with a sense of tradition. It
was also seen as a transition between the realm of theory, represented by the
library which abutted it, and the pedagogical practices embodied by the
Academic Quadrangle which housed the classrooms of the University. Finally,
the utilization of the space by students embodied a sense of creativity and
community during the early years of the University (Johnston, 2005). My
research was confirming my belief that just as poorly designed spaces may
negatively influence learning, thoughtfully designed spaces like Convocation Mall
could positively influence the learning experiences of students.
Yet the story turned out to be more complex. In my master’s thesis I
explored how the Mall came to be understood as a site of resistance to the
conservative politics of the University administration (Johnston, 2005), how this
influenced teaching and learning relationships throughout the curriculum
(Camley, 1999; Rossi, 2003), and eventually, how the University began to rewrite
this history for public relations and institutional branding purposes. Early hints of
this process appear in a 1993 address by the then University president:
…most of the students did not take part in the demonstrations [during
the University’s first 10 years of operation between 1965-1975]
unless they needed some distraction, particularly at mid-terms…All
but a couple of hundred students were interested in getting an
education and the life of the university went on without too much
disruption…Many of the protesters were from off campus and not
SFU students…It may be said that the younger brothers and sisters
of the ardent protesters thought that their siblings had not
accomplished a great deal, and had delayed their completion of their
university studies to no great purpose or gain… (Wilson,1993, ¶8).
Convocation Mall, if not the entire university, had lost the contested
meaning and practices it had once held as an intentional site of dialogue and
resistance to something with clear boundaries that demarcated legitimate versus
illegitimate learning practices (Wilson, 1993; Camley, 1999; Rossi, 2003;
Johnston, 2005). The physical space, of course, had not changed much over
time, but something had shifted in how people, including myself, perceived and

5

therefore discussed the mall. The initial hypothesis during my master’s thesis
evolved into the realization that a greater understanding of a space like
Convocation Mall may clarify the intentionality of my practices as a teacher or as
a student that I brought into the space of my classroom.
As a teaching assistant and sessional instructor, I therefore arranged my
course syllabi to reflect the contested meaning and historicity of our shared built
environment:
The space of our class is a part of a long history here at the University
of questioning, challenging, and growing as individuals and as a
community. Perhaps the most well-known space on campus is the
Convocation Mall, the covered space beside the library, where in the
early years of the University students would meet to share and
discuss their experiences and challenges on an almost daily basis. I
wish to promote a similar type of space for our classroom, where you
can feel safe to share your experiences and challenges with what we
are learning and know that you will be supported as we work together
to understand and overcome these challenges [Emphasis added by
author].
When I shared this statement with others, I noticed two patterns in the
interpretation and feedback they offered. First, they might describe past spaces
or environments in which they had felt safe while learning. Second, they might
describe past relationships with others that had made them feel safe while
learning. These seemingly divergent interpretations bothered me because of the
apparent lack of a unifying concept that could account for both. The simplicity of
the words “safe” and “space” were not translating into any shared understanding.
My effort to clarify what was meant by “space” had not made the notion of “safe
space” any clearer for my students or myself. I began to recognize that this
murky understanding surrounding the phrase “safe space” was evidence of a
more nuanced interconnectedness between the physical and relational spheres
of education. The language of “space” was operating to link these domains in a
way I didn’t fully understand. And this observation led me to wonder whether
work on the function of language and its philosophy might shed light on my

6

perplexities regarding “safe space”. As observed by the British philosopher of
language J.L. Austin:
…words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools:
we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must
forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us (Austin,
Urmson, & Warnock, 1979, pp. 181-182).
As a teacher, I had implicitly understood words’ utilitarian nature. I needed
to pick my words carefully, especially when working with students in a
linguistically diverse class. However, Austin’s reference to the “traps that
language sets us” led me to reflect on the linguistic choices I was making in my
teaching. I began to recognize that when I worked with students who spoke
English as an additional language, I tried to use words that (in my eyes) held no
metaphoric meaning. As I learnt more about the philosophy of language (cf.
Austin, 1975; 1979; Heidegger, 1982; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Ricoeur, 1975),
this strategy of choosing my words carefully to avoid problematic metaphors was
quickly undermined, as most words have metaphors buried within their
etymology. All language was revealing itself to be metaphoric in some way. The
solution, then, was not to avoid metaphors like “safe space”, but understand how
they were impacting differing understanding by students’, teachers, and higher
education administrators.
In my explorations, I encountered a 1998 article by Robert Boostrom that
brought the relevance of metaphor to discussions of safe space in education into
sharp relief. Boostrom argued that “safe space”, which began as a metaphor
used to talk about education, had begun to be mistaken as a way to practice
education. Drawing upon his experiences with colleagues as they spoke about
their educational spaces (namely their classrooms) as safe spaces, Boostrom
observed how disparate educators used the phrase as “a way of talking about
teaching” (p. 397), and that it reflected “how teachers see themselves, their
students, and their work” (p. 397). Boostrom’s observation helped me understand
that the use of this safe space metaphor did not refer to a specific “way of doing

7

teaching” (p. 397), but rather served as a tool for sharing experiences of
teaching. However, as Boostrom noted:
[O]ne of the problems with metaphors is that because it is through
them that we are able to see, we rarely look closely at them … This
is hazardous not so much because they obscure our efforts to
communicate with those outside the business [of education], but
rather because they successfully communicate ideas we have never
intended (p. 397).
It dawned on me that the metaphor of safe space was functioning in
exactly this way in my conversations with colleagues and students. Not only was
the metaphor much more complex than it had appeared, but this nuance was
often not acknowledged by how I or others used it. As Boostrom observed, a
metaphor might be successful at communicating ideas about the experience of
an educational relationship and simultaneously evoking associations that many
do not intend when they refer to the “safe space of my class”. I recognized that
by first understanding how a metaphor could evoke these unintended
associations, I could interrogate what resulted from a reference to the “safe
space of my class” and then consider how students, teachers, and administrators
could arrive at radically different interpretations of safe space.
This then became the focus of my thesis work. As I delved deeper into the
literature, however, I was reminded by my committee that a study of this literature
alone would not offer me the practice-oriented clarity I desired. Instead, I must
constantly strive to develop links between this theoretical literature and the
practice of teaching that drove my interest. The problematic metaphor of safe
space might benefit from an exclusively conceptual or philosophical analysis, but
the analysis carried out for my thesis would have to be philosophy in the service
of education.

1.2. Organization of this work
To interrogate what meaning the safe space metaphor is communicating
(both intended and otherwise) about a modern education system addressing

8

ideals of being inclusive to a vast diversity, it is first necessary to consider how
metaphors function in language. Chapter 2 of this work will offer a deeper and
more thorough analysis of some of the different types of problems that
metaphors can create when utilized in the context of education. The analysis first
explores one of the most pervasive and problematic metaphors in modern
educational discourse, namely, the “school as factory” (Apple, 1979; Bentley,
1998; Callahan, 1962; Egan, 1988; Freire, 1970/2000; Rist, 1973). Language that
denotes capitalist business and efficiency has resulted in words like organization,
production, efficiency, outcomes, and accountability being applied to both
business and educational institutions alike. This process of interpreting school
through its metaphoric equation to a factory was quite fruitful as it offered
insights, understandings, and similarities between the two that allowed for deeper
analysis. However, the nature of metaphoric language is also problematic
because our ability to understand the primary subject of the “school” became
unduly tied to the attributes of the secondary subject of the “factory”. Our
independent understanding of the factory, the secondary subject, could then
come to dominate, through what philosopher of language Max Black called
“entailment relationships” (1962). Our ability to make sense of the primary
subject was thereby intertwined with the many unintended associations of the
secondary.
To better understand how these ideas are imparted from the secondary
subject onto the primary subject, I will review the function of the substitution,
comparison, and interaction theories of metaphor (Richard, 1936; Beardsley,
1962; Black, 1962; Ricoeur, 1975; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). I will show that
neither the substitution nor comparison theory is capable of accounting for the
vast array of unintended ideas that are being imparted with the use of the safe
space metaphor in education (Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2017; Deresiewicz, 2017;
Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; 2018; Weigel, 2016; Whittington, 2018). In contrast, the
interaction theory of metaphor developed by Black (1962) begins the exploration,
but it is only with the writing of Paul Ricoeur and his interactive theory of
metaphor (1975) that we arrive at a more thorough appreciation of the complexity
9

of how metaphors function in language. I will therefore explore Ricoeur’s theory
of metaphor in detail, to explain how a metaphor imparts meaning at the level of
its use as a word, its use within a statement or sentence, and its use within a
discourse. This will allow me in turn to review the influence of Ricoeur’s approach
on the subsequent study of the relationship between language and thinking in the
field of cognitive linguistics (Johnson, 1993; Gibbs, 1994; Grady, 1997; Lakoff &
Johnson, 1999; Winter, 2001; Davidson, 1978; Searle, 1979; Rorty, 1989; Butler,
1990; Turner, 1996; Steen, 1999; Fauconnier & Turner, 1994; Fauconnier, 1997;
Grady et al., 1999; Coulson & Oakley, 2000; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002).
The work of the cognitive linguists on conceptual metaphors deepened
Ricoeur’s insights into how a metaphor can structure the thinking about a subject
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; 1999; Grady, 1997; Johnson, 2008). I will therefore
draw on this work to disentangle meanings imparted by the safe space metaphor
within an educational context, and to analyze how the metaphor structures our
thinking about what is possible or impossible, legitimate or illegitimate, relevant
or irrelevant.
Chapter 3 of this work will therefore conduct a systematic mapping of what
is meant by metaphorical references to the “safe space” of a class. Drawing on
the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980; 1999), this mapping will
reveal the conceptual function of the safe space metaphor. The first step in this
mapping is distinguishing between the spatial and physical experience that
constitutes the source domain for a conceptual metaphor, along with the
intangible relational experience that constitutes the target domain (Grady, 1997;
Johnson, 1981; 2008). I will use this approach to identify the range of meanings
activated by the concepts of “safe” and “space”. The second step undertaken in
this mapping is the consideration of how “safe” and “space” interact within the
conceptual metaphor that addresses the experience of “my class”. Therefore, two
distinct mappings become necessary in this chapter, first for the metaphor “my
class as an experience of space” and then “my class as an experience of safety”,
which are blended in the latter part of the chapter to develop a deeper

10

understanding of what the “safe space of my class” metaphor intentionally and
unintentionally imparts.
During the respective mappings for space and safety, firstly at the level of
the word’s meaning, secondly at the level of the statement, and thirdly at the
level of discourse, possible sources for unintended meanings transmitted by the
metaphor are located within past philosophical debates (Johnson, 1981) about
the nature of both space and safety. Centrally, I draw on the philosophical
debates about the nature of “space” originating in competing theories posited by
Isaac Newton, about an absolute understanding of space (Alexander, 1956;
Casey, 2013; DiSalle, 2002; Einstein & Jammer, 1969; Hall, 1992; Hatfield, 2006;
Jammer, 1969; Shapiro, 2002), and by Gottfried Leibniz about a relational
understanding of space (Aiton, 1985; Bobro, 2005; Greene, 2005; Hawking,
2010; Perkins, 2007; Vailati, 1997). My argument will be that two distinct and
competing understandings of space are present in the ways this conceptual
metaphor is deployed and interpreted in contemporary educational discourse.
Furthermore, I will draw on the philosophical and educational debates about the
nature of “safety”, specifically those concerned with the necessity for some
discomfort and the relative lack of safety during the learning process (Boler,
1999; Dewey, 1895; English & Stengel, 2010; Fisher, 2006; James, 1884; 1983;
Mayo, 2016). These attitudes towards safety interact with competing
understandings of space in radically different ways.
This mapping of the conceptual “safe space of my class” metaphor offers
a useful lens through which to consider current debates about free speech, free
expression, and educational discourses that have prioritized equity, diversity, and
inclusion. Depending on the context, the safe space metaphor may evoke a
container which keeps out all experiences that are unsafe, or a fluid medium of
exchange co-constituted by the countless potentially uncomfortable relationships
between those in the class. At the level of discourse, this leads conversations to
focus either on how to guarantee safety while learning regardless of the people,
ideas, pedagogy, or context taking part in the educational space, or how to

11

create and maintain meaningful educational relationships that can account for the
inevitability of discomfort in the diversity of the modern classroom.

1.3. Safe space as metaphor in the practices of educational
institutions, teachers, and students
These two radically different meanings for what the safe space metaphor
means in modern education are internalized and expressed by higher education
institutions, teachers, and students in a myriad of ways. Chapter 4 of this work
therefore explores how these different positions in current educational discourse
contribute to an understanding of safe space in education that is to some extent
incoherent or at cross-purposes with itself. Drawing upon three examples from
my own experience as a student and teacher at various institutions of higher
education in British Columbia, I illustrate how very different practices may be
prompted or informed by the two competing meanings of safe space. On the one
hand, some institutions and some students may pursue or demand a guarantee
for educational spaces free of anything “unsafe”, but which limit the kinds of
educational work that can be done. At the same time teachers may utilize a
relational understanding that entails the necessary presence of risk and
uncertainty through their reciprocal relationship with students. The teacher’s
understanding is then not an absolute guarantee of safety, but rather an
emphasis on pedagogical practices meant to minimize the harm the risks and
uncertainties pose to the most vulnerable students who would experience them
most acutely. I will illustrate these pedagogical practices meant to minimize harm
by revisiting the work of bell hooks (1994) who offers an extremely mature
discussion of what these difficult and nuanced teachable moments can look like
as inclusive classroom pedagogy.
The concluding Chapter 5 of this work then considers how we might go
about reconciling these different meanings for the safe space metaphor and the
differing practices they entail on the part of the institution and the teacher.
Specifically, how can a teacher’s distinctly relational understanding align with

12

pedagogical priorities at an institution that has differing priorities? To accomplish
this, I will consider how the discourse of safe space operates at the societal and
national level to meet specific civic priorities. By considering the purpose of
institutions of higher education to deliver not only individualistic or consumerist
outcomes (Norris, 2020) but also contribute to the formation of an educated and
civically engaged citizenry (Waldron, 2012), I argue that foregrounding a
relational understanding of safe space can enable institutions to appeal to the
reality of a diverse society and an economy that is more in tune with current
societal needs. That is, through a deeper understanding of the complex safe
space metaphor in education, colleges and universities can articulate a clearer
justification of policies and practices designed to foster relational educational
experiences premised on the practices of inclusion.

13

Chapter 2.
Why is safe space a problematic metaphor when
discussing education?
The purpose of Chapter 2 is to explore how metaphors function in
educational discussions, and moreover, how this can be problematic in any
discussion of the safe space metaphor. My motivation for exploring how
metaphors function is to better understand and then explain why so many
discussions of classrooms as safe spaces can lead to divergent understandings
of what is implied by that phrase, and how this is then compounded when an
educator considers the pedagogical practices required for the fulfillment of
promises regarding safety. This chapter therefore develops an argument for
approaching any discussion about safe educational space with careful attention
to how metaphors have traditionally operated and been understood in education,
and how they contribute to this specific discourse.
The key work considered in this chapter is French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of
Meaning in Language (1975). I shall distinguish between pre-Ricoeur theories of
how metaphors function (the substitution theory, the comparison theory, and the
interactive theory), and post-Ricoeur theories that build on his account of
interaction operating at multiple levels. This post-Ricoeur interactive theory of
metaphor is central to modern day cognitive and linguistic research into the
functioning of metaphor, which I will then draw on in subsequent chapters to
develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of what safe space can
mean in education.

2.1. Metaphors in educational discussions
My personal understanding of safe space and the issues highlighted were
not unique in the middle of the last decade in higher education. Uncertainty

14

played out across discourses grappling with what was meant by a safe space in
education (Ben-Porath, 2016; Callan, 2016; Harris, 2016; Mayo, 2016; Roth,
2019), documenting some of its unexpected consequences (Friedersdorf, 2015;
Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; 2018; Shulevitz, 2015; Stone, 2016; Whittington, 2018),
or articulating full-throated critiques that argued that safe space was placing
restrictions on academic freedom and free speech (Chemerinsky & Gillman,
2017; Deresiewicz, 2017; Weigel, 2016).
North American educators were charged with determining what a safe
space, whether theirs or their institution’s, looked like in practice. A vivid example
of these struggles, illustrating a divide between the intentions of educators and
the expectations of students, played out at Yale University in 2015 over an
unlikely issue: Halloween costumes (Callan, 2016; Friedersdorf, 2015; Lukianoff
& Haidt, 2018). In October 2015, a group of at least thirteen administrators at
Yale University sent out an email to the student body suggesting to students that
they carefully consider their choice of Halloween costumes that month to not
offend fellow students. Friedersdorf (2015), as well as Lukianoff and Haidt
(2018), points out that these types of communications from administrators at
colleges and universities have become the norm across North America in the
past decade. In this case, several students in one of Yale’s undergraduate
residences, Silliman College, were uncomfortable about what they understood to
be administration telling them what they were permitted to wear. These students
approached the faculty members that lived amongst them at Silliman College as
residence heads. Two of these faculty members, Erika Christakis and her
husband Nicholas Christakis, listened to the discomfort of their students, and
after considering their concerns, Erika sent out an email to the residents of
Silliman College “inviting the community to think about the controversy through
an intellectual lens that few if any had considered” (FIRE, 2015).
As a lecturer in early childhood education, Erika Christakis drew upon her
academic and professional experience to indicate that she, like others, was
uncomfortable telling college students what to wear at Halloween. Moreover, she

15

posited that something important could be lost from the experience of higher
education if administrators prohibited and policed anything that might cause
offense. She continued:
American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation
but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience;
increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and
prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not
from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have
we lost faith in young people's capacity—in your capacity to exercise
self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to
ignore or reject things that trouble you? … Nicholas says, if you don’t
like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are
offended. Talk to each other (FIRE, 2015).
How this email was received by some students, and the ensuing
maelstrom, offers a clear example of the divide between educator intentions and
some students’ expectations of what a safe space can and should mean. Rather
than taking offense with the initial communication regarding Halloween costumes
from the administration, some students were enraged by Erika’s email
suggesting that they consider instances of costumes causing them discomfort
through an intellectual lens and use the opportunity to engage in a deeper
dialogue. Petitions demanding an apology and retraction from Erika Christakis
were posted online, which quickly gathered signatures from Yale students
(Friedersdorf, 2015). She began receiving communications from students
claiming she had failed in her responsibility to create and maintain a safe space
for her student residents, and therefore should resign from her role (Lukianoff &
Haidt, 2018). A public meeting was organized to discuss the issue and Nicholas
Christakis attended in his role as a residence head, as well as a colleague and
partner to his wife:
Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is
revealed between professor and undergrads. Christakis believes that
he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect
upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate
why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one
respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many
of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands

16

for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a
confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one
respects students by validating their subjective feelings
(Friedersdorf, 2015).
As educators, both Erika and Nicholas Christakis felt that it was their role to
engage the students in earnest dialogue. For many of the students in attendance
at that meeting, they felt that his role was to understand their subjective
experience and feelings, and then prioritize his care for those feelings before any
intellectual pursuit. One poignant exchange between a student and Nicholas
Christakis makes this difference clear:
“In your position as master [residence head],” one student says, “it is
your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who
live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email,
that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?!”
“No,” he said, “I don’t agree with that.”
The student explodes, “Then why the fuck did you accept the
position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down! If that is
what you think about being a master, you should step down! It is not
about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand
that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!”
(Friedersdorf, 2015)
In this case, the student felt it was the residence head’s job to create a
place of comfort and home for all students, without much consideration of the
advisor’s duty as an educator to promote an intellectual space within that home.
For the student, this intellectual space and this home space were at odds. For
both Christakis’, a safe space was a way to talk about the culture of earnest
dialogue with their students, and to promote that culture. For both Christakis’, a
safe space was something to be relationally developed through ongoing
dialogue. But for some students, a safe space implied the existence of a
particular physical and social space in which they would be protected from
anything that might cause them discomfort or harm. Within the boundary of that
space, they expected certain acts, thoughts, etc., to be prohibited and censored
to ensure their personal sense of safety. Exploring this divide between the

17

relational safe space of educators, and the absolute and bounded safe space
demanded by some students, is a primary motivation for my work.
As noted earlier, this disconnect between the intentions of educators and
the expectations of students was observed by Robert Boostrom in 1998.
Specifically, he recognized that references to safe space in education were
metaphoric in nature, and that like many other metaphors used to discuss
education in the past (Beavis & Thomas, 1996; Freeman, 1996; Grady, Fisher &
Fraser, 1996; Ormell, 1996; Parker, 1995; Stefkovich & Guba, 1995), they were
likely to be misconstrued as implying a specific way to educate. I found similar
observations in other writing about the historical role of metaphors in education
(Callahan, 1962; Deffenbacher, 2011; Freire, 1970/2000; Illich, 1971; Kliebard,
1986; 1992; McEwan, 1996; Miller, 1976; O’Neill, 2019; Ortony, 1975; 1976; Rist,
1973; Schutz, 2010; Selden, 1975; Thomas, 2006). These metaphors allowed
educators to recognize and consider educational issues in a new way (Boostrom,
1998). However, these metaphors also communicated unintended meanings,
perhaps accounting for some of the differences in understanding between
educators and students. How and why metaphors do both things – that is, both
enlighten and confuse us – is the subject of the rest of this chapter.

2.2. Substitution, comparison, and interaction theories of
metaphor
In his unfinished text On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense (1873)
Friedrich Nietzsche raises an objection to the possibility of truth. Specifically,
Nietzsche is skeptical about the promise of human beings knowing some
absolute truth through language:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out

18

and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and
now matter only as metal, no longer as coins (Nietzsche, 1873, ¶10).
At the time of Nietzsche’s writing, common assumptions about the use of
language held that metaphors served two important functions. First, a metaphor
filled a gap in language by substituting a pre-existing meaning that was already
understood. Take the “eye” of a needle: it is obvious that no seeing eye exists at
one end of a needle, but the value of having such a means to describe this hole,
this gap, was noted as far back as Aristotle (Shibles, 1971a; 1971b). Second, a
metaphor provided a pleasing and colourful attempt to make up for such gaps in
language and understanding by comparing the unknown to the known. The utility
of metaphor was its ability to provide a way to understand one thing by either
substituting or comparing its meaning with another thing that was better
understood.
The philosopher of language Max Black in his text Models and Metaphors
(1962) took up this belief of metaphor as gap filler. In his text, Black critiqued the
earlier substitution and comparison theories of metaphor for their inability to
account for the complex communication of ideas, and then developed a third
“interaction” theory of metaphor that he argued better represented the way in
which humans expressed ideas. Like Nietzsche, Black was concerned not simply
with the common assumptions about how metaphors functioned, but also how
the use of metaphors had the ability to influence the understanding of the
unknown that developed through the interaction. To Black, a metaphor did not
just fill a gap through substitution or comparison, it created a new understanding
through the interaction of the known and the unknown that essentially erased the
gap from existence and was therefore in need of further analysis:
The extended meanings that result, the relations between initially
disparate realms created, can neither be antecedently predicted nor
subsequently paraphrased in prose. We can comment upon the
metaphor, but the metaphor itself neither needs nor invites
explanation and paraphrase (1962, p. 237).

19

If we consider the “eye” of the needle once more, we could say that the
hole at the end of a needle is like an eye because it is a space through which
light, and other items such as string, can pass. This is an account of metaphor
according to the comparison theory, which for Black was a specific type of the
substitution theory. However, Black objected to both the substitution and
comparison theories, because both are based upon the assumption of objectively
existing similarities between objects that the metaphor simply recognizes. He
noted that such an understanding of metaphor took no account of its persuasive
power, of its ability “after long use [to] seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people” (Nietzsche, 1873, ¶11). Curriculum historian Herbert Kliebard would later
sum up Black’s position as follows: “the metaphor creates a similarity rather than
alluding to similarities that exist antecedently” (1992, p. 207).
Based upon this observation of a metaphor’s ability to create similarities,
Black developed his “interaction theory of metaphor”. In this perspective, a
metaphor functions by transferring common aspects or “a system of
commonplaces” (1962, p. 237) of one better understood object to a lesser
understood object, serving as a type of lens through which, the lesser understood
object can become better known. However, this transference results in some
features of the better understood object being overstated and others simply being
ignored. In this way the very structure of how the lesser understood object comes
to be known is shaped by how the better understood object is known. The hole at
the end of the needle is perceived both as marking its “head”, but also as the
recipient of thread, as the eye marks the head of an animal and receives light
and images.
Black’s interaction theory of metaphor was taken up in the writing of
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their text Metaphors We Live By (1980).
Lakoff and Johnson offered an extensive and thoughtful attempt to fully develop
Black’s thesis that metaphors structure our thinking about one thing through our
thinking about another, calling this metaphorically structured thinking. They
argued that this in turn led to activities being similarly structured, which reflexively

20

shaped the language used to describe the activities. Their discussion of the
relationship between the concepts of argument and war illustrates this point. If
we consider the metaphoric statement argument is war, we can contend that
while there is relevance to this statement, there are many ways in which it is
untrue for all accounts of argument. However, Lakoff and Johnson identified a
series of common statements about argument that are aligned with this
metaphor: for instance, the need to defend, regroup, reorganize one’s position in
the face of potential opposition; the need to critique, attack, probe the position of
the opposition; the desire to win the argument. The point Lakoff and Johnson
successfully developed was that the way we structure our thinking about
argument through the metaphoric statement argument is war directly influences
how the activity and its description through language are developed in our
culture. The war metaphor has become an accepted way to consider, participate
in, and describe an argument: “the concept is metaphorically structured, the
activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is
metaphorically structured” (1980, p. 5). In this way the language of metaphor is
“not poetic, fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal” (1980, p. 5), and this literal sense
determines the way we conceive of a concept, which in turn determines the way
we act.
The utilization of metaphor thus becomes immensely significant. Black
referred to metaphors as models, as they encompassed not only the
straightforward utterance but also established parameters of understanding.
According to Black, many of these models become submerged during and after a
metaphor is first conceived so that we are not immediately conscious of them,
and they play out in certain key words and ideas. Black referred to these
submerged models as archetypes:
By an archetype I mean a systematic repertoire of ideas by means
of which a given thinker describes, by analogical extension, some
domain to which those ideas do not immediately and literally apply
(1962, p. 241).

21

This idea of archetype explained the organizing power of a metaphorical
concept such as argument is war, through a system of organization which, while
coherent, was for the most part unconscious and existed primarily at the level of
common, ordinary, or uncritical ways of thinking. Lakoff and Johnson elaborated
on this idea. For them, the metaphorical concept and its system of organization
enable a type of sub-categorization to take place: 1) Argument is War, 2) War is
meant to be won, 3) War is won by attack and defense. These subcategorizations become fluid in thinking and lead to entailment relationships: for
example, arguments should be won necessarily entails that I must defend my
own position and attack the position of my opponent. The role of an archetype in
everyday thinking can therefore not be ignored, for it serves to organize thoughts
and actions through language at an imperceptible level. As Kliebard summarized:
“it is not, after all, language that is the symbolic mirror of your thought; rather,
language provides us with the conceptual categories by which thought and
understanding are ordered” (1992, p. 206). In so doing, language, specifically
metaphoric language, provides us with the way we categorically conceive and
perceive of the world. This is also true for the theoretical sciences and the
detailed models they develop, because the explanation of these models to others
inside and outside of their fields invariably requires the use of metaphoric
language.

2.3. Problems in education and meaning when metaphor
functions through substitution, comparison, or
interaction
Education as we know it is crowded with metaphoric concepts that provide
useful ways of thinking about everything from school design (Burke & Grosvenor,
2008; O’Neill, 2015; Upitis, 2010;), to curriculum theory and development
(Kliebard, 1986; 1992) to assessment (Deffenbacher, 2011). As a rhetorical tool
for building an argument it is hard to deny the utility of metaphor in conveying
ideas that are highly complex or relatively unknown to a non-expert audience. It
therefore becomes the responsibility of the theorist who develops this metaphoric

22

understanding to utilize it sparingly and, moreover, to acknowledge the limitations
and contradictions of metaphor.
This work, however, is not immediately concerned with the use of
metaphors in developing ideas, as is common in educational writing, but is
instead interested in those instances in which metaphors “after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people” (Nietzsche, 1873, ¶10). This seems to
me an apt description of the role of “safe space” in educational discussions,
where it is commonly not understood to be operating metaphorically (Callan,
2016; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; 2018; Roth, 2019). How does this transition to
what we might term the “everyday” understanding of a topic take place?
For Nietzsche this ingrained quality of metaphorical thinking was a natural
result of the use of language. He understood language to be metaphorical in its
relationship to thought in the first place, so that relationships developed
metaphorically between different words in the language were a natural
consequence of this primary metaphor. As language was understood as the
normal and only way to explain thoughts and ideas, it invariably led to many
instances in which metaphoric language was conveniently forgotten to be
metaphoric at all.
This points to a significant limitation of human understanding. When a
metaphor is no longer immediately recognized as a metaphor, but instead as the
default way to think about a concept (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the ability to
critically interrogate understanding in the face of change and hardship is severely
curtailed. Often distilled down to a basic saying, many metaphors have become
so ingrained in the structure of everyday language, activity and thinking that they
now seem ordinary and normal. Yet as we have seen, these conceptual
metaphors operate to either substitute well-known meaning onto a lesser known,
to compare (and substitute) the characteristics of the familiar with those of the
less familiar or orchestrate an interaction between the common and lesser-known

23

ideas. In these cases, archetypes and entailment relationships shape and restrict
our thinking.
An example will illustrate how this works. One conceptual metaphor that
took hold of the American public at the turn of the twentieth century, and has yet
to be dislodged, is that of the need for greater efficiency in all aspects of life.
Businesses had thrived in the United States in the post-Civil War period through
new technologies and workplace methods. This had led to a rapid
industrialization and urbanization of much of the country by the turn of the
twentieth century. Where up to the end of the nineteenth century America could
be considered a primarily agrarian society, with most of its population living
outside major centres, the onset of the twentieth century marked the beginning of
a more industrial and technological society with much of the American population
now living in urban centers (Pickstone, 2000). With this demographic shift,
precipitated by the rapid economic development of the post-Civil War era, issues
such as developing a large-scale public education system became more
pronounced to meet the constantly growing demand for an educated workforce.
Moving from the schoolhouse (that had tended to the needs of a farmer society)
to an efficient urban public system to meet the needs of most Americans would
require reform of the concept of education on an industrial scale.
While the motivations and implementation of this reform varied across
regions, states and cities (Thomas, 2006), it is possible to consider this reform
movement first from a macro level, at the grand scale of how education was
conceived in America as a whole. This in turn allows for a more nuanced
consideration of the structure of the school and the development of curriculum.
Raymond Callahan takes on this project in his seminal work Education and the
Cult of Efficiency (1962). Callahan offers a social and cultural analysis with
special attention paid to the language of efficiency that influenced the formation
of the standardized schooling system now common across North America. His
approach, beginning with systemic considerations and then eventually narrowing

24

to the classroom level, makes the daunting task of understanding this process of
social, institutional and ideological change much more manageable.
Callahan’s work illustrates how these reforms were enabled and mediated
by the substitution, comparison, and interactive function of metaphor (i.e., Black’s
‘archetypes’). Following his strategy, I will first address the macro-level
considerations, i.e., how comparisons of size, scale, and scope at the turn of the
twentieth century enabled a business-orientated understanding of education to
be metaphorically substituted for the traditional liberal understanding. Second, I
will turn to an analysis of the goals of these reforms, and how they interacted to
enable and structure a particular organization of the work done by teachers and
administrators in schools that was to last throughout the twentieth century and
into the present time.
First, as the macro-level requirement for an education system to serve a
large and diverse population grew more pressing in the late nineteenth century,
educational administrators and governmental policy makers considered how to
re-form an existing system that served a relatively small population into
something that could meet the needs of urban populations. Little government
infrastructure had previously existed that could serve as a model for how this
new behemoth of education could be implemented. However, due to the sheer
size of the patchwork of educational systems in some cities and states, it was
equated with large businesses and industries. One of the results of this
comparison, based upon the size and scale of education to the industries of
America, was that the educational administrator began to be thought of as, and
substituted with, business administrator:
…which made the organizational and administrative aspects of the
educational work seem – on a superficial basis, at least –
comparable to those aspects of large industry which, it was claimed,
were being handled so efficiently by businessmen. In these huge
systems there was no question but that the administrative detail work
was considerable (Callahan, 1962, p. 149).

25

Where education sought a model to provide guidance on how to structure
such a vast school system, there existed a need to substitute the concept of the
schoolhouse with that of the “school” as a large, complex network of
interconnected units.
Similarities with business structures such as the scale of urban education
and the administrative needs it would require were championed, while questions
pertaining to the nature and purpose of education were conveniently put aside to
be dealt with in the future, if at all. Most striking about this move to equate
education to business due to their relative size, was that “education”, in any real
sense, was not easily delineated as a concept. It existed in many forms, both as
physical structures and curricular formats ranging from the one-room
schoolhouse which students attended only during the day, to privately funded
boarding schools, to religious or moral education to vocational training. This is an
important consideration, because education was not neatly identifiable due to its
vast scope and differing executions across America, whereas business was a
generally identifiable and clearly delineated concept. The claim was made that
this clear and bounded concept could be substituted for the nature of education
at that time.
This move to delineate education as a clear concept represented an
important way in which metaphorical concepts are established: through the
equation and comparison of two fully formed concepts that could be considered
as objects with their own substance.
Understanding our experiences in terms of objects and substances
allows us to pick out parts of our experience and treat them as
discrete entities or substances of uniform kind (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980, p. 25).
Claiming that the vastly varying experiences of education could be
grouped together in their entirety allowed for the comparison to business to be
more palatable. If we could classify slices of our experiences in terms of
complete objects and substances, it allowed us to treat them as discrete entities

26

or substances, and most importantly, to fathom, reason and consider them in
some meaningful way. This experience with physical objects, for Lakoff and
Johnson:
provides the basis for metonymy. Metonymic concepts emerge from
correlations [comparisons] in our experience between two physical
entities or between a physical entity and something metaphorically
conceptualized as a physical entity (1980, p. 59).
Through the metonymic pairing “school is like a large industrial business
due its large scale”, an underlying concept of “efficiency” emerges. Large
organizations such as school systems need to be organized efficiently, because
that is how large industrial businesses are organized to maximize productivity
and profit. The emergence of the metonymic concept of efficiency is important to
any reading of Callahan; it gives concrete form to the “rage to order” (to borrow
an idea from Max Weber) that his text described, that is, the drive towards an
increasingly ordered way of life as representative of a modern, urban, industrial
existence.
This underlying metaphorical relation of school and business enabled and
legitimized a far-reaching reorganization of the work of education.
Gareth Morgan’s text Images of Organization (2006) elaborates on several
metaphoric examples of the organization of education and the school: machines,
organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, and instruments of
domination. As Callahan documents in detail, images drawn from the business
world have the greatest resonance with how schools have been conceived and
actually run in the past century. This was not a necessary conceptualization, but
rather was the result of metaphor interacting with, and thereby being tied to, the
values and beliefs of dominant discourses and language practices. The
subcategorization of aspects of the school as a business allowed for the
structuring of discourse around education with an embedded orientational
metaphor: a spatial understanding of the dominant values of the culture (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). The orientation is to growth, conceived of as movement

27

forwards and upwards: feeling happy is better than feeling sad, going up is better
than going down, and more material success is preferable to less material
success (wealth). With respect to each of the metonymic emergent concepts that
have arisen in education in the last century, such as efficiency, accountability
(i.e., report cards), standardization (i.e., curriculum), and choice and
consumerism (i.e., school vouchers), more is always desirable.
When we apply the framework developed by Lakoff and Johnson to the
development and representation of dominant values in American capitalist
culture at the turn of the twentieth century, we discover a narrative that is all too
familiar in present day educational theory. Success as material success (wealth),
is perhaps the most dominant value present in educational texts such as the
McGuffey Readers. We are led to believe that success must be understood as a
product. Therefore schools, in their metaphorical conception, need to maximize
the possibility of success – and the most prolific example of maximizing
productivity and success in America at the time was industrial businesses. As
business success was defined as material and financial success, schools needed
to be efficiently managed, and the organizations of spaces in which work was
undertaken needed to be as efficient as possible.
Given this metaphoric structuring and orientation, it is then no wonder that
the ideas of scientific management to promote efficiency championed by
Frederick Taylor (1911/1967) have remained a part of educational discourse for
over a century. These mechanisms of scientific management developed by
Taylor were: intensive study of a particular job and its movements, what he called
a time and motion study; standardization, determining the optimal movements to
do the job and then training others in these specific movements; assignment of
definite tasks, giving individuals a particular amount of work to accomplish in a
given time; and a functional foreman who supervised specific aspects of the
work, which meant he also taught and supervised what he was expert in
(Callahan, 1962).

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The perceived need to standardize and supervise ‘definite tasks’ which
could be completed and assessed in a given time was the most telling aspect of
the organization of education over a century ago. “Outcomes-based” education
dramatically altered the nature of the work undertaken by teachers and students
(Apple, 2004; Smyth & Dow, 1998). The metaphoric conception of the school as
business was not simply a substitution of business principles into education, nor
was it a straightforward comparison (the similarities between the two were
tenuous at the onset of the metaphor). Instead, a much more complex interaction
between education and business was initiated when the two were brought
together metaphorically. It is this understanding of metaphor as a dynamic factor
in cultural and social development that I wish to highlight, because it is germane
to the discussion of safe space taken up in the following chapters.
This century-long history of shared structure brought about through
metaphor, along with the emergence of educational theories that it both shaped
and was shaped by, is difficult to untangle without a robust understanding of how
metaphor functions at more than just the level of the word, or the level of the
sentence, or at the level of discourse. Many of the proponents of these theories
championing increased efficiency, accountability, standardization, and choice
have simply forgotten their metaphorical origin, or worse yet, outright deny this
genesis and hence relieve themselves of any responsibility to respond to critique.
In this situation there are striking similarities to Nietzsche’s argument about the
fleeting nature of truth and its indebtedness to metaphor:
In the natural sciences, some (but certainly not all) would claim that
this metaphorical make-believe will eventually be abandoned as
model or theory becomes more like a hypothetical-deductive system,
but, even if this were the case, this should not blind us to the theory’s
metaphorical origins (Kliebard, 1992, pp. 208-209).
There are thus strong grounds for considering the education system, with
its curricular theories and desired educational outcomes, as a theoretical model
that has forgotten it is a metaphor. Enabled by the substitution, comparison, and
interactive function of metaphor, the education system operates at many levels of

29

meaning, from the word, the statement, and at the level of educational discourse.
Much of what we now know as education is owed in no small part to a particular
mechanistic metaphor that at first compared, then substituted, and finally simply
was the school as an efficient business. Metaphors become problematic by being
taken literally, not only substituting one object by another, but by also being
forgotten as functioning metaphorically.
When a metaphor is taken literally, it names one thing by substituting
another, to which we initially resist. However, this resistance slowly dissipates as
we accept the make-believe – we suspend our literal objection at the promise of
some greater insight. In the acceptance of this promise, the thing becomes what
it had pretended to be and “our willing sense of make-believe is converted into a
literal prison” (Kliebard, 1992, p. 209). It is at this moment, in the acceptance of
the metaphor’s promise, that it troubles our deeper understanding because of the
mistaken belief that the metaphor functions in an easy to discern way of
substituting meaning, comparing meaning, or interacting to develop meaning.
This relatively simplistic understanding of function was found wanting by the
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur because he came to understand that nothing,
not even metaphors, functioned in isolation. It is therefore to Ricoeur’s theory of
metaphor I now turn, to put my forthcoming analysis of safe space on a more
secure footing.

2.4. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor
Paul Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor (1975) accepted the inevitability of
metaphor in language. Ricoeur’s was a comprehensive, multidisciplinary,
hermeneutic approach, with its focus first on symbolic forms, and then on
symbolic structures. For Ricoeur a metaphor did not simply function to substitute
or compare meaning at the level of the words in the metaphor, nor simply
through the interaction of possible meanings at the level of a sentence, or within
an existing discourse. Instead, Ricoeur proposed that metaphor functioned at all
these levels in a continuous dialectical manner. This meant a metaphor could not

30

be analyzed in isolation; one needed to consider the word, the sentence, and the
discourse, and the interactions between them, to derive its true meaning.
Ricoeur had been developing this understanding of how words function
within language, and specifically metaphor, since his 1967 essay “Structure,
Word, Event” when he posited that metaphor captured the cumulative meaning of
a word:
Now this process of the transfer of meaning – of metaphor –
supposes that the word is a cumulative entity, capable of acquiring
new dimensions of meaning without losing the old ones. It is this
cumulative, metaphorical process which is projected over the surface
of the system as polysemy (1967, p 93).
Ricoeur’s process of inquiry was therefore to locate where the
metaphorical process was occurring, and he surmised that a metaphor operated
at the level of the word, the level of the sentence, and at the level of discourse.
However, none of these levels was elevated above the others. Additionally,
Ricoeur argued that “epistemological specificity” must be clarified (1972, p. 165):
simply, what knowledge did a metaphor create? In keeping with his grounding in
hermeneutics, he also suggested that it was necessary to think of metaphor as a
work in miniature, as any exploration of metaphor “contributes to the
interpretation itself of the work as a whole” (1972, p. 175).
Ricoeur began his exploration by considering Metaphor as a Word. He
points to the definition of metaphor offered by Aristotle:
Metaphor is the application of one thing of the name belonging to
another. We may apply (a) the name of a genus to one of its species,
or (b) the name of a species to its genus, or (c) the name of one
species to another of the same genus, or (d) the transfer may be
based on a preposition (Poetics, 1457b, 67).
In his analysis of Aristotle’s definition (1975, pp. 16-19), Ricoeur argued that not
only was the noun affected, but that there was “a movement” which involved a
type of borrowing that he called “a transposition”. The proper meaning is then
changed, as the borrowed meaning is transposed to the proper meaning. This

31

process then occurs in reverse, back to the borrowed meaning, causing it to
change. As Ricoeur points out, underlying this idea is a theory of derivation that
makes it possible to find the origin of substitution, which he calls the act of
borrowing.
Ricoeur felt that it was a mistake for Aristotle to focus almost exclusively
on the word in his definition of metaphor. Ricoeur began by asking his reader to
focus on both terms in the relationship, as the act of borrowing affected both
terms. Secondly, he drew attention to how the characteristics of one term could
not be completely transposed onto the other term, but instead led to a deviation
from the expected logical order of the first term resulting in an invention (1975,
pp. 21-22). This reordering was not simply a superficial act of having the second
term resemble the first, but was instead a redescription of reality (1975, p. 22).
This analysis of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor as presented in the Poetics and
Rhetoric allowed Ricoeur to locate Aristotle’s metaphorical process as taking
place at the level of the verb, in the action between the two terms, the nouns
(1975, p. 42).
Ricoeur argued that a reinterpretation of Aristotle was possible by closely
analyzing the description of mimesis (the representation of the real world in art
and literature) in Rhetoric (1975, p. 42):
Metaphor, it relates, makes one see things because it represents
things as in a state of activity (Rhetoric, 1411b, 24-25).
This has profound implications for any analysis of metaphor. It suggests, for
example, that safe space is active space and not a static and discrete zone,
requiring ongoing maintenance and development. Both the notion of an
educational space itself, and its relative degree of safety, are creative
achievements rather than mere observable features of the world.
This shift in focus from only the word to the relationships between words,
from rhetoric to semantics, and from semantics to hermeneutics pointed directly

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to the need to consider other levels of meaning, in particular the way metaphors
operate at the sentence level:
Rhetoric terminates in classifications and taxonomy, to the extent
that it focuses on the figures of deviation, or tropes, in which the
meaning of a word departs from its lexically codified usage, and as
such fails to explain how meaning is produced. ‘The semantic and
the rhetorical viewpoints do not begin to be differentiated until
metaphor is transferred into the framework of the sentence and is
treated not as a case of deviant denomination, but as a case of
impertinent predication,’ a displacement of the metaphorical process
from the word to the sentence (1975, p. 4).
Thus, according to Ricoeur, “a theory of the metaphorical statement will be
a theory of the production of metaphorical meaning” (1975, p 65). He believed
that structural linguistics that defined language as a “system of signs”
characterized it in just one of its aspects and not in its totality (1975, p. 69),
asserting that semiotics operated at the level of the sign (word), while semantics
operated at the level of the sentence (1975, p. 70-76). This “disjunctive
conception of the relationship between semiotics and semantics” (1975, p. 75)
allowed Ricoeur to move beyond Aristotle’s and more traditional theories of
substitution, and instead connect to the interaction theories of metaphor
developed by I.A. Richards (1936), Max Black (1962), and Monroe C. Beardsley
(1962).
Ricoeur pointed out that Richards’ work, specifically his new definition of
rhetoric and utilizing metaphor at an ontological level, shifted focus from
metaphor at the level of the word and instead to the level of metaphorical
statement. Richards’ theory of metaphor required that language be understood
by its contextual arrangement, meaning that words were only meaningful through
their relationship to other parts of the discourse (1975, pp. 77-78). Ricoeur
pointed out that for Richards:
metaphor results from the ‘contextual theory of meaning’;
…metaphor holds together within one simple meaning two different
missing parts of different contexts of this meaning. Thus, we are not
dealing any longer with a simple transfer of words, but with a

33

commerce between thoughts, that is, a transaction between contexts
(1975, p. 80).
The importance of this observation cannot be understated. Whereas
traditional theories of metaphor had focused on the “vehicle” of the metaphor,
I.e., the word, Ricoeur followed Richards in emphasizing the participation of the
“tenor”, the original underlying idea, in the entire operation of the metaphor
(1975, p. 80). The implication was that metaphor involves the whole world of our
perceptions:
Our world…is a projected world, shot through with characters lent to
it from our own life…the exchange between the meanings of words
which we study in explicit verbal metaphors are superimposed upon
a perceived world which itself is a product of earlier or unwitting
metaphor (Richards, 1936, pp. 108-109).
Ricoeur inferred that metaphorical meaning is produced through a two-way
interaction. First, through the metaphoric use of language our understanding of
one thing was explicitly superimposed onto something else to create meaning,
but that something else, which was a product of countless previous metaphors,
also acted on this created meaning in more subtle and implicit ways. This was
the transaction between contexts that, as Ricoeur acknowledged, had earlier
been highlighted by Max Black (1962).
As noted in the previous chapter, Black had first summarized and then
dismissed both the substitution theory and the comparison theory of metaphor.
According to Black, the substitution theory of metaphor held “that a metaphorical
expression is used in place of some equivalent literal expression” (1962, p. 37).
The comparison theory of metaphor could be understood in terms of analogy and
similarity, where the reader noted the similar “ground” of the analogy, then could
consider the frame of reference or wider context. Black argued that neither of
these theories could account for the new organization of thought the metaphor
created:

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…[a] metaphorical statement is not a substitute for a formal
comparison or any other kind of literal statement but has its own
distinctive capacities and achievements (1962, p. 37).
Or, as Mark Johnson would later summarize Black’s objection to the comparison
theory:
The projection of one system onto another is a distinctive intellectual
operation not reducible to any mere comparison of objects to mark
their similarities (1981, p. 28).
There are seven features of Black’s interaction view of metaphor (1962,
pp. 44-45), which Ricoeur accepted and further adapted into the following
general attributes (1975):
1. A metaphorical statement in the interaction view of metaphor
has two separate subjects, a “principal” subject and a
“subsidiary one”.
2. These subjects are best understood as “systems of things”
rather than an individual “thing”.
3. The metaphor works by applying to the principal subject a
system of “associated implications” characteristic of the
subsidiary subject.
4. These implications usually consist of “commonplaces” about the
subsidiary subject, but may in some appropriate situations,
consist of deviant implications established ad hoc by the writer.
5. The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes
features of the principal subject by implying statements about it
that normally apply to the subsidiary subject.
6. This involves shifts in meaning of words belonging to the same
family or system as the metaphorical expression, and some of
these shifts may be metaphorical transfers.
Mark Johnson, whose ideas about metaphor can be seen to be derived
from Ricoeur’s writing, explains that according to the interactive theory, a
metaphor is created by using:
one entire system of commonplaces (e.g., that of wolf) to ‘filter’ or
organize our conception of some other system (e.g., that of man).

35

The ‘interaction’ is a screening of one system of commonplaces by
another to generate a new conceptual organization of, a new
perspective on, some object (1981, p. 28).
In addition to the contributions of Richards and Black, Ricoeur’s theory of
metaphor required a consideration of literary theory. Ricoeur found the theory of
Monroe C. Beardsley (1962) quite useful as it ascribed a degree of inventiveness
to the metaphorical statement (1975, p. 96). For Beardsley, the two things
juxtaposed in a metaphor constituted a “logical opposition” that allowed a new
meaning to emerge, because the order of connotation, what would normally be
invoked by the word or “vehicle” of the metaphor, is disrupted (1962, pp. 105122). This amounted to acknowledging the predicative quality of the metaphorical
statement, a key aspect of Ricoeur’s theory. Beardsley’s work helped Ricoeur
distinguish between metaphor and metonymy, and to position his theory of
metaphor rooted in interaction as preferrable to previous theories of comparison
and substitution:
This twofold approximation enriches our concept of metaphorical
processes: definition, naming, synonym, circumlocution, and
paraphrase are metalinguistic operations through which I designate
elements of my code by means of equivalent elements within the
same code. Even code-changing operations depend upon
equivalence of terms from one code to another. All these operations
are related profoundly to the capacity of words to receive additional,
displaced, and associated meanings on the basis of their resembling
the fundamental meaning… (1975, pp. 177-178).
As Ricoeur worked from the level of the word (semiotics) to the level of the
sentence/statement (semantics), his argument eventually brought him to
consider the level of discourse, because of what he described as a metaphor’s
ability to “redescribe reality” (1975, p. 231). This was based upon his analysis of
how, at the sentence/statement level, the initial idea “acts on” the secondary idea
in a predicative manner to redescribe it in a new way, creating a new meaning,
that cannot be accounted for at either the level of word or statement. This
predicative act at the level of the statement creates a new reality at the level of
discourse. “Whereas the sign points back only to other signs immanent within a

36

system, discourse is about things. Sign differs from sign, discourse refers to the
world” (1975, p. 216).
Within his theory of metaphor, this referentiality to the world is especially
important because it allows for both the creation of new meaning and the
corrosion of the former, ostensibly literal meaning. This innovation is the key for
Ricoeur because it is a type of transference between realms, domains of
meaning heretofore treated as separate:
Now metaphor typically involves a change not merely of range but
also of realm. A label along with others constituting a schema is in
effect detached from the home realm of that schema and applied for
the sorting and organizing of an alien realm. Partly, by thus carrying
with it a reorientation of a whole network of labels does a metaphor
give clues for its own development and elaboration (1975, p. 72).
The process of transferring these labels from the original realm to the new realm
is not simply a relabeling that leaves old organizations unchanged. Instead, this
can result in novel and important reorganizations that are subsequently
incorporated back into the home realm. This dialectical labelling and
reincorporation of the new possibilities led Ricoeur to write that “metaphor
permeates all discourse” (1975, p. 80), and is integral to our symbolic systems
that continually “make” and “remake” the world.
The obvious problem with such symbolic systems (often referred to as
models in the literature) is that they can be taken as accurate representations of
reality itself. Ricoeur and his colleagues all accepted the benefit of utilizing
models and metaphors, such as when Black wrote:
A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two disparate
domains in cognitive and emotional relation by using language
directly appropriate to the one as a lens for seeing the other; the
implications, suggestions, and supporting values entwined with the
literal use of the metaphorical expression enables us to see a new
subject matter in a new way (1962, pp. 236-237).
However, even as far back as the early 1960s theorists such as Douglas
Berggren were wary that a “given metaphor or its allegorical extension may be
37

transformed into myth” (1963, pp. 465-472). Ricoeur called this confusing “the
make-believe” that “something is the case” (1975, p. 255) with the actual claim
that that is indeed the case. He emphasized this caution by drawing upon the
writing of Australian philosopher Colin Turbayne:
The one is to use a disguise or mask for illustrative or explanatory
purposes; the other is to mistake the mask for the face…Both thus
involve the crossing of different sorts. But while the former is to
present the facts of one sort as if they belong to another, the latter is
to claim that they actually belong. While the former adds nothing
obvious to the actual process, the latter involves the addition of
features that are the products of speculation or invention instead of
discovery (Turbayne, 1970, pp. 3-4).
Yet who pays attention to the cautions of philosophers? As we shall see,
mistaking “the mask for the face” is one of the hallmarks of the
misunderstandings that haunt debates over “safe space” to the present day.

2.5. Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and interaction at
multiple levels to develop meaning
Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor opened new ground for theorists of
metaphor in the 1970s and 1980s. Linguistic, cognitive, and philosophical
theorists all explored the intricacies of the transition from a unique focus on the
word (semiotics) or the statement (semantics) toward the interactions between
word, statement and discourse. This work was most notably and influentially
taken up by the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in their
book Metaphors We Live By (1980). Echoing Ricoeur’s view that the meaning of
a metaphor could not be reduced to some simplified “building blocks of meaning”
(1980, p. 69), Lakoff and Johnson argued for an experiential gestalt, for
metaphor as rooted in an organizing form and pattern which should be
considered as “a cluster of other components” (1980, p. 69). These clusters then
form a gestalt that “human beings find more basic than the parts” (1980, pp. 6970).

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Lakoff and Johnson’s description of gestalts worked to further develop and
build on the interaction theory of metaphor posited by Ricoeur. Specifically,
Lakoff and Johnson claimed that “human thought processes are largely
metaphorical” and that the “human conceptual system is metaphorically
structured and defined” (1980, p. 6). Leaving behind the theory of substitution
and comparison, Lakoff and Johnson claimed that metaphors created new
connections through their interactions by offering “a partial understanding of one
kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience…” (1980, p. 154). It
was here where their work most strongly aligned with Ricoeur’s focus on the
interaction at the level of discourse and the meaning which developed:
Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A
metaphor may thus guide future action. Such action will, of course,
fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor
to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be selffulfilling prophecies (1980, p. 156).
One particularly telling example of this was Lakoff and Johnson’s
discussion of the 1970s energy crisis in the United States, using the vocabulary
of an armed conflict, which served to develop a metaphorical network that
simultaneously explained the problems in terms of conflict, while constructing
conflict-orientated solutions. Reality through this metaphorical network was
thereby redescribed in a discursive fashion that determined the nature and scope
of possible responses.
These new insights into the influence of metaphor on thought and action
through interaction at the level of discourse influenced several branches of
inquiry following the publication of Ricoeur (1975) and subsequently Lakoff and
Johnson (1980). These inquiries were philosophic (Johnson, 1993; Gibbs, 1994;
Grady, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Winter, 2001; etc.), linguistic (Davidson,
1978; Searle, 1979; Rorty, 1989; Butler, 1990; Turner, 1996; Steen, 1999; etc.),
and cognitive, focused on metaphoric networks of thought which blended to
derive new meanings and understanding (Fauconnier & Turner, 1994;
Fauconnier, 1997; Grady et al., 1999; Coulson & Oakley, 2000; Fauconnier &

39

Turner, 2002; etc.). Operating generally within the dialectical interaction theory of
metaphor developed by Ricoeur, these inquiries have confirmed the ubiquity of
metaphorical thinking and its capacity for generating both innovation and stasis.
As Ricoeur put it:
…the ‘place’ of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is
neither the name nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the
copula of the verb to be. The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies both
‘is not’ and ‘is like’ (1975, p. 7).
This simultaneous focus on what is and is not, what is possible and
impossible, what is present and absent, interacts in such a way as to develop
new meaning and understanding. This has been particularly evident in work in
cognitive linguistics, which at the same time has called attention to the ways in
which metaphors can simultaneously limit or imprison our thinking. The next
section of this chapter will discuss how the interaction theory of metaphor, as
developed by the cognitive linguistic branch of inquiry, can be applied to an
analysis of safe space at the level of the words “safe” and “space”, at the level of
sentence/statement of safe space, and at the level of discourse from and within
which safe space derives its meaning. This will prepare the ground for the
analysis that follows in Chapter 3.

2.6. Safe space as a conceptual metaphor in education
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how a cognitive-linguistic analysis of
metaphor works in practice is to consider how Lakoff and Johnson took up the
philosophical question of causality. Concepts of causality have been a staple of
philosophic discourse since the time of Aristotle, yet as Johnson forcefully
argued, for most of that time:
the idea that metaphor lies at the heart of human conceptualization
and reasoning has been rejected... One could even make a crude
distinction between two types of philosophy – objectivist/literalist
philosophies that see metaphor as a dispensable linguistic
appurtenance and those that see philosophies as creative
elaboration of basic conceptual metaphors… If our most

40

fundamental abstract concepts – such as those for causation,
events, will, thought, reason, knowledge, mind, justice, and rights –
are irreducibly metaphoric, then philosophy must consist in the
analysis, criticism, and elaboration of the metaphorical concepts out
of which philosophies are made (2008, p. 39).
Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and its elaboration by cognitive linguistics in
the 1980s and 1990s provided new tools for this kind of analysis. Johnson soon
found his attention drawn to the key role played by metaphors in discussions of
causation:
I was struck by how philosophers referred to ‘causes’ as if they were
objective forces or entities and as if there existed basically one kind
of natural causation (as revealed in expressions such as ‘X caused
Y’ and ‘The cause of Y is X’). In an attempt to explain human actions,
many philosophers also spoke of ‘agent causality,’ in order to carve
out a space for human ‘willing,’ but in physical nature, natural causes
ruled the day. So, there seemed to be at least one type of cause (i.e.,
physical) but not more than two types (adding agent causation to
physical causation), and both conceptions were thought to be literal,
not metaphorical. Causes were alleged to be literal entities or forces
in the world (2008, p. 40).
For Lakoff and Johnson, the first step in analysis was to consider how
people generally conceptualized their experiences. Applying Ricoeur’s theory to
the language of causality, they noted that causal relationships typically “involved
an understanding of change of state as (metaphorical) motion from one location
to another: “They called this the “Location Event-Structure Metaphor” (Johnson,
2008, pp. 40-41). As with other conceptual metaphors, a better understood
source domain – in this case an individual’s experience and description of the
space around them – was utilized to metaphorically explain a much less
perceptible target domain, in this case the temporal. Explanations and
descriptions of this temporal target domain would therefore utilize language and
concepts drawn from the perception and experience of objects in the spatial
source domain.

41

Applying this idea consistently to sentence- and discourse-level meaning
involving changes of state led to the following “mapping” for the location eventstructure metaphor (Johnson, 2008, p. 41):
Table 2.6-1:

Location Event-Structure metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Motion in Space]

[Events]

Location in space

→

States

Movement from one location to
another

→

Changes of states

Physical forces

→

Causes

Forced movement

→

Causation

Self-propelled movements

→

Actions

Destinations

→

Purposes

Paths to destinations

→

Means to ends

Impediments to motion

→

Difficulties

As predicted by Ricoeur’s theory the overarching discourse of the Location
Event-Structure metaphor permeates the entire system for conceptualizing and
communicating about causality. This system includes an array of complex
“submappings” (Grady, 1997, quoted in Johnson, 2008) which organize how
various aspects of the target domain can be thought and talked about.
This application of Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor offers a useful model on
how to better understand the social and pedagogical issues that arise when safe
space is used to describe “my class”. At first glance safe space seems a simple
and straightforward metaphor, free of the philosophical complexities of causality
and similar fundamental concepts. However, any meaningful understanding in
education cannot ignore the larger educational themes of equity, diversity, and
inclusion, within which safe space discourse is located. Moreover, Ricoeur’s
philosophical theory highlights the reality that, to understand the operations of
metaphor in the claim “My Class is a Safe Space”, the entire system and its
complex submappings would need to be analyzed. Simply, the metaphor

42

functions to transfer rules and expectations from the source domain(s) of which
most educators and student are unaware.
Therefore, in the next two chapters of this work, the concept of safe space
will be analyzed using the mapping approach exemplified here for the Location
Event-Structure metaphor, with explicit consideration of the levels of word,
sentence and discourse. In chapter 3, an in-depth history of our everyday
understandings of both “space” and “safe” will be undertaken. This will be
followed by an analysis in which this lost history will be used to develop a
mapping for “space”, then “safe[ty]”, and finally safe space, and thereby provide
insight into the conceptual structuring they impart to an understanding of “my
class as a safe space”.
In Chapter 4 I will show how this kind of mapping can also be used to
develop a more pedagogically meaningful conception for safe space. This
expanded meaning of safe space will be situated within the discourse of modern
education’s longstanding issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, to put forward
tangible suggestions to educators of what a pedagogy of safe space can look like
in practice.

43

Chapter 3.
How can we consider safe space at Ricoeur’s level of
the word, and at the level of the sentence
(statement)?
The purpose of this chapter is to begin to apply Ricoeur’s theory of
metaphor (1975) to our understanding of safe space, as it functions dialectically
at three levels: the word, the statement, and discourse. As Lakoff and Johnson
(1980; 1999) point out, many important concepts operate as conceptual
metaphors that structure our thinking about a subject. This occurs when a source
domain, an experience with which an individual has a familiarity, is utilized to
make sense of a target domain, an experience with which this individual has less
familiarity. The result is the metaphorical structuring of the experience in the
target domain through the explanation, language, and possibilities afforded by
the source domain.
In the case of the “safe space of my class”, this metaphorical structuring of
the experience of “my classroom” takes place through an individual’s
understanding of safe space. As has been discussed earlier and will be
elaborated upon in this chapter, safe space lacks one precise and uniform
meaning. This results in metaphorically structuring the experience in a class in
what can best be considered a haphazard fashion. For some that call for a safe
space, this means a defined, absolute, bounded environment that is exclusionary
of discomfort or harm; and this can result in the structuring of an experience that
is lacking in almost all educational value. It is therefore necessary to develop a
definition of safe space that utilizes a rigorous philosophical framework to draw
out the relational nature of meaningful education.
Drawing upon Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and Lakoff and Johnson’s
mapping technique for conceptual metaphors, I will therefore undertake the
development of a more precise definition for safe space. This process will be

44

done incrementally throughout this chapter’s analyses at the level of the word
and the level of statement. The resulting mapping of “the safe space of my class”
will then be analyzed within the discourses of educational examples in the next
chapter to develop further improvements.

3.1. Mapping the conceptual metaphor for safe space and
“my class”
In the location event-structure metaphor described by Lakoff and Johnson
(1999), they explain how we come to think of events (target domain) through the
way we think of space (source domain). This is because the experiential nature
of both the source and target are not the same; we can experience space by
being within a space or walking through a space; we cannot really experience
time in anything resembling the experience of space. Instead, we can describe
our experience of time using our experience of space: time moves and passes us
like an object; time has spatial and directional planes such as the past and the
future; time can be a means to arrive at a specific destination or goal.
Table 3.1-1:

Location Event-Structure metaphor

Source Domain
[Motion in Space]

Target Domain
[Events]

Location in space

→

States

Movement from one location to
another

→

Changes of states

Physical forces

→

Causes

Forced movement

→

Causation

Self-propelled movements

→

Actions

Destinations

→

Purposes

Paths to destinations

→

Means to ends

Impediments to motion

→

Difficulties

We conceive of time as moving through space, akin to walking across a
room, or a grain of sand falling through an hourglass. This allows an individual to
extend inferences that are true regarding the motion in space, to how we

45

perceive, structure, and make sense of temporal events. Lakoff and Johnson’s
mapping of this location-event conceptual metaphor aids us in understanding
how a less understood target domain can become known. However, the intricate
array of submappings that exist in this location-event metaphor reveal that the
amount of structuring and meaning being imparted from the source domain to the
target domain is not a single word, or a simple statement, but instead a
conglomeration of meaning and inferences that are discursively constructed by
the interaction.
In this work’s analysis of safe space, it is therefore necessary to undertake
a similar mapping. However, this mapping of safe space needs to first consider
how “safe” and “space”, as distinct experiences and thus distinct source
domains, interact on the experience of “my class” as the target domain.
Therefore, two distinct mappings need to take place before considering “the
experience of safe space” and its metaphoric structuring of “my class”. First, as
Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) explained, the physical experience of space is
foremost for most individuals, therefore the order of analysis begins with a
deeper understanding of what is meant by the experience of space as a primary
domain:
Table 3.1-2:

Space of My Class conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[My Class]

This is then followed by the experience of safe[ty] as a primary domain:
Table 3.1-3:

Safety of My Class conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Safety]

Target Domain
[My Class]

Finally, there is the need to consider what exactly the invocation of “my
class” means. This is because the invocation of my class (as distinct from all

46

other places) represents a specific space within which something educationally
worthwhile takes place. This is what distinguishes my class from another space
such as a bakery: the shared educational intention. The space of my class is
therefore a way to discuss what emerges from the intention shared by the
members therein. Depending on who the participants may be, this could be the
teaching and learning of ideas, the mastery of content, or simply the passing of
the course.
At any given time, the teacher can utilize their position within the class to
help establish a singular intention for a specific topic of discussion, which is then
shared by all members of the class. What draws all these intentions together is
not the work to be undertaken to achieve the end goal, but instead, how the
space of my class influences the communication that takes place, which in turn
enables any work toward that goal. Space, as well as safety, is very much
functioning to develop rules and expectations for dialogue, permissible topics for
discussion, and the preferential tone to be experienced in my class. The result is
the need for the previous mappings to be more specific, mapping the experience
of space and the experience of safety to the target domain of the experience of
the communicative context in my class:
Table 3.1-4:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Table 3.1-5:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

47

With this more specific understanding of what is meant by invoking my
class, we are now ready to consider the deeper meaning of space and safe
respectively, and the array of submappings they enable within the conceptual
metaphor of “my class is a safe space”.

3.2. Space at the level of the word
In this and the following sections, I will delve into the history of the word
space. My purpose in doing so is to better understand what is meant by the
experience of space so we can develop a mapping, which includes important
submappings, to the communicative context in my class. The overall purpose of
this section is to explore and develop a more thorough understanding and
definition for the concept of space, that can then provide a route to enable a
more precise discussion about safe space.
A consideration of the nature of space is in fact a consideration of the
nature of reality; and therefore, what is possible and expected (legitimate and
relevant, vs illegitimate and irrelevant) in a space such as my class. It is then
reasonable to state that what we understand about the nature of space will affect
how we speak about and conceptualize the space of my class. This
understanding will then contain many submappings that can influence how we
talk and think about what is real and possible in a space, or for the purposes of
this work, what is real and possible in the safe space of a classroom. These
assumptions about the nature of reality lead to what humans consider real, and
therefore knowable, which leads in turn to specific lived practices and
experiences of this knowledge.
Perhaps the reason why there is a belief that educators can do, create, or
perform safe space in their classes is partially due to an incomplete
understanding of what space really means. Simply put, we can do something
finite with relative confidence: if we follow the steps, it will be achieved. However,
when something is infinite and not easily defined, it becomes much more difficult

48

to do anything with the same levels of confidence in achieving a desired result.
This is one of the reasons noted earlier that as an educator I had become
fascinated with what the nature of space might represent.
An understanding of space as absolute, finite, bounded, and exclusionary
may offer a sense of confidence in the achievement of safety for all students, but
results in an experience of my class bereft of almost all educational merit. An
understanding of space as relational, infinite, temporary, and inclusionary can, in
contrast to absolute safety for all students, offer a sense of uncertainty and risk
which can lead to a co-constituted experience of my class that is educationally
worthwhile. By more deeply understanding this nature of space, we reconsider
how we talk about or think about the space of my class. This understanding
transmits unintended ideas and meaning, submappings, that influence how we
communicate what is possible or real (legitimate and relevant versus illegitimate
and irrelevant) in that space.
These unintended ideas and meanings result in an understanding
requiring an in-depth analysis of the modern history of how the word space has
been described, and what in turn this meant for any ensuing discussion about the
experience of communication in my class. As my exploration of space is guided
by my education and training in the Anglo-European tradition of philosophy, I will
focus on the modern history of how the word space first developed, explicitly
located in a philosophical exchange between the ideas of Isaac Newton (16421726) and Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (1646-1716).
This exchange took place through a series of five letters and their replies
between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke (1645-1729), whose work in theology and
metaphysics was greatly influenced by Newton. The correspondences were
written in 1715-1716, and first published in 1717 in what became known as the
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Alexander, 1956). For philosophers of the first
half of the eighteenth century, the Correspondence explicitly located a central
question about the nature of reality, and all ensuing knowledge that was derived

49

from its nature: was space (and hence the universe) infinite, or bounded by a
finite and absolute boundary?
The Correspondence and its debate over the nature of space and reality
pitted a relational understanding of an infinite space (as defended by Leibniz),
against an absolute understanding of a finite space as argued for by Clarke. The
relational understanding of infinite space that Leibniz attempted to defend had
been the relatively stable understanding of space since Judeo-Christian
influences had infused the existence of God into any understanding of the nature
of space. The absolute understanding of finite space that Clarke advocated for
was based upon the work of Newton, which in turn had been strongly influenced
by the reintroduction of a Greek “atomist” understanding of space by Pierre
Gassendi (1592-1655) to the European discussion (Casey, 2013). Gassendi’s
reintroduction of atomism to the philosophers of the seventeenth century would
contribute to upending the relational understanding of an infinite space which had
held sway for almost two millennia, and usher in a modern Newtonian absolute
understanding of a finite space that remains dominant to this day.
Before commencing with an in-depth analysis of the debate central to the
Correspondence, it is necessary to explain how Greek atomism influenced the
understanding of space in both its time, and again in the seventeenth century.
Greek atomism put forward a metaphor of space as being a large void
populated occasionally by objects (DiSalle, 2002; Shapiro, 2002), much like a
large container, or jug. In the areas of the void displaced by what filled the jug
(say wine) there existed matter which was made up of tiny indivisible atoms.
Depending on the configuration of these atoms, different matter and objects were
possible. This understanding would therefore map as follows:

50

Table 3.2-1:

Space-location of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

It is important to note that for these ancient Greek atomists, the presence
of occasional objects within the void was what distinguished it from all other
voids. In this way, the atomist view of space could be considered as space being
nothingness, with only the objects within it establishing any experience of space.
Another way to think about this is that the direct experience of space does not
take place, but instead this experience is perceived by some type of interaction
with objects within/at that space, which is then demarcated as a location within
some greater space.
A useful example to consider is how you perceive the space of your home.
We experience a specific room not by the room’s dimensions or some other
ethereal sense, but instead by our encounter and interaction with specific objects
and signs. When an object or sign is expected and relevant to a particular
location, like a toilet, we can recognize that we are in the location of the
bathroom. Therefore, the location of the room is recognizable by what is within it,
and this in turn helps to establish a boundary around that location that reinforces
what is a legitimate and relevant versus illegitimate and irrelevant object or sign
for that location. The establishment of this boundary is not necessarily a specific
and well-defined line, but instead more of a fuzzy and opaque sense of a
boundary. This fuzzy boundary is in part established by the relevance of the
encountered object or sign to that location, and hence has an almost gradientlike quality where the sense of the boundary is gradually established or gradually
diminished based upon one’s relationship to the object or sign being considered.

51

For instance, encountering a toilet immediately beside a refrigerator, while
perhaps fulfilling a utilitarian design ethic, would be considered by most to be
inappropriate and irrelevant objects to encounter for a kitchen and for a
bathroom. This gradient-like quality of the fuzzy boundary will be revisited and
expanded in the later discussion of safety at the level of the word, but this
understanding of boundary maps as follows:
Table 3.2-2:

Space-location-boundary of My Class’s Communicative
Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location

→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant,
versus illegitimate and
irrelevant

Bounded/boundary

Many early atomists, such as Democritus and Parmenides (DiSalle, 2002)
struggled to reconcile two competing interpretations of the container of space.
The first interpretation was of this container being an unbounded, infinite space
which included and permeated all atoms, and the void where atoms did not exist.
The second interpretation was of a finite and measurable space which included
all the cumulative distances of the void, the spaces between atoms, and the
spaces between objects (Jammer, 1969).
It is important to note that in this second interpretation, the cumulative
distances of the void between individual topos (places), as developed in
Aristotle’s Physics, are finite in the sense that they could be totaled (Aristotle,
1961, 4:211a). However, the finite order of magnitude for this sum of all
distances, may very well approach infinity due to the impossibility of the human
mind ever fathoming it. We then arrive at two atomist views of space. First, of a

52

space that includes everything, both matter and non-matter, and the “void,” which
extends to infinity without possibility of a boundary or an outside. Second, of a
space which consists of everything between matter in a bounded container of a
universe, which is infinite in the sense that a sum of all these distances between
matter, and even the sheer size of the container, are mathematically
unfathomable. Therefore, for the atomist, space was infinite in one of two
practical senses: either it extended to infinity, or it was an impossibility to
measure every relative distance within it.
The Greek mathematician Euclid would develop a system for expressing
these two Atomist views of space, which would later be described by Rene
Descartes (1596-1650) in what is now called the Cartesian coordinate system.
Euclid offered an explanation which Descartes later used to develop a twodimensional space, the plane as described by the x- horizontal and y- vertical
axes, and for a three-dimensional space, as described by the z- depth axis.
This three-dimensional abstraction of the experience of space would later
come to be known as the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry. This
abstraction allowed for two radical ways of thinking about the atomist views of
space that would split theoretical discussions of the nature of space for the next
two millennia. First, as the abstractions of these x, y, and z axes of Euclidean
space extended to infinity, this never-ending view of space meant that the only
meaningful description of objects and bodies was in relation to each other within
a specific location. This would become known as the Relational view of space.
Second, with this abstraction it was possible to locate a boundary of the
abstractions of the x, y, and z axes described by Euclidean space, allowing for a
finite view of a bounded space within which were a near infinite number of unique
topos with objects and bodies. This would become known as the Absolute view
of space.

53

Figure 3.2-1:
(Stolfi, 2009)

Descartes description of Euclidean geometric space

These Relational and Absolute views of space would eventually be
infused with Judeo-Christian assumptions regarding the existence of God
(Alexander, 1956; Jammer, 1969). Christian theologians, between the fall of the
Roman Empire and near the end of the Middle Ages in the fifteenth century,
worked to characterize space as an extension of an all-powerful, omnipotent God
(Perkins, 2007). As God was all powerful and had dominion over all of creation,
this creation, when considered along its x, y, and z axes, must necessarily be
infinite and without boundary to acknowledge the omnipotence of God. This
resulted in the relational view of an infinite space establishing itself as the
dominant view during this period. Further, as all of creation was permeated by
the power of God – God’s “substance” as it came to be called (Descartes, 1985)
– it became no longer plausible to defend the existence of indivisible atoms in an
atomist relational view of space (Greene, 2005). Rightly or wrongly, the relational
view of infinite space would, from this point forward, always invoke a necessary

54

sense of interconnectedness between everything in this space, due to the
presence of God.
Another way to think about this relational view of space is that again, there
is no direct experience of space, but instead this experience is perceived by
interactions with objects. The objects are expected at specific locations, but
should they be encountered in an unexpected location, the inference that must
be made is that there is some reason for their current location that is relevant. In
the example of how you perceive the space of your home, if the home was a
micro-home, less than 300 sq feet, our expectations as to the legitimate and
relevant (versus illegitimate and irrelevant) location of specific objects and signs
need to be revisited to gain greater insight into the intentions of the original
designer. (For example, the toilet and refrigerator may be in proximity because of
the intention to build a micro-home, hence having these fixtures in proximity was
a relevant use of the limited square footage.) This understanding would therefore
map as follows:

55

Table 3.2-3:

Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant,
versus illegitimate and
irrelevant

→

Discussions of legitimate
and relevant, vs illegitimate
and irrelevant, are based
upon exploration of
intention

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender
worthwhile explanation of
the connection between
intention and legitimacy

Shared location

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundaries

Possibility for [divine] movement

Positionality is relative to
intention

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed Europe transition from the
end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and brought with it challenges to the
God-infused relational view of infinite space. One of the most influential
challenges came from Gassendi, who reintroduced his contemporaries to the
atomist absolute view of space (Casey, 2013). Gassendi’s implicit challenge to
God’s immanence throughout a relational view of space drew in part upon new
scientific discoveries in physics, regarding how physical phenomena could be
more reasonably explained in an absolute view of space (Jammer, 1969). One
direct result of Gassendi reintroducing Renaissance thinkers to the atomist
absolute view of space was for others to respond in defense of the relational view
of space, if not also a defense of the necessity of God.
This defense of the relational view of space would be taken up by,
amongst others, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and
56

Leibniz (1646-1716). Practicing metaphysics in defense of the relational view of
space, each developed far-reaching works that supported specific interests.
Descartes developed a metaphysical defense that would serve the interest of the
emerging science:
Some years ago, I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that
I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful
nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I
realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to
demolish everything completely and start again right from the
foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that
was stable and likely to last (1984, VII: 17).
Spinoza developed a metaphysical defense that would serve the interest of
ethics. However, Leibniz, perhaps the most eclectic of these three, went so far as
to develop a metaphysical defense of the relational view of space that
established its own ontological order (Moore, 2012). Therefore, Leibniz’s
relational view of space will be considered more fully, for he alone was not
motivated in reconciling this view of space with the scientific, or cultural,
discoveries of the time as had become fashionable and self-fulfilling through the
scientific method (Perkins, 2007; Vailati, 1997). Instead, Leibniz offered a
defense of the relational view of space by presenting one of the most mature
interpretations of what this view of a relational, infinite universe would look like at
the ontological level (metaphysical – physical), the epistemological level (how
knowledge was derived), and the potential practice of the everyday (Leibniz,
1973e; 1996).
Despite the defenses taken up by Descartes and Spinoza, the scientific
evidence supporting the claim of an absolute view of space continued to mount
through the seventeenth century, encouraged most notably by the work of
Newton (Alexander, 1956; Hall, 1992; Perkins, 2007). Underpinning this
continuing debate was the role of God in the universe proposed by the relational
versus absolute views of space. Whereas the relational view claimed an “all
powerful and invisible” (Greene, 2005, p. 7) interconnectedness between objects
and bodies in the universe, the absolute view claimed the independence of all

57

objects and bodies in the universe. At the end of the seventeenth century few
thinkers were willing to publicly support the claim that God was unnecessary in
either view of space (Hall, 1992) due to the persistence and leading role of the
Christian church in almost all public discourses.
This necessity to account for God was also true when Newton, an atomist
who posited an absolute space as a potentially empty container (DiSalle, 2002;
Shapiro, 2002) accounted for the presence of God. He did this by allowing space
to be filled by “spiritual substance” as well as material substance, but he was
careful to add that such spiritual stuff “can be no obstacle to the motion of matter;
no more than if nothing were in its way” (Hall, 1992, p. 27). Absolute space,
Newton declared, is the “sensorium of God” (Hall, 1992, p. 29), but a space
where God exerted no inherent influence. This marked the beginning of what
would later be known as the Death of God in philosophical, metaphysical, and
academic pursuits (Hall, 1992). This understanding would therefore map as
follows:

58

Table 3.2-4:

Absolute Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Container that is
distinguished by there being
something in/at a specific
location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant in/at
a specific location.
Everything beyond the
boundary is considered
illegitimate and irrelevant

→

Discussions are focused on
something being present
(static), or being in
movement

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of the boundary
to legitimate and relevant, or
illegitimate and irrelevant,
discussion and ideas

Bounded/boundary

Possibility for movement

Positionality is established by
distance to the
bounded/boundary

In formulating his laws of motion which mathematically described how
humans perceive the movement of objects, Newton required a reference point
from which to make his observations. If this reference point were static and
unchanging, his laws of motion would make perfect sense. If this reference point
could only be determined by its potentially shifting and changing relationship to
other objects, Newton’s “equations describing motion would prove meaningless”
(Greene, 2005, p. 9). Newton, therefore, “with a few brief sentences in his
Principia Mathematica” (Greene, 2005, p. 27) declared the necessity for an
absolute view of space (Hall, 1992). The result was the creation of a self-fulfilling
tautology for what would become known as Newtonian, or Classical physics. His
laws of motion successfully accounted for almost all humans could conceive of

59

scientifically regarding motion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In a
very real sense, Newton erected a permanent and static boundary around his
absolute space that was fathomable, where none had existed up to that point, to
explain the relationships of objects within that space.
In the competing (finite and infinite) views of space, the implications for the
nature of reality were profound. If space, and thereby the universe, was infinite in
size and scope, any consideration of the evolving relationships between bodies
or objects required an acceptance of the inherent uncertainty in what was
considered legitimate knowledge derived in this space. If space, and thereby the
universe, was finite in size and scope, it became possible to consider individual
bodies or objects with respect to the universe itself and without consideration of
the influence of other proximate objects. In this way, the finite sense of space
offered a sense of certainty in what was legitimate and relevant versus
illegitimate and irrelevant knowledge derived in this space.
Were absolute knowledge and certainty possible? Or was only relative
knowledge possible, with its necessary uncertainty? At their most general, the
competing finite and infinite views of space can result in radically differing
understandings of what is meant by a safe space. If space is infinite, the
submapping of infinite size, scope, and variations can lead to entailment
relationships (Black, 1962; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) which provide safe space
with a meaning that must be relational. Put another way, in an infinite universe
safe space would exist and be created only by the relationships of individuals
and their relative positionality to each other. Further, once this safe space was
created it would require an ongoing and constantly shifting communicative
context to maintain it. On the other hand, if space is finite, the submapping of
finite size, location, and certainty can lead to entailment relationships which
provide safe space a meaning that must be absolute.
If the universe were truly finite, safe space would exist as specific
locations, and have clear boundaries regarding where it begins and ends. The

60

boundaries would allow for the prohibition and policing of specific, static practices
inside the safe space, and it would be finite in the sense that there would only be
so much safety to go around.
At its very core, this debate between the Leibnizian and the Newtonian
understandings of space speak to the very nature of the experience of space,
and importantly for the present work, the experience of safe space. If the finite
Newtonian understanding of space were to be accepted, it would mean that
empty space existed, with independent objects occasionally being encountered
within it. Newtonian space is akin to a container for objects. The laws and rules
that then govern this container are entirely spatial, set apart from and above the
objects. In a very real sense, these laws and rules do not consider the objects
over which they act.
However, if the Leibnizian understanding of space is to be retained (or for
this work, recovered), it would mean that space exists as the relationship
between objects. Leibnizian space is akin to a container made up of objects.
Therefore, any laws and rules in Leibnizian space are informed by the
interconnectedness of the objects themselves. An example of relevance for this
work would be the experience of a safe space by twelve people in a class due to
their current relationship and configuration of the communicative context of the
class. With the arrival of a thirteenth person, every existing relationship and
configuration of what is accepted as legitimate and relevant to the communicative
context of the class would need to shift to account for the possibility afforded this
new person as a member. Though this shift may be difficult to perceive, the
experience of safe space will feel subtly different to the participants in the newly
enlarged class.
How we have come to our modern understandings of space and safe
space is influenced by inheritances from this debate and its outcome – the
primacy of the Newtonian understanding. To a lesser degree, our modern
understandings of space and safe space are influenced by the remnants of the

61

Leibnizian understanding in our relationships and practices of safe space. It is
therefore worthwhile to delve into the debate over finite versus infinite space, and
how its outcome influenced our modern conceptualization of space (and in turn,
safe space).
The debate regarding the universe and thereby reality’s true nature, as
either an absolute Newtonian space, or a relational Leibnizian space, can result
in very different expectations about the certainty of knowledge. As discussed
above, the Newtonian understanding of space exists as several objects and their
distances within a void. These objects exist as independent of the space and
independent from each other; there is no connection between the space and the
discrete objects. Therefore, this Newtonian space can be governed by (universal)
rules and laws within a boundary, set above and independent of the objects.
Again, the Leibnizian understanding of space is a space full of relations
between objects. In this way, the space itself is the objects and their relationships
to each other, and as will be discussed in the next section of this work, each
object is a node amongst and a part of the many relationally connected objects in
the space. This understanding results in a space which cannot be governed by
general rules nor laws that are set above the objects. Moreover, general rules
and laws are an impossibility because the objects and the space itself derive a
co-constituted meaning from the multiplicity of relationships. Therefore, any
attempt to govern, rule, or control the space requires the integration of relative
relationships, which are temporary at best due to the ever-changing positionality
of the objects. Hence, infinite space demands continual revaluation of
positionality and relationships.

3.3. Space at the level of the statement
In this section I will consider the word “space” as used at the level of the
statement, in terms of absolute or Newtonian space, versus relational or
Leibnizian space. During the debate over the certitude of reality and knowledge

62

which played out in metaphysical debates as an issue of transcendence, the
question presents itself: could human beings make sense of infinite, or only finite
things (Kant, 1998)? For philosophers of the first half of the eighteenth century,
this debate was ever present, and was first explicitly located in a 1717 publication
which became known as the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. It consisted of the
exchange of five letters in 1715-1716 written by Leibniz to Clarke, and Clarke’s
five subsequent replies.
The Correspondence represented the last phase of a controversy
stretching back to 1705 between Newton, who was influential to Clarke’s notable
works in theology and metaphysics in England, and Leibniz. The original point at
issue in this controversy was whether Newton or Leibniz had first created
calculus, and thus which of the two had plagiarized the other’s work. However,
the controversy eventually expanded this dispute to other aspects of what would
become known as Newtonian (or Classical) physics and its implications for
theological and metaphysical thought (Alexander, 1956; Vailati, 1997). For many
of their contemporaries, the Correspondence was eagerly read as the final
showdown between the objectiveness of mathematics and science that posited
the existence of absolute space, and the uncertainty of metaphysics and
theology that argued for relational space (Aiton, 1985; Hatfield, 2006).
For the present work, the most pertinent outcome from the debate in the
Correspondence is the task of clarifying what is meant when an educator claims
the space of their class fosters the discussion and development of knowledge. Is
this knowledge legitimated and established as relevant through the multitude of
communicative relationships within the class, or by an authority (the teacher) who
maintains and reinforces the boundary of legitimate and relevant communication
permissible within a class?
Before addressing how the controversy over absolute versus relational
views of space presented in the Correspondence was “settled” a half century
later by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), it is necessary to have a more complete

63

understanding of just what exactly is meant by a relational view of space; for the
possibilities it affords are quite different than the simplicity of an absolute view of
space. It is these possibilities of the relational view of space that will be retrieved
through this work, and developed into a more educationally meaningful
understanding of the experience of safe space.
To better understand what is meant by space being infinite, and in turn
relational, we need to begin our discussion with Descartes, whose “metaphysics
of space was set against the doctrines of ancient atomists, as revived and
promoted by Pierre Gassendi” (Moore, 2012, p. 63). Atomism argued that matter
existed as small, indivisible particles or “atoms”. These atoms were distributed
through a space conceived as an empty container. Where there were no atoms,
there was a vacuum of empty space.
For a devout Christian who adhered to a belief of an all-powerful God, the
idea that there existed parts of God’s domain empty of his presence, in the form
of his atoms or his matter, seemed antithetical to the very essence of God.
Descartes therefore proposed a system where the essence of matter was space
in three dimensions, where there was no distinction between space and this
essence of matter. Utilizing the established Euclidean geometry of the time, he
abstracted three x-, y-, and z- axes which extended to infinity, requiring a
coordinate system to locate objects in this space. Hence, only the relational
positioning of bodies to other bodies in this space was possible.
Descartes equated this space with the essence of matter. This essence
was not in the space, but rather its own space that was required for there to then
be empty space. This essence of matter which Descartes promoted as the
“substance” of God, ensured God’s will and power in all of reality. All of reality,
and thereby all of space, was therefore an extension of God. Through such a
conception of space, Descartes ensured an interconnectedness between all
objects and bodies. Furthermore, because God was infinite, without a beginning
nor an end, an inside nor an outside, only the relational view of space could be

64

possible. This understanding of space was developed in the previous section of
this work, and maps as follows:
Table 3.3-1:

Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Shared location

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundaries

Possibility for [divine] movement

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant,
versus illegitimate and
irrelevant

→

Discussions of legitimate vs
illegitimate are based upon
exploration of intention

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender
worthwhile explanation of
the connection between
intention and legitimacy

Positionality is relative to
intention

A generation after Descartes, Leibniz took up the defense of the relational
view of space. Due to the increasing adoption of the absolute view of space and
the corresponding science to support it, Leibniz began his defense of the
relational view with a simultaneous attack on what he considered the illogic of the
absolute view. He put forward two seemingly straightforward required principles
for thinking about the nature of space, the universe, reality, and the practice of
metaphysics. Leibniz considered these necessary principles as a priori. An a
priori truth is essentially something that is known to be true “absolutely
independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses” (Kant,
1998, B2-3), which meant for Leibniz a universal truth derived from theoretical
deduction, and not derived from experiences in the world.

65

The first a priori principle Leibniz put forth was called the principle of
sufficient reason: “there is nothing without a reason” (Leibniz, 1973b, p. 172);
“nothing unintelligible happens” (Leibniz, 1996, p. 381). The second a priori
principle he called the principle of contradiction: “nothing can at the same time be
and not be, but everything is or is not” (Leibniz, 1973a, p. 9). For Leibniz, these
two a priori principles represented a kind of boundary in any attempt to make
sense of things through the practice of metaphysics and philosophy. The
principle of sufficient reason established how things should work within this
boundary, as there was consistency, and more important, everything had a
reason for being.
The principle of contradiction pointed out that sense could not be made of
things beyond this boundary, as there was no consistency outside the boundary.
These a priori principles of sufficient reason and contradiction were applied to a
consideration of the nature of space being infinite or finite. If space and the
universe were infinite, the principle of contradiction ensured that all rules, laws of
nature, etc., were consistent throughout this universe in an ongoing and neverending manner. Therefore, if a boundary were established for some reason, it
would reasonably be located at the very edge of this consistency, which in an
infinite universe, is unfathomable. The result would be that the principle of
sufficient reason, that everything happens for some reason, is fulfilled. If space
and the universe were finite, the principle of contradiction would require that all
rules, laws of nature, etc., within the boundaries of this universe to be consistent,
and everything beyond the boundary to not be consistent and therefore
unintelligible.
The result of this line of thinking for a finite universe would be that the
principle of sufficient reason could not be fulfilled, because the inconsistent and
unintelligible beyond the boundary could not be ascribed as happening for some
reason. These two a priori principles and their application to the debate over the
nature of space therefore cast suspicion on the absolute view and formed the
basis of Leibniz’s self-fulfilling tautology for an infinite, relational view of space.

66

One important implication of Leibniz’s a priori principles was the
recognition that boundaries, wherever they existed in relational space, were
erected for some intended purpose and that the discussion of legitimate and
relevant versus illegitimate and irrelevant, needed to align to that specific
purpose. This consideration of boundaries when they are encountered can have
educational implications. As an example, in a class trying to learn about the
benefits of teaching from a critical pedagogy perspective, questions about its
utility during this discussion would not be dismissed as illegitimate or irrelevant.
So long as the discussion within the communicative context aligned (in some
way) to the intended purpose which served as the temporary boundary, it would
be a legitimate avenue for further discussion. This understanding would therefore
map as follows:
Table 3.3-2:

Relational Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared location
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Established based upon
some recognized shared
educational intention

→

Discussions of legitimate
and relevant, vs illegitimate
and irrelevant,
communication are based
upon exploration and
connection to intention

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender
worthwhile explanation of
the connection between
intention and legitimacy

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundaries
Possibility for movement

Positionality is relative to
intention

67

In the infinite, relational view of space, Leibniz also insisted on necessity
of the presence of God. Specifically, God was responsible for all “that is
contingently the case”, with “what is contingently the case” being “what is the
case in this possible world but not in others” (Moore, 2012, p. 69). Essentially,
God would establish, on each possible Earth-world in the infinite expanse of the
universe, differing versions of possible relationships between all objects or
bodies, with each Earth-world being the most ideal representation of those
differences. As a universe stretching to infinity had to have a reason for being,
and as God was infinitely powerful, he could consider every possible combination
of every possible version of every possible relationship on this Earth, and every
other possible Earth, simultaneously somewhere in the infinity of the universe:
God knows through his wisdom, chooses through his goodness, and
produces through his power (Leibniz, 1973c, §55).
I will posit that to a modern reader, this notion of possible worlds where
every combination of relationship may or may not exist, will seem odd. Very few
individuals have deeply considered the implications of what infinity, and an
infinite space, can mean to an understanding of reality, unless of course you are
an admirer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or other comic books and their
concept of the multiverse. However, to someone such as Leibniz, ensconced in
the reality of an infinite, relational view of space and of an all-powerful God, these
thoughts would have seemed ordinary. Leibniz did recognize the problematic
nature of his claim of our present Earth being the best of all possible worlds,
because at its most shallow, it could not account for all that was not ideal in this
world: evil, suffering, and pain.
To address the seeming imperfections of our present Earth, Leibniz
established an entire metaphysical system called theodicy to account for why
God would plausibly allow for evil to exist, and to explain the function it would
serve (Leibniz, 2005; Plantinga, 1974). Moreover, he pointed out that what was
for the best on one world was dependent upon the conditions of the existing
relationships on that world, which did not exist in the same fashion on any other

68

world (Leibniz, 1989). Simply put, each world could only be said to be the best
with respect to itself and its own unique conditions.
In his system of an infinite, relational view of space, Leibniz noted that
there existed individual substances, which he called Monads, which were parts of
the entirety of the world. These monads were mind-like, and conscious of the
world around them. Further, each monad represented the world in some specific
way (Leibniz, 1973c), from some position as it were. Monads were not material
things because they lacked any spatial characteristics, much like a mind as
opposed to a brain. Where a brain has a specific physical place at any specific
time, the human mind, like a monad, was something aspatial and atemporal.
All monads existed thanks to the existence of a singular, perfect, central
monad which was a full and perfect representation of the world due to its being
representative of God. This central monad was necessary for all other dependent
monads to exist, because this central monad existed in the substance of these
dependent monads and their specific, and differently positioned, representations
of the world. Across and through all the possible worlds of Leibniz’s metaphysical
system, the central monad existed, surrounded with a differing combination of
these dependent monads. With the infinite number of these dependent monads
existing, or even not existing, in infinite combinations, these possible worlds
became infinite by necessity.
The implication of Leibniz’s infinite relational view of space and his
monad-oriented theory of knowledge is that it introduces a necessary evaluative
component to the mapping. Specifically, with each monad being a representation
of the world in some specific way (Leibniz, 1973c) which did not exist in that
fashion anywhere else, the conditions that brought about that specific monad
representation needed to be considered and evaluated by an individual.
If through this evaluation the representation of the current situation in the
world was found wanting, the conditions that brought about the situation could be
addressed. This evaluation of the current situation can also have educational

69

implications. As an example, this evaluative component can engender a
necessary continual reflection in the experience of safe space, on the
appropriateness of communicative strategies being utilized in a current situation.
This understanding would therefore map as follows:
Table 3.3-3:

Relational Space-location-boundary-movementpositionality-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative
Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared location

→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Established based upon
some recognized shared
educational intention

→

Discussions of legitimate
and relevant, vs illegitimate
and irrelevant,
communication are based
upon exploration and
connection to intention

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender
worthwhile explanation of
the connection between
intention and legitimacy

→

Continual attempts to reflect
on the possible connections
between current
communication and
intention, leading to
repositioning or revision

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundaries
Possibility for movement

Positionality is relative to
intention

Recognition and evaluation of
positionality and possibility

In developing his vision of an infinite array of monads interacting with a
central monad on each of the possible worlds, with each possible world being the
best representation with respect to its own conditions, Leibniz closed his
conceptual and ontological loop. As he only ascribed value to two a priori

70

principles, sufficient reason and contradiction, a process of reasonable analysis
always led to the conditions being present, and then to the determination of the
possible truth in that world for those conditions. In this way Leibniz established a
self-fulfilling tautology for an infinite, relational view of space which was
breathtaking in its scope and depth.
However, much of his development of the relational view of space took
place during the almost continual stream of macroscopic scientific discoveries
which elevated Newton’s absolute view of space. These discoveries included
Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the earth not being the center of the Universe
and his subsequent astronomical observations, Kepler’s laws of planetary
motion, Galileo’s scientific objections to the position of the earth in the Universe,
and microscopic scientific discoveries such as Snell’s law of light refraction,
Hooke’s discovery of the cell, and Newton’s observations of the makeup of the
light spectrum. Together, these scientific discovers began to paint a picture of
reality in stark contrast to Leibniz’s possible worlds of monads and the relational
view of space. While Leibniz recognized the value of these scientific discoveries,
he was struck by the hubris of these thinkers who claimed they were on the
verge of offering a comprehensive explanation for the complexity of the universe:
We have knowledge of a tiny part of that eternity which stretches out
immeasurably… And yet out of so little experience we rashly make
judgements about the immeasurable and the eternal… Look at the
most lovely picture, and then cover it up, leaving uncovered only a
tiny scrap of it. What else will you see there, even if you look as
closely as possible, and the more so as you look from nearer and
nearer at hand, but a kind of confused medley of colours, without
selection, without art! And yet when you remove the covering, and
look upon the whole picture from the proper place, you will see that
what previously seemed to you to have been aimlessly smeared on
the canvas was in fact accomplished with the highest art by the
author of the work… [Similarly, the] great composers frequently
mingle discords with harmonious chords so that the listener may be
stimulated and pricked as it were, and become, in a way, anxious
about the outcome; presently when all is restored to order he feels
so much more content (Leibniz, 1973f, p. 142).

71

Newton was one thinker for whom Leibniz had disdain (Aiton, 1985;
Alexander, 1956; Perkins, 2007; Vailati, 1997). With Newton’s atomist
reassertion of space being an absolute container in its nature, Leibniz dedicated
the last years of his life attempting to refute the possibility of this absolute view of
space. Newton contended that space was independent from everything within it
(Perkins, 2007). Leibniz contended that space was simply a way of describing
the relation between one object and another object (Vailati, 1997). Newton
argued that space was absolute, finite, and consistent, while Leibniz countered
that space was relational, infinite, and consistent in some unknown manner, and
perhaps always unknowable to human beings (Aiton, 1985; Alexander, 1956).
Newton’s implicit implication was that God was not all powerful because his
domain had an end, a boundary. Leibniz’s explicit implication was that God must
be all powerful to account for the infinite nature of his domain. This
understanding of Newtonian absolute space would therefore map as follows:

72

Table 3.3-4:

Absolute Space-location-boundary-movement-positionality
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Container that is
distinguished by there being
something in/at a specific
location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant in/at
a specific location.
Everything beyond the
boundary is considered
illegitimate and irrelevant

→

Discussions are focused on
something being present
(static), or being in
movement

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of the boundary
to legitimate or illegitimate
discussion and ideas

Bounded/boundary

Possibility for movement

Positionality is established by
distance to the
bounded/boundary

These assertions and counter-assertions would play out in the
Correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke, writing in defense of Newton’s
metaphysical implications (Alexander, 1956). This debate of space’s metaphysics
and ontology, as absolute versus relational, would be read by their
contemporaries as a confrontation between the uncertain reality of metaphysics
and theology, and the objective reality of mathematics and science. This debate
would influence ensuing work in European philosophy for almost half a century
through to Kant.
Probably the most famous and influential philosophical exchange of the
eighteenth century (Aiton, 1985), the Correspondence would have a far-reaching
effect once it was settled that Newtonian physics explained the universe in closer

73

alignment to what humans perceived. The Correspondence influenced an
epistemological order based upon objective, empirical measures that would
remain relatively stable until the beginning of the twentieth century. However, to
say that this debate was settled with the publication of the Correspondence
would be to ignore and diminish the half century of intellectual struggle which
took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of the most influential
philosophers of this period, David Hume (1711–1776), offered a concise account
of the problems with past attempts to make sense of space, and in turn provided
a framework for almost all subsequent work in metaphysics to the beginning of
the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Descartes had proposed that
there was no distinction between space and matter, and that the universe was
shot through with the essence of matter, as an extension of the “substance” of
God. Descartes had originally noted the existence of three kinds of substance:
one Divine substance, one extended substance, and an infinite number of
created thinking substances.
Metaphysical philosophers of the seventeenth century like Leibniz had
extended these ideas of substance in their own various works, so that by the
eighteenth century, Hume was forced to refer to “that unintelligible chimera of
substance” as philosophers no longer had any clear idea of what Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, and others arguing for a relational view of space meant when
they wrote of “substance” (Hume, 2000, I.i.§7). Hume’s objection to “substance”
was extended to other non-perceivable nor observable metaphysical concepts.
Moore (2012) notes that Hume would come to consider these poor examples of
metaphysics because thoughts, ideas, and concepts appeared to be created to
serve whatever purpose the author had in their mind. Hume therefore challenged
contemporary philosophers to align their practice of metaphysics with what was
physically real and observable through physics or one of its subsidiary
knowledges. Further:

74

Hume introduced a kind of self-confidence into metaphysics which
… would never thereafter go away. Sense itself, in the most general
attempt to make sense of things, was to become a principal focus of
attention. There would be a concern with the scope and limits of
sense-making which, by the twentieth century, was to become
almost obsessive. … such self-consciousness brought with it then,
and has continued to bring with it ever since, a crisis of selfconfidence in the very practice of metaphysics (Moore, 2012, pp. 8788).
This allowed Hume to begin molding the practice of questioning the nature
of space and reality into what he felt was good metaphysics. Good metaphysics
would limit the scope of inquiry to what the self, the human being, was conscious
of. If the self could sense it through hearing, touch, smell, taste, sight, etc., only
then could metaphysics lead to making sense of this “sensed” thing. In this way,
Hume addressed the issue of transcendence in metaphysics by firmly
establishing a boundary around what was immanent and existent. Hume’s
metaphysics would be bound to what the human being was able to perceive
through their senses. This was an example of Hume’s empiricism, the “view that
all sense-making derives from sense experience” (Moore, 2012, p. 88).
Hume moved quickly from this finite claim about the limit of what a human
could sense of space and in space, to an epistemology of knowledge derived
from this sense-experience. For Hume, a real-world sense-experience would
lead to an impression, while a memory of a sense-experience could lead to a
unique and imaginative idea of the original impression. The strength of how these
impressions and ideas came together would then form understanding and
knowledge of the experienced world. Hume was adamant that all attempts to
make sense of things had to come from our experience of those things in the
world, and that more complex understanding was derived from simple ideas:
…our thoughts or ideas, however compounded or sublime, … always
… resolve themselves into such simple ideas as were copied from a
precedent [impression] (Hume, 1975, p. 19).

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Hume was therefore able to generalize this empiricist metaphysics, with
which he took direct aim at the metaphysical claims put forward by past
advocates of the relational view of space:
When we entertain … any suspicion that a philosophical term is
employed without meaning or idea …, we need but enquire, from
what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be
impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion
(1975, p. 22).
The result of thus limiting the scope of metaphysics and discussions about
the nature of space was profound. In the context of the present work, the
implication would be that the impression of space would be that which we had
sensed, perhaps observed, in our experiences interacting in an environment.
This would mean that space or safe space would be little more than a container
within which we could act. These acts could then be sensed or observed to
increase or decrease safety, of which there was a finite amount, compared to the
others in the container. Further, Hume’s assertion that “impression leads to idea”
would necessarily cancel out substance as “nothing but a collection of simple
ideas, that are united by the imagination” (2000, p. 16), “infinity” as an
impossibility for the human mind to fathom (2000, I.ii.§1), and perhaps even:
the idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good
Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and
augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom
(1975, p. 19).
In his ontological and epistemological system, Hume explicitly coupled
metaphysics to his contemporary physics and sciences (Hume, 2000), limiting
knowledge to what could be derived through science and its various senseexperiences:
It seems to me, that the only objects of the abstract sciences are
quantity and number, and that all attempts to extend this more
perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere
sophistry and illusion (1975, p. 163).

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Hume’s objections to metaphysics and denouncement of the relational infinite
view of space contributed to an understanding of space that required the need to
sense, perceive, or observe something in any experience of space. This
understanding would therefore contribute to our map as follows:
Table 3.3-5:

Absolute Perceived Space-location-boundary-movementpositionality of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Container that is
distinguished by there being
something in/at a specific
location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant in/at
a specific location as only
what is observable through
direct experience.
Everything beyond the
boundary, in-direct or
inferred experience, is
considered illegitimate and
irrelevant

→

Discussions are focused on
something being observed
as present (static), or being
in movement due to some
observable reason

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of the
importance of the boundary
to legitimate or illegitimate
discussion and ideas

Bounded/boundary with limited
perceivable possibilities within

Possibility for movement

Positionality is established by
distance to and perception of the
bounded/boundary

When Kant approached the discussion of a human’s ability to comprehend
the nature of space, he was careful to acknowledge the work upon which he was
building:

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I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very
thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and
gave completely different direction of my research in the field of
speculative philosophy (2002, 4:260).
Kant’s work is especially useful to the consideration of what safe space can
mean in the educational context. This is because Kant approached the exchange
in the Correspondence at a point when the debate about the nature of space
remained unsettled. On one side of this debate was the atomist absolute space
whose understanding Hume had narrowed to what humans could sense,
perceive, or observe directly. On the other side was the relational infinite space
whose understanding Leibniz had posited was limited only by what humans could
fathom. There were aspects of Kant’s taking up the Correspondence which were
striking because of the apparent lack of consistency amongst his purpose and
those of the arguments he drew upon.
First, Newton’s interest (as defended by Clarke) had lain in the physics of
motion, which had compelled him to posit “absolute” space to ensure that his
calculus worked. Second, Leibniz’s objection to absolute space and his
promotion of relational space was based in part on the implications of a nonomnipotent God in a finite, absolute universe, as well as his desire to promote his
mathematical proof, and his calculus in support of relational space. Third,
Clarke’s support of Newton was in part intended to reconcile motion in an
absolute and finite universe with the possibility of an infinite, omnipotent God.
Therefore, Kant took up what was both a theological and mathematical debate,
not just a metaphysical debate about the nature and meaning of space. Kant
eventually arrived at a theory of space being purely an a priori intuition of the
mind. This a priori state Kant argued to be necessary to see the world and its
objects, which supported the purpose of developing his own theory of cognition.
Much like Hume, Kant wanted to distinguish between good and bad
metaphysics, but was concerned by the need to establish “some principled way
of distinguishing between that which is to be rejected and what is to be saved”
(2002, 4:255ff). To arrive at this differentiation, Kant struggled to make sense of

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and then explain the nature of space. In his early work of 1755, Kant explained
the physics and metaphysics of space by adopting a relational view of space in
the Leibnizian sense (Kant, 1992a).
Kant changed his mind in 1768 when he advocated for an “absolute and
original space” in the Newtonian sense (1992b, 2:383). Kant pivoted once more
in 1770 when he rejected both the Leibniz relational view and the “English” view
of space as an “absolute and boundless receptacle of possible things” (1992c,
2:403). Rather, Kant concluded that space, in any meaningful sense, was a
“subjective and ideal” way how human beings perceive their sense-experiences
of the things in the world:
Space is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor
an accident, nor a relation, it is, rather, subjective and ideal; it issues
from the mind in accordance with a stable law as a scheme, so to
speak, for coordinating everything which is sensed externally (1992c,
2:403).
Kant intended to establish what would become known as “the transcendental
ideality of space, which meant that it was not only dependent upon human
perception” but was also an a priori “universal representation” (Hatfield, 2006, p.
76). This a priori universal representation of space would not be dependent upon
the senses but would instead consider the general understanding of space to be
a type of “built in” ordering and structuring system to our sense experiences.
Kant developed a theory of space’s ontology which sought to resolve,
once and for all, the debate between absolute and relational views of space. He
did this by positing that space and time were dependent upon the mind for their
existence. By arguing that the representation of space was an intuition of the
mind rather than a general concept, Kant sought to counter the metaphysical and
epistemological implications of Descartes and Leibniz’s relational view, and the
implications of Newton’s absolute view, to put forward his own claim of space as
an intuition distinct from other concepts (Hatfield, 2006). The following passage

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from Kant begins to offer what he meant by the structure of space as intuition,
utilizing a series of questions that juxtapose his and Leibniz’s perspectives:
What, now, are space and time? Are they actual beings? Are they
mere determinations or else relations of things, but nonetheless of a
sort that would in themselves belong to such things if they were not
being intuited; or are they such that they inhere only in the form of
intuition, and hence in the subjective constitution of our mind, in the
absence of which these predicates could not be ascribed to anything
whatsoever (1998, A23/B37-38, emphasis mine)?
With striking force and clarity, Kant could acknowledge past views of space,
dismiss them, and establish his own. From his reference to Newton’s “actual
beings”, Descartes’ “determinations” of God’s will, and Leibniz’s “relations of
things”, he was able to begin arguing that space existed “in the subjective
constitution of our mind” in what he called transcendentally ideal.
This transcendentally ideal subjective constitution of our mind was
premised upon four arguments (Kant, 1998, A23-25/B38-40) to explain the ideal
nature of the “representation of space”, a type of intuition which was necessary to
perceive and then structure meaning of the world and its objects. In establishing
space as a necessary a priori intuition, Kant’s argument could be understood as
an attack on the relational view of space as unable to be experienced void of any
objects to perceive. His result was an a priori representation of space as intuition,
both non-empirical and non-relational.
The purpose of Kant’s interest in establishing space as an a priori intuition
was to forward his theory of cognition, namely how human beings thought about
and understood the world. As the debate over the nature of space had endured
between two distinct camps, the absolute and relational views, it was necessary
for Kant to offer a resolution to the debate before continuing his own work on
cognition. This ontological claim of the nature of space as an a priori intuition
allowed him to posit an epistemological theory which still permeates our thinking
about thinking today, and which has limited the thinking of most individuals about
the nature of space to all but the most superficial of considerations.

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Kant’s ontological claim of the nature of space was necessary for his
theory of cognition explaining how human beings thought about and came to
understand the world. To Kant, human beings were given an a priori
understanding of space by its affect upon them, and this affect was “sensory”.
However, this understanding of space did not mean that space acted upon an
individual, but instead was constituted in how the individual came to see the
world of objects beyond the self. We are given this a priori understanding only
because human beings are capable of reception, a concurrent process of
structuring and ordering to what we are experiencing, which allows us to
understand the experience. Knowledge accrued from experience was referred to
by Kant as synthetic a priori knowledge, for it was not purely conceptual, but also
contained the sensory process of reception influenced by the nature of space
intuition.
This radical idea of how we understood the world beyond ourselves
became known as transcendental and was best captured in Kant’s analogy of
‘native spectacles’ with which every individual was born (Moore, 2012). These
lenses, which are a necessity to see and hence cannot be taken off, are how he
explained the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge leading in part to the
knowledge of a reality independent of the individual (Kant, 2002, 4:297-302). The
idealism was not due to what we knew of the outside world, but instead how we
knew and perceived it:
all objects of experience possible for us… are nothing but
appearances, … which, as they are represented, … have outside our
thoughts no existence grounded in itself (1998, A490-491/B518519).
These spectacles can be understood metaphorically as follows: 1) I am born and
I have eyes capable of receiving input through a pair of spectacles I cannot take
off; 2) I have 20/20 vision with the spectacles as a baby, but I do not yet know I
have 20/20 vision because I have had no sense experiences of the objects in the
world; 3) As I take in more sense experiences of the objects in the world through
my spectacles, I come to perceive and understand I have 20/20 vision due to my

81

ability to make sense of the sense experiences of objects I am receiving; 4) From
this point forward, I know how things are supposed to look, thanks to what I
perceive through my spectacles; 5) I never really see the objects in the world, but
instead perceive and understand these objects through the lens of how I know
they are supposed to look, through the spectacles. In this way, Kant’s spectacles
can be understood as functioning like an interactive metaphor as developed by
Black (1962) and Ricoeur (1975), that systematically orders the world that we
perceive thanks to the intended ideas imparted by the metaphor. However, in this
understanding the lesser understood ideas of the mapping also give meaning to
the world we are perceiving, though this meaning and understanding is liable to
be incomplete, unintelligible, or even wrong.

82

Figure 3.3-1:

Author’s approximation of Kant’s analogy of the spectacles

83

Where Hume’s epistemological theory of knowledge started with a sense
experience, distinguishing only between the direct experience and the memory of
a direct experience, Kant offered a theory which was much more nuanced. For
Kant, meaningful and accurate knowledge of the world was gained through
synthetic a priori knowledge which combined intuition with concept. Our intuitions
about the nature of space and its resultant ordering of our sense experiences of
objects in the world, were a passive product of our receptivity. Our understanding
of concepts was an active product of the way we think about what we are
perceiving about the object.
For Kant, much like Hume, this structure of space was necessarily finite
and observable because it had to affect our senses, even though space as an
abstract concept could be “an infinite given magnitude” (1998, B39). Kant was
thereby able to describe the scope of what he considered good metaphysics, and
then develop its boundaries and limits by claiming that any synthetic a priori
knowledge decoupled from intuition was invariably poor metaphysics.
Thinking about thinking becomes akin to what Kant said about good
philosophy, which: “Consists precisely in knowing its bounds” (1998, A727/B755).
The ontological claim about the nature of space was embedded in his analogous
spectacles. Hence any meaning and understanding of the world derived through
these spectacles, Kant’s epistemology, were necessarily imbued with this claim
of the finite nature of space. This resulted in the necessary role of perception in
the establishment, and evaluation of worthwhile knowledge. Kant’s contribution to
the understanding of space therefore results in the following mapping:

84

Table 3.3-6:

Perception-Space-location-boundary-movementpositionality of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Container that is
distinguished by there being
something in/at a specific
location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant in/at
a specific location as only
what is observable through
direct experience.
Everything beyond the
boundary, in-direct or
inferred experience, is
considered illegitimate and
irrelevant

→

Discussions are focused on
something being observed
as present (static), or being
in movement due to some
observable reason

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of the
importance of the boundary
to legitimate or illegitimate
discussion and ideas

Bounded/boundary with limited
perceivable possibilities within

Possibility for movement

Positionality is established by
distance to, perception, and
comprehension of the
bounded/boundary

The central role of perception established by Kant more than two hundred
years ago contributed to an empiricist-oriented experience of the communicative
context in education. The maintenance of the boundary between what was and
was not perceivable (and therefore legitimate and relevant versus illegitimate and
irrelevant knowledge) through vigorous debate and censure has been a common
characteristic of education from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first (Barrow
& Woods, 2006). The elegance of Kant’s claims about the nature of space was

85

that it could be said to represent all that the human eye was capable of directly
perceiving.
For nearly 2000 years, the science and mathematics of what was directly
perceivable had led to the longevity of Euclidean geometry, in which Kant’s
claims about the nature and geometry of space were firmly enmeshed. However,
“the single most important event for the evaluation of Kant’s theory of space was
the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century and the
subsequent conclusion that physical space-time is non-Euclidean in the
twentieth” (Hatfield, 2006, p. 88). The theories of Albert Einstein are one such
example of the implications of non-Euclidean geometries (Einstein, 2000;
Greene, 2005; Hawking, 1998; 2005; Jammer, 1969). These discoveries
dispelled Kant’s claims about the nature of space with respect to all that the
human eye was incapable of directly perceiving. The distinction between what
humans were capable of directly perceiving versus what scientific
instrumentation and reasoning were now capable of indirectly revealing created
an opportunity to update Kant’s theory of space, and the mapping of space being
developed in this chapter.

3.4. Considering space at the level of the word and
statement
In this section I will reconcile the two distinct experiences of space
discussed above to the mappings regarding the communicative context of my
class developed so far in this chapter, by updating both mappings based upon
modern theories regarding the nature of space made available through the
discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, Relativistic and Quantum physics, and the
possibilities they engender. By the end of this section, we will have developed a
mapping of the experience of space that will then be complementary of the
mapping of the experience of safety developed later in this chapter.
Kant was not proposing something new in his original claims about space
being not a distinction between absolute and relational space, but instead “the
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subjective constitution of our mind” (1998, A23/B37-38). Rather, he was making
important revisions to existing theory reflecting the current, late eighteenthcentury scientific understanding of the universe. Today, we can work within
Kant’s theory to reflect the current (early twenty-first century) understanding of
the universe, and evaluate the implications to the mapping I have been
developing through the inclusion of an evaluative component:

87

Table 3.4-1:

Perception-Space-location-boundary-movementpositionality-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative
Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Container that is
distinguished by there being
something in/at a specific
location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant in/at
a specific location as only
what is observable through
direct experience.
Everything beyond the
boundary, in-direct or
inferred experience, is
considered illegitimate and
irrelevant

→

Discussions are focused on
something being observed
as present (static), or being
in movement due to some
observable reason

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of the
importance of the boundary
to legitimate or illegitimate
discussion and ideas

→

Change based upon
reflection on other possible
connections between
current communication and
intention

Bounded/boundary with limited
perceivable possibilities within

Possibility for movement

Positionality is established by
distance to, perception, and
comprehension of the
bounded/boundary

Recognition and evaluation of
positionality and possibility
through current understanding

This update to the mapping allows for an understanding that what our senses are
capable of directly perceiving is but at the very edge, or rather the very
beginning, of the possibilities for space, knowledge, and the practices of which
we are capable.

88

When Hume’s empiricist project explicitly coupled metaphysics and the
nature of space to the science of the eighteenth century, he unintentionally
established the grounds for decoupling one from the other and empowering the
relational view of space. Kant had refined Hume’s theory of how humans made
sense of things in a reality governed by Euclidean geometry and the assumptions
of a finite absolute view of space.
The beauty of Kant’s analogy of the spectacles was that it could deny the
possibility of all other theories of reality. This is arguably one of the reasons that
accounts for its longevity in modern thought. Kant established this utility by
systematically dismissing the idea of thinking about things absent the spectacles,
which he called an “empty’” understanding of objects and concepts (1998,
A51/B75).
Furthermore, Kant pointed out that any a priori concept which was
extended or decoupled “beyond our sensible intuition does not get us anywhere”
(1998, B148) because “our sensible and empirical intuition alone can provide
them with sense and significance” (1998, B149). Kant based his theory of space
as an a priori intuition partly upon the science of the eighteenth century.
However, the validation of non-Euclidean geometry in the nineteenth century,
and the ensuing assumptions of Einstein’s relativistic physics and quantum
physics would seemingly invalidate parts of Kant’s theory of how humans made
sense of things beyond their ability to directly perceive. However, rather than
reject the mapping for the experience of space developed up to this point, I am
confident that large portions of it can be retained:
because the deviation between classical and relativistic reality is
manifest only under extreme conditions, Newtonian physics still
provides an approximation that proves extremely accurate and
useful in many circumstances. But utility and reality are very different
standards (Greene, 2005, p. 10).
Therefore, the mapping of the experience of space to the experience of the
communicative context of a class, as developed so far in this chapter, is still

89

useful because it can account for what human beings are in fact able to directly
perceive of reality through their own senses and reason. In the theoretical
discussions of Relativistic and Quantum physics the current mapping may not be
acceptable as 100% accurate, but in the practical discussions of a classroom
engaged in learning, the mapping is representative of what can be witnessed and
inferred to be taking place.
Hidden beyond these finite perceptions that can be witnessed, according
to Relativistic and Quantum physics, is a reality of infinite possible complexity
which is imperceptible to a human being’s senses without scientific
instrumentation. Relativistic and Quantum physics have provided scientific
methods for the indirect perception of aspects of this infinite reality, but for most
human beings this infinite reality exists merely at the level of underdeveloped
abstraction.
Part of the reason for this underdeveloped abstraction may be because
human beings are comfortable with the certainty represented in what is finite.
Something which is finite, however, is necessarily a part of some larger finite
thing in any view of space due to the human mind’s limit of what it can
comprehend. At a certain point, this Russian “Matryoshka” doll understanding of
what is finite gives way to a doll which is too large to fathom, becoming
essentially infinite. At this point of transition from what is finitely fathomable to
what is finitely unfathomable, or infinite, certainty is lost. In a similar fashion,
Relativist and Quantum physics understood the empiricism of Newtonian physics
as being simply the tip of any possible understanding (Einstein, 2000; Greene,
2005; Hawking, 1998; 2005; Jammer, 1969).
Where Relativistic physics sought understanding in the immensity of the
universe, Quantum physics sought understanding in the minuteness of the
universe. In this way infinity was understood as extending metaphorically, from
empiric direct perception in both directions to the microscopic and the
macroscopic.

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The relational view of space, as developed by the metaphysics of Leibniz,
also extended from the imperceptible microscopic, the monad, to the
unfathomable macroscopic, possible worlds (Bobro, 2005; 2014). It is then no
wonder that twentieth and twenty-first century physics have embraced the
language of Leibniz’s relational view of space (Aiton, 1985; Greene, 2012) to
describe the nature of reality they were discovering (Bobro, 2005). Moreover,
some of their discoveries at the quantum, sub-atomic level manifested many of
the characteristics and relationships described in Leibniz’s metaphysical account
of monads.
A useful example of these conceptual and linguistic similarities can be
found in “quantum entanglement theory” and how reality works at the sub-atomic
level of quantum physics. This theory posits that there are particles smaller than
atoms, and in turn, these participles have even smaller parts, and so on.
However, according to this theory, each participle and its smaller parts exist in a
specific position in relation to all other parts of the particle and the other particles
around it, and simultaneously does not exist in that specific position (Hawking,
2010; Greene, 2012).
Much like a monad, each particle potentially has a perfect representation
of the universe in it, if it were to combine with other particles to infinity; but due to
the uncertainty of the relative position of all its parts from all its other parts and
other particles around it, the particles offer a representation of the universe from
a certain point of view. Like monads, the individual particles and their parts are
not indivisible because they are determined by their relationships to an
inseparable whole, described as superposition (Hawking, 2010). Similarly, a
monad is not indivisible as its relationships to the central monad and the other
existing monads, describe how knowledge of the world is derived (Leibniz,
1973c).
The implication of quantum entanglement theory to the scope of legitimate
knowledge can be understood in an example of modern computing. Today

91

almost all computers are run using microchips that contain binary switches
represented in computer language as off or on, 0 or 1. This means that only one
bit of information, 0 or 1, can be encoded at any one time on any one switch.
There exists a finite amount of information which can exist and be processed at
any one time due to the size of a microchip and its finite number of switches (1
gigabit = 1,000,000,000 bits = 1,000,000,000 switches). Current research in
quantum computing seeks to develop a type of microchip which has switches
that can be encoded with a 0 or 1, and every value in between (Hawking, 2010).
Depending on the size of this quantum microchip there would be a near infinite
amount of information that could exist and be processed at any one time.
In a similar fashion, the Newtonian absolute and finite view of space,
developed in the metaphysics of Hume and Kant, exists in a metaphoric 0 or 1
binary, permeated with distinctions between seen OR unseen, present OR
absent, sensed OR un-sensed, and (most important to our mapping), legitimate
OR illegitimate, relevant OR irrelevant based upon our ability to perceive it. The
relational view of space as developed in the metaphysics of Leibniz rejects this
binary, permeated instead with the implications of seen AND unseen, present
AND absent, sensed AND un-sensed, legitimate AND illegitimate, and relevant
AND irrelevant.
This relational view of space can therefore have radical implications for an
understanding of safe space. My class cannot simply be called a safe space OR
not because of the multitude of possibilities between these two binaries. My class
might be considered a safe space for myself (as teacher) and for some students,
AND at the same time being considered unsafe for other students in the class. At
this practical level of educational consideration, safe space necessitates this
relational understanding.
Similarly, knowledge according to Leibniz, like superposition being a
description of an inseparable whole of particles and their parts, cannot be
distilled to discrete, independent facts or truths that are legitimated once and for

92

all time. Instead, knowledge is always necessarily dependent for its meaning on
the multitude of relationships it has with other knowledges. The knowledge
represented by this web of relationships between a monad and all other monads,
including the perfect central monad, is a factor for this first monad’s relative
position and needs to be taken into consideration. First, the monad has a full
perfect monad within it, but due to the relative position of all the other parts in this
monad, all this monad can do is represent this perfect central monad from a
specific point of view. Leibniz referred to this feature of monads as their being
“windowless” (1973c, §7) because he believed that each monad was unique and
complete, and therefore could not be altered from the outside. Second, because
each monad has a full perfect monad within it, it also has all other unique
monads within it. Leibniz referred to this feature of a monad as “mirroring” the
entire world (1973c, §56).
Due to the relative position of its parts to the whole of a monad, and its
mirroring every other monad, it has within itself the necessary “map” to adjust its
meaning to something closer to, or farther from, the perfect accurate
representation of the world. It can do this because monads are “mind, or mindlike”, so it can adjust its relative position of its parts, and itself, to the full and
accurate representation of the world of the perfect monad. What this means is
that each monad can be distinguished from all others, due to it representing “the
whole universe in its own way and from a certain point of view” (1973d, pp. 122123). This point of view of the monad is then clearer the closer it is to the subject
matter of its neighbouring monads, or the more detailed account of the subject
matter it represents within.
However, just because a point of view of the monad is not clear (due to its
relative distance from the subject matter of its neighbouring monads), does not
invalidate its contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the whole. As
an example of the experience in the communicative context in my class, a
student’s contribution to a class discussion on Covid-19 vaccine efficacy could
take the form of an unclear statement about being allergic to peanut butter.

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Rather than dismiss, invalidate, and deem the contribution irrelevant, the least a
teacher or classmate could do is attempt to reposition their own point of view to
understand the relevant connection (however tenuous) that the student may have
been trying to make between their contribution and the discussion at hand. This
attempt to reposition one’s own point of view to understand an alternative or
unclear point of view can then guide the response to the initially unclear
contribution in a way that seeks to legitimate the student’s contribution as
relevant.
While the attempt of this ‘repositioning’ may be impossible to achieve all
the time, it still represents the best possible action that can be taken. As I pointed
out earlier in this chapter, Leibniz’s metaphysics noted that this current world is
the best possible world with respect to the current conditions upon it. However,
“we must not be misled by the imagery of possible worlds. Possible worlds are
not like foreign countries where they do things differently” (Moore, 2012, p. 82). It
is then not an issue of relativism or perception with different actions meaning the
same thing. Instead, the conditions on each world are indeed different, resulting
in the need to evaluate and reflect on what is reasonably the best based upon
these differing conditions.
The implication of this discussion of possible worlds is that an individual
making the attempt to ‘reposition’ is not a choice, but the natural order of things
representing the reality of this as the best possible world. Making the attempt to
reposition, successful or not, is then the thing to do in all situations of this reality.
Making the attempt, like Leibniz’s metaphysics, is intrinsically important in and of
itself. Leibniz described this intrinsic importance as follows:
The nature of the monad is representative, and consequently nothing
can limit it to representing a part of things only, although it is true that
its representation is confused as regards the detail of the whole
universe and can only be distinct as regards a small part of things;
that is to say as regards those which are either the nearest or the
largest in relation to each of the monads.… In a confusing way [all
monads] go towards the infinite, towards the whole; but they are
limited and distinguished from one another by the degrees of their

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distinct perceptions…. [A] soul can read in itself only what is distinctly
represented there; it is unable to develop all at once all the things
that are folded within it, for they stretch to infinity (1973c, §§60-61).
The beauty of Leibniz’s relational view of infinite space is that it can jar us
from what we consider normal and legitimate, from what we consider best, and
force us to evaluate and reflect on why we may not always make the best
possible attempt. The practice of making the attempt to understand where others
are coming from and accepting their contributions as belonging in some way, is
the best possible action to take to achieve a communicative context that
maximizes the opportunity to fulfill an ongoing educationally valuable goal, and to
raise the consciousness of all the educational community’s members. The result
of this updated modern understanding of space is therefore mapped:

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Table 3.4-2:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant
communication in/at a
specific location upon
connection to shared
educational intention

→

Legitimate and illegitimate
communication are open to
discussion linked to shared
educational intention and
relevance

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of legitimate and
relevant communication,
and an openness to expand
this recognition

→

Change and revision arising
from making a continuous
genuine attempt to seek
connection between the
current communication and
the shared educational
intention

Shared Location

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundary, that
distinguishes location from all
other locations

Possibility for movement

Positionality is relative but not
limited to what is currently
established as legitimate

Recognition and evaluation of
positionality, possibility, and
boundary

3.5. Safe at the level of the word
Having developed a richer understanding of the history and meaning of
space so far in this chapter, and how this understanding influences our mapping
to the communicative context of my class, it is now necessary to delve into the
meaning of the word “safe” and the experience of safety. The purpose of this
exploration of the word safety is to better understand what is meant by the

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experience of safety so we can develop a mapping, which includes important
submappings, to the communicative context in my class. This mapping begins as
follows:
Table 3.5-1:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

[Experience of Safety]

The following sections explore and develop a more thorough
understanding of and definition for the concept of safety, at the level of the word,
and then at the level of the statement, that can then provide a route to a more
precise discussion about safe space as a conceptual metaphor. My motivation
for exploring this question is to understand and explain why a clearer definition of
what is meant by “safety” can allow for a more precise and educationally useful
discussion of safe space.
Like the previous discussion of the experience, meaning, and mapping of
space to my class, any consideration of the experience of safety is premised
upon either having it or not having it. However, this state of having or not having
safety takes place in a context that can be considered spatially. The result is that
the experience of safety takes place in a specific location that is bounded: safety
is experienced within the boundary that represents the presence of some criteria
which is considered safe, while outside that boundary is considered unsafe due
to the absence of this criteria. The simplest example of this could be an
individual’s personal subjective experience of safety taking place within their own
body and mind, with the body serving as the location and the limit of how far this
sense of safety is extended by the mind, the boundedness of the safe location.
However, the establishment of the boundary between safe and unsafe is not a
specific and well-defined line, but instead fuzzy and opaque. The fuzzy boundary
of safety is in part implicit in its understanding as a condition, characteristic, or

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quality of some other space. It is therefore reasonable to consider safety as
having a gradient-like condition, where the sense of having safety within the
boundary is easily recognizable, but gradually diminishes as we pass through
this fuzzy boundary, until safety is no longer present or assured.
The gradient-like quality of the sense and experience of safety through the
fuzzy boundary can be considered as analogous to a sensation such as warmth.
The experience of warmth exists, for most individuals, somewhere between hot
and cold. My experience of warmth is qualitatively different from that of my
elderly father due the circulation issues he faces from his diabetes. Moreover, my
experience of warmth exists on a gradient because I know when I am feeling it,
but there is a fuzzy boundary represented by its diminishing, until it is simply
absent from my experience.
The gradient-like quality of warmth, the gradual and almost imperceptible
transition from being present to being absent, is implicitly a recognition of the
infinite experience available from one threshold of the boundary to its other. Our
implicit recognition of the infinite experiences experienced as gradients of safety
are akin to the gradient of a relational and infinite space. Whereas a Newtonian
absolute space establishes binary opposites, present OR absent, safe OR
unsafe, the Leibnizian relational space better represents the true experience of
safety and its gradient-like nature.
As an example, we could consider a young child in her parent’s loving
arms experiencing a sense of safety. If the parent placed the child on the ground
and walked 5 feet away, there may be an ensuing decrease in the feeling of
safety on the part of the child. Next, if the parent walked another 25 feet away,
there most likely would be another decrease in the experience of safety on the
part of the child, as well as on the part of the parent now no longer in a position
to immediately aid in the maintenance of this safety. The experience of safety
can then range from a relational understanding to an absolute understanding.
The further the parent moves away, the less safe the child may feel. However,

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the child’s actual physical safety has not really changed in any absolute sense,
as the parent is still close enough to close the gap should the child encounter
danger. This understanding would therefore map as follows:
Table 3.5-2:

Safety-location-boundary of My Class’s Communicative
Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

[Experience of Safety]

→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

Location

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Many of the existing conceptions of the experience of safety do not
recognize the importance of its fuzzy, gradient-like nature (Boler, 1999; Callan,
2016; Dewey, 1895; English & Stengel, 2010; Fisher, 2006; James, 1983; Mayo,
2001; Ramsey, 2009). Instead, this elastic state of safety, through the metaphor
of safe space, is forced to give up its Leibnizian, elastic, and relational nature,
and instead adopt a more Newtonian, bounded, and absolute status. Part of the
work contributed by the mapping in this chapter of the relational experience of
space, is the making of the boundary for both space and safety fuzzier.
This contribution is accomplished through an understanding that safety is
also co-constituted by the people in a space. Therefore, questions about
legitimate and illegitimate communicative action need necessarily to consider the
relevance of these actions to the shared intention of these people in the space of
a class. A teacher may set clear boundaries for the communicative context of a

99

class, in what they consider a relational act; but this act can be imbued with the
inheritance of Newtonian space.
These acts, rules, or laws that govern a pedagogical space to establish
safety may well legitimate or render illegitimate specific communicative actions;
but they do so without any acknowledgement of or contribution from the objects
in that space: that is, the students and their intentions for that safe space. In this
way, the teacher’s pedagogical desire is to nurture possibility in the class, but
what is possible is determined by themselves. Alternatively, a teacher influenced
by a Leibnizian understanding of space may set boundaries for the
communicative context of the class knowing full well that it is a provisional move
to establish temporary rules to achieve some shared thoughts, intention or
purpose. These Leibnizian temporary boundaries, and the rules they empower,
exist to create opportunity, and further new actions amongst the students. In this
way, the teacher’s pedagogical desire is to nurture possibility from the
relationships in the class.
It is important to reinforce that it is the submapping of boundedness and
the boundary that is established for both space and safety, that make these two
concepts congruent and able to become a more complex conceptual metaphor.
As previously discussed, the boundedness of space allows for the determination
of what is considered legitimate and illegitimate communication. The
boundedness of safety also allows for a similar determination, exercised in the
experience of the communicative context in my class through inclusionary and
exclusionary practices. The binary understanding of safety and safe space lead
to misunderstanding when it forces safe space to be thought about as either
legitimate (hence it makes us feel safe), or as illegitimate, making us feel unsafe.
Instead, like the previous analysis of space at the level of the word and the level
of the statement, safety needs to also be framed as legitimate and relevant
toward some purpose or intention, or illegitimate and irrelevant toward that
purpose or intention.

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The fuzzy boundary of safety and the exercise of exclusionary and
inclusionary practices can be understood to have as a primary purpose the
physical integrity of the human body, and as a secondary purpose, the emotional
wellbeing derived from this physical integrity. This distinction between physical
integrity and emotional wellbeing, and their relationship to learning has been
discussed by educational philosophers for some time (Boler, 1999; Dewey, 1895;
English & Stengel, 2010; James, 1983; Mayo, 2001). Further, sociopolitical
analyses of safety from a fear of physical or emotional harm have focused on
how calls for safety in education can in fact be demands for the removal of
differences and challenges from the experience of students (Boler, 1999; Fisher,
2006; Ramsey, 2009).
The seeming interchangeability of a physical safety and an emotional
safety employed in discussions of education (Barrett, 2010; Boostrom, 1998;
Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018) is a source of misunderstanding that needs to be
addressed for the mapping of this chapter. At its most basic, a conflation takes
place in discussions of safety: a temporary bounded location free of physical pain
is conflated with a temporary bounded location free of the risk of emotional pain.
The logic of how these two are connected causally from the boundedness of the
location, which comes first, must therefore be established for this mapping.
Examples of what safety can and should mean in education abound.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762) explains how
encounters with pain, and the ensuing fear, uncertainty and risk of reoccurrences
of this pain contribute to growth. This understanding would therefore contribute to
our mapping as follows:

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Table 3.5-3:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-fear of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain

→

The integrity of the physical
body is maintained through
the inclusion of legitimate
and relevant communicative
acts

Integrity of the physical body and
emotional mind through the
exclusion of fear, risk, and
uncertainty

→

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
is maintained due to the
exclusion of illegitimate and
irrelevant communicative
acts that may induce an
experience of fear, risk, or
uncertainty

However, if the fear of the unknown, encourages habits that impede
growth and learning, the educator needs to make changes to the environment.
English and Stengel point out that within “Rousseau’s examples is the notion that
a static environment is the friend of fear because it gives the child a sense of
comfort and tranquility, yet in reality it makes him increasingly vulnerable to and
more frightened of any type of change in circumstances” (2010, p. 527). This line
of thinking suggests that some action needs to be actively taken to remove the
normalcy associated with the fear of change from the static, status quo
environment.

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In the late nineteenth century, William James claimed that fear was not felt
and then expressed, but instead expressed physically and then felt emotionally
(James, 1884). For James:
…what we take to be emotional expression – physiological and
behavioural – comes first and the emotion of fear is born when the
bodily changes we associate with fear – racing pulse, pounding
heart, and the like, and even flight, fight, and paralysis – come to
consciousness (English & Stengel, 2010, p. 522).
In their work exploring whether fear prompts or impedes learning, English
and Stengel point out that safe spaces are “not only [safe] from extrinsic sources
of fear such as bullying, but also from intrinsic sources such as a learner’s social
insecurity” (English & Stengel, 2010, p. 523). The primacy given to the integrity of
the physical body would therefore support our mapping. If the exclusion of pain in
the communicative context of my class is then understood as the maintenance of
the integrity of the physical body, we can understand that actions such as fire
and earthquake drills, alarms on exterior doors, hall monitors, prohibitions on
physical contact between students and with the teacher, and even active-shooter
drills, all contribute to a sense of safety for some, and potentially an heightened
sense of risk for others. However, the exclusion of fear, uncertainty, and the
sense of risk from the communicative context of my class is something that
needs further clarification.
John Dewey understood fear as a relational construct, which he explored
through the discomfort and resistance faced by students in some learning
experiences. English and Stengel analyze this relationship between fear and
discomfort in Dewey’s writing, and point out that he developed a description of
learning that required a certain degree of discomfort:
Discomfort can also dissolve into fear in ways that undercut
possibilities for learning. So the educator who provokes affect must
guard against the possibility that fear becomes the learner’s habitual
response (English & Stengel, 2010, p. 529).
Similarly, English and Stengel show how for Paulo Freire:

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fear is neither positive nor negative; it is an appropriate and
predictable response to difficulty. But for this self-proclaimed
progressive educator, fear becomes negative if one fails to face (and
conquer) it and is thereby immobilized by it. This paralyzing potential
of fear prevents one from dealing with what is difficult and thus stops
growth and learning (English & Stengel, 2010, p. 536).
In both these descriptions of the role fear plays during the discomfort of
learning, fear is recognized as reasonable and relevant during the experience of
the communicative context of a class. The role of the educator is then to exclude
illegitimate and irrelevant communicative actions that may increase a student’s
fear, uncertainty, or sense of risk to a level which impedes the ability to think and
learn. However, there is another, more important role for the educator to
undertake through the active inclusion of communicative actions that decrease or
minimize a student’s fear, uncertainty, or sense of risk to a level that allows them
to resume their thinking and learning. This understanding would therefore
contribute to our mapping as follows:

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Table 3.5-4:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-fear of My Class’s
Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain

→

The integrity of the physical
body is maintained through
the inclusion of legitimate
and relevant communicative
acts

Integrity of the physical body and
emotional mind through the
exclusion of fear, risk, and
uncertainty

→

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through the
exclusion of illegitimate and
irrelevant communicative
actions that may induce a
paralyzing fear, risk, or a
sense of uncertainty, that
impede thinking and
learning.
Established through the
inclusion of communicative
pedagogical actions that
limit, but do not exclude,
fear, risk, or uncertainty, as
impediments to thinking and
learning

Safety can therefore influence the target domain of the communicative
context in my class by the setting of boundaries for legitimate and educationally
relevant interactions that exclude pain, the fear of pain, and to a lesser degree,
the risk and uncertainty of potential pain in ways that disable learning. This
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mapping of the experience of safety to the experience of the communicative
context of my class therefore offers rules and expectations for what should be
legitimately excluded (physical pain), but also establishes rules and expectations
for the inclusion of some experiences, and the exclusion of others such as fear,
uncertainty, and risk. This is a daunting task for any educator, made more difficult
by increasingly diverse student bodies and their respective relative positionalities
to the function of fear, risk, and uncertainty in their own prior learning
experiences. This understanding would therefore map as follows:

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Table 3.5-5:

Safety-location-boundary-pain-positionality-fear of My
Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain

→

Relative Positionality of fear,
uncertainty, risk

→

The integrity of the physical
body is established through
legitimate and relevant
communicative acts
The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through the
exclusion of what the
teacher or student body
consider extreme,
illegitimate, or irrelevant,
communicative actions.
Established through the
inclusion of communicative
pedagogical actions that
potentially limit, for some
students, fear, uncertainty,
or a sense of risk, as
impediments to thinking and
learning.

A deeper discussion of inclusion and exclusion for the submapping of fear,
uncertainty, and risk is of most practical pedagogical importance. Whereas the
integrity of the physical body through the exclusion of physical pain is generally
easy to justify pedagogically, it is what is excluded that is of importance to this
discussion about learning in my class. Something could be topically relevant to

107

my class, but should it cause a fear that may impede learning for some/all
students, its inclusion should either be supplemented with further support, or
consideration should be given for its exclusion.
Should something be topically relevant but potentially a source for
emotional uncertainty or risk to a student, I would argue that this is not itself
sufficient grounds for its exclusion. Instead, the teacher should consider what
support, supplement, or revision can be offered to minimize the chance of the
emotional uncertainty or risk impeding the student’s learning. The next section of
this work will therefore explore the positionality of fear, uncertainty, and risk, and
how it both problematizes and offers a path forward for the mapping in this
chapter.

3.6. Safe at the level of the statement
The distinction between a physical safety and an emotional safety
becomes pronounced at the level of the statement. The general acceptance of a
metaphor’s promise (in this case a certain type, degree, and amount of safety
needed to learn without impediment) is also the source of misunderstanding and
conflict. This can be found in historic and current discussions of safety in different
types of spaces. One history of how individuals have talked about safety in North
American spaces can be traced back to the experience of groups which faced
social repression in the 1960’s. In her book Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection
of Place and Politics, Moira Kenney (2001) traces the first discussions of these
safe spaces back to the gay and lesbian bars of Los Angeles in the mid-1960s,
and then to the ensuing women’s movement of the 1970s.
As Kenney notes, gay and lesbian bars were not considered “safe” as in
free of risk, as anti-sodomy and homosexuality laws ensured that the constant
threat of a police raid was always present on their physical bodies. Instead, these
bars were considered “safe” because they offered a physical place temporarily
free of this pain, and temporarily free of debilitating fear, risk, and uncertainty that

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enabled patrons to form a community and resist the many social, moral, and
intellectual norms that repressed these groups. By the 1970’s and the discussion
of safe spaces in the American women’s movement, safety “began to mean
distance from men and patriarchal thought” (Harris, 2015, ¶5), and the active
exclusion of the source of physical pain and the ensuing emotional fear was
utilized to maintain a physical safety and foster a degree of emotional safety. The
maintenance of physical safety through the exclusion of the source of pain (men)
and source of fear (patriarchal thought) thereby allowed for a degree of emotional
safety, freedom from the uncertainty and risk resulting from the pain and fear, to
develop:
…consciousness raising groups … safe space … in the women’s
movement, was a means rather than an end and not only a physical
space but a space created by the coming together of women
searching for community (Kenney, 2001, p. 24).
The goal of consciousness raising groups was to gain further knowledge
and understanding through the sharing of ideas in the relative safety of these
spaces, and thereby be better prepared to address the specific social, moral, or
intellectual repression they faced beyond the safe space. For those familiar with
the aims of a liberal education, in which students gain knowledge and
understanding through the sharing of ideas and the discussion of their thinking to
be better prepared for future challenges, the history of safe space developed by
Kenney will feel familiar. However, the understanding derived from this history of
safety in space would undergo another half century of nuanced theoretical
development, resulting in parts becoming invisible and forgotten, leading to
misunderstandings by educators and students alike.
To understand the mapping that occurs in the meaning and usage of
“safe" within a statement like “safe space”, it is necessary to briefly summarize
this 40-plus years of theoretical development of safety in certain educationally
worthwhile spaces. Three important developments took place which drastically
altered the meaning of safety in these specific spaces due to the

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acknowledgement of the relative positionality of physical safety and emotional
safety.
First, activist groups beyond the initial lesbian, gay, bisexual, and women
adopters of the term safe space began to use it more frequently to describe their
own communities, because this term represented an admirable ready-made
(prefigurative) model to emulate (Boggs, 1977).
Second, many of the activists from these original groups who used safe
space to organize in the 1960s and 1970s, entered the academy and began to
write about their resistance in more theoretical ways:
Theory, in addition to and in the context of activism, has helped
shape the development of “safe space”. In the wake of their defeat
in the 60s, many left-wing organizers retreated to the academy,
particularly the humanities and social sciences, where they
developed increasingly nuanced political schematics based on their
experience. Perhaps they could work out on paper where exactly
they went wrong (Harris, 2015, ¶8).
One of the most important theoretical contributions during this period was
that even as groups raised their own consciousness through their commitment to
safety in a space, the social, moral, and intellectual norms they aimed to confront
beyond that safety, were nonetheless present within their safe spaces “in the
interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (Foucault, 1978, p. 94).
This meant that no matter how diligently groups may try to promote safety
to raise the consciousness of their members, they could not provide complete
and absolute safety to their members on the inside, or from the outside. The
repressive social, moral, and intellectual norms played out in the infinite
relationships between the subjective feelings and experiences of members inside
the group, and these could therefore never be entirely prohibited or policed.
Further, the safe space did not exist completely independent of the ever-present
repressive norms in the world just beyond it, so again, it was not possible to be
entirely safe from those strictures the group hoped to resist. In fact, some of the
“mobile relations” of communication, the ongoing changes and subsequent
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repositioning of individual perspectives within the group, would reproduce the
very repression the safe space’s shared intention was attempting to combat.
Third, the theoretical recognition that a safe space could not allow its
members to be entirely immune to the repressive norms they hoped to confront:
…had profound practical implications: it would no longer be enough
to support the right organization or hold the right positions, we are
also responsible for the ways in which we reproduce existing power
relations at their most micro levels (Harris, 2015, ¶9).
The reproduction of existing power relations was in fact the very same meant to
be confronted, so these confrontations turned inward into the safe spaces
themselves. No matter how diligently the members of a safe space may try to
confront these repressive power relations, this inevitable pivot inward and the
confrontations this wrought, served to undermine the understanding of safe
space being for all its members. Safety therefore operated in a similar fashion, to
exclude illegitimate communication on the grounds of ensuring physical safety.
Unfortunately, exclusion invariably became entangled with the impossibility of
excluding uncertainty and risk that could result in fear of this pain. At first, these
confrontations were primarily theoretical accountings of the multiplicity of
challenges faced by any individual seeking a safe space. Simply put, no matter
the shared cause of any group in a safe space, each member had their own
identity that intersected with other characteristics not shared by every member of
the group (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990), so the risk of being marginalized or
underrepresented because of one’s unique intersectional identity was just as
much a possibility inside a safe space as beyond it.
Therefore, the theoretical development of safe space resulted in the
acknowledgement that a completely safe space for every member of a group was
an impossibility due to their intersectional positionality. The safety offered in a
space could at best be relative, and by degrees determined by an individual’s
similarities (more safety) or differences (less safety) to the other members. This
meant that the relative positionality of an individual’s safety had to be evaluated

111

through their homogeneity to all others in that space. The practical
considerations of this theoretical development of the meaning of safety in a
space are daunting for those wishing to foster that safety, because no amount of
accommodation, diversity, inclusion, or the policing of any number of
microaggressions could fully ensure everyone’s sense of emotional safety in that
space. This understanding would therefore map as follows:

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Table 3.6-1:

Relative Safety-location-boundary-pain-positionality-fear of
My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

→

The integrity of the physical
body is established through
legitimate and relevant
communicative acts

→

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through
exclusion.
The scope of what is
considered extreme,
illegitimate, and irrelevant
communicative actions that
impede learning are
constructs of one’s relative
positionality.
Possible to establish
through the inclusion of
communicative pedagogical
actions that potentially limit,
for some students of similar
relative positionality, fear,
risk, or a sense of
uncertainty, as impediments
to thinking and learning

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain
Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Despite the discoveries of activists in the 1960s and 1970s regarding the
practice of safe space, talking about or trying to practice safety in educational

113

settings such as classrooms endured. In 1998 when Boostrom offered his
observations about the problematic ways in which educators were confusing their
talk about fostering safe space with the practicing of safe space being a specific
way to teach, he did so within the framework of the theoretical and practical
developments of the mapping outlined above. As he considered four specific
academic articles discussing safe space in educational settings, ranging from K12 to higher education, he noted:
Understood as the avoidance of stress, the ‘safe space’ metaphor
drains from classroom life every impulse toward critical reflection. It’s
one thing to say that students should not be laughed at for posing a
question or for offering a wrong answer. It’s another to say that
students must never be conscious of their ignorance. It’s one thing
to say that students should not be belittled for a personal preference
or harassed because of an unpopular opinion. It’s another to say that
students must never be asked why their preferences and opinions
are different from those of others. It’s one thing to say that students
should be capable of self-revelation. It’s another to say that they must
always like what they see revealed (1998, p. 406).
Boostrom observes that the safe space metaphor muted the necessary critical
reflection needed to gain greater understanding and consciousness, through the
entanglement of emotional safety with physical. In the name of minimizing fear,
risk, uncertainty and discomfort, an educational safe space was produced that
lacked all educational value. The classroom could be considered safe because it
protected students from all risk of physical and emotional harm derived from the
difficulty of learning new things, but then became meaningless (Kenney, 2001)
within the project of education.
This tension between this conflated understanding of safe space and the
educational goal of critical reflection has persisted as greater numbers of
educators and institutions have utilized safe space to describe the teaching and
learning experiences they offer to students. The incident surrounding the Yale
University Halloween costumes discussed earlier in this work is just one example
of the tensions and misunderstandings created by these promises of safety in
educational spaces (cf. Barret, 2010; Mayo, 2010; Stengel, 2010; Turner &

114

Braine, 2015). While some educators may see safe space as an intention to
strive for, a means to learning and greater understanding, many students see it
as a promise to respect and protect them from anything that they perceive as
risky, uncomfortable, and therefore emotionally unsafe.
The fear of the risk and discomfort necessary to learn is in part due to a
misunderstanding of how risk functions in complex situations. Lukianoff and Haidt
(2018) draw out this misunderstanding in their discussion of how fragility and
antifragility (Taleb, 2012):
…explains how systems and people…like the immune system, grow
stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of
things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and
cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep
them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can
withstand shocks…But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused
word “resilience” and recognize that some things are antifragile.
Many of the important systems in our economy and political life are
like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in
order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become
rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes
them to respond vigorously (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018, pp. 22-23).
The risk to a fragile object such as a teacup is not the same as the risk to a
complex system which can recover from its encounter with fear, risk, or
uncertainty, and carry on or potentially grow from the experience. Students are
not fragile objects, but instead complex systems of thoughts, beliefs, and
experiences, each with their own relative positionality. An encounter with
emotional unsafety is therefore not a terminal affliction, but rather a temporary
experience which can potentially be mitigated by their own, their classmates’, or
their teacher’s attempts through pedagogical actions.
This is not to say that risk is experienced in the same way by all students,
but rather to emphasize that the first pedagogical move does not always have to
be to remove a threat when it is perceived. An example is bans on peanuts that
have proliferated across North American school systems, to manage the real risk
to a select minority of students with nut allergies. These policies of exclusionary

115

action, which entail barring a risk from all students, have resulted in the primacy
of exclusionary thinking. This has been a determent to inclusionary
communicative practices that could allow students to manage and utilize risk to
boost their own immunity to peanut allergens (cf. “hygiene hypothesis”), to say
nothing for their learning.
The necessity for risk and uncertainty, central to an understanding of
learning (Dewey, 1895; English & Stengel, 2010), became conflated with an
uncontrolled and unmitigated sense of fear, risk and uncertainty due to the
recognition of the relative positionality of individuals. But what this conflation
ignored was that educators had already been continually evaluating the relative
emotional safety of their students as an impediment to learning, and thus making
the attempt to control, mitigate, and limit this experience of fear and risk through
their pedagogical and communicative decisions with students. This recognition
therefore contributes to the mapping as follows:

116

Table 3.6-2:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

→

The integrity of the physical
body is established through
legitimate and relevant
communicative acts

→

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through
inclusion of communicative
pedagogical actions that
potentially limit, for some
students of similar relative
positionality, fear, risk, or a
sense of uncertainty, as
impediments to thinking and
learning

→

Communicative pedagogical
actions are open to
reflection, revision, or
possible exclusion arising
from the need to establish
the temporary integrity of
the emotional mind,
relatively free from
impediments to thinking and
learning

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain
Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Evaluation of relative
positionality

As has already been discussed in relation to the gradient-like nature of the
experience of safety, it is important to consider how the experience of safety is
117

relatively elastic due to the positionality of the child or student, and their
relationality to others. No matter how elastic and relational this experience of
safety may be, a teacher in a position of power, authority, and responsibility for
learning often feels it is their responsibility to set boundaries for their students. In
this way, the Newtonian inheritances of a space above and independent of the
objects within it are acted out in what are usually rules of exclusion or prohibition
meant to police the actions of students. Instead, a teacher can draw upon a
relational understanding of a space to develop rules that foster the relationality
and positionality of students to create their own safe space.

3.7. Blending safe at the level of the word and statement,
with the space of my class
Having completed mappings for both the experience of safety and the
experience of space to the communicative context of my class, we are now able
to blend the two mappings to establish a new understanding of the experience of
safe space to the experience of the communicative context of my class. It is
important to once again note that it is the boundedness of both concepts, safety
and space, that establishes the congruence necessary for this blending to take
place. However, it is necessary to consider how this blending is to occur because
it is not as simple as adding both mappings together. Instead, it is essential to
recognize that the primary experience is space, and therefore the experience of
safety imbues the space with aspects of its submappings. It is therefore useful to
first review the two mappings before commencing this blending:

118

Table 3.7-1:

Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

→

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant
communication in/at a
specific location upon
connection to educational
intention

→

Legitimate and illegitimate
communication are open to
discussion linked to
educational intention and
relevance

→

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of legitimate and
relevant communication,
and an openness to expand
this recognition

→

Change and revision arising
from making a continuous
genuine attempt to seek
connection between the
current communication and
the shared educational
intention

Shared Location

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundary, that
distinguishes location from all
other locations

Possibility for movement

Positionality is relative but not
limited to what is currently
established as legitimate

Recognition and evaluation of
positionality, possibility, and
boundary

119

Table 3.7-2:

Safety of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared Location
→

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

→

The integrity of the physical
body is established through
legitimate and relevant
communicative acts

→

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through
inclusion of communicative
pedagogical actions that
potentially limit, for some
students of similar relative
positionality, fear, risk, or a
sense of uncertainty, as
impediments to thinking and
learning

→

Communicative pedagogical
actions are open to
reflection, revision, or
possible exclusion arising
from the need to establish
the temporary integrity of
the emotional mind,
relatively free from
impediments to thinking and
learning

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain
Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Evaluation of relative
positionality

Working through the existing submappings of space and safety, we can
begin to see how safety imbues space with new meaning and expectations. I will
120

work through each of these submappings separately, before concluding with a
blended mapping for the experience of safe space to the experience of the
communicative context of my class.

3.7.1. Location
Table 3.7-3:

Safety-location of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared Location

Distinguished by there being
something
included/excluded within the
specific location

→

Table 3.7-4:

Space-location of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared Location
→

Table 3.7-5:

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific location

Safety-location blending with Space-location for Safe Space
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Safe Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Shared Location

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific place

→

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3.7.2. Boundedness / Boundary
Table 3.7-6:

Safety-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundedness/boundary

Fuzzy boundary denotes the
gradient-like experience of
safety.
Inclusion within denotes
safety / Exclusion denotes a
lack of safety

→

Table 3.7-7:

Space-boundary of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Boundless, but with temporary,
possibly fuzzy boundary, that
distinguishes location from all
other locations

Establishes what is
legitimate and relevant
communication in/at a
specific location upon
connection to educational
intention

Table 3.7-8:

→

Safety-boundary blending with Space-boundary for Safe
Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safe Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundary that distinguishes the
experience of the location from
all other locations

Establishes legitimate and
relevant communication for
a shared educational
intention

→

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3.7.3. Possibility for movement / Free of Pain
Table 3.7-9:

Safety-pain of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Integrity of the physical body
through the exclusion of pain and
the fear of pain

The integrity of the physical
body is established through
legitimate and relevant
communicative acts

Table 3.7-10:

→

Space-movement of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Possibility for movement

Legitimate and illegitimate
communication are open to
discussion linked to
educational intention and
relevance

→

123

Table 3.7-11:

Safety-pain blending with Space-movement for Safe Space
of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safe Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Possibility for movement
→

Learning and change is
considered as a gradientlike understanding between
legitimate and relevant, and
illegitimate and irrelevant
communication

→

Actions and
communications are judged
as legitimate and relevant
based upon the
maintenance or the
reinforcement of the right to
ongoing membership

Integrity of the physical body free
from pain or the fear of pain

3.7.4. Positionality
Table 3.7-12:

Safety-positionality of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

The integrity of the
emotional mind and thinking
are established through
inclusion of communicative
pedagogical actions that
potentially limit, for some
students of similar relative
positionality, fear, risk, or a
sense of uncertainty, as
impediments to thinking and
learning

→

124

Table 3.7-13:

Space-positionality of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Positionality is relative but not
limited to what is currently
established as legitimate

Different pedagogies and
strategies that engender a
recognition of legitimate and
relevant communication,
and an openness to expand
this recognition

Table 3.7-14:

→

Safety-positionality blending with Space- positionality for
Safe Space of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Safe Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Specific positionalities
influence the experiences of
fear, risk, and uncertainty
from communication in a
gradient-like fashion.
The stronger these
experiences the greater the
potential impediments to
thinking and learning

→

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3.7.5. Evaluation
Table 3.7-15:

Safety-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safety]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Evaluation of relative
positionality

Communicative pedagogical
actions are open to
reflection, revision, or
possible exclusion arising
from the need to establish
the temporary integrity of
the emotional mind,
relatively free from
impediments to thinking and
learning

→

Table 3.7-16:

Space-evaluation of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Recognition and evaluation of
positionality, possibility, and
boundary

Change and revision arising
from making a continuous
genuine attempt to seek
connection between the
current communication and
the shared educational
intention

→

126

Table 3.7-17:

Safety-evaluation blending with Space-evaluation for Safe
Space of My Class’s Communicative Context conceptual
metaphor

Source Domain
[Experience of Safe Space]

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

Recognition and evaluation of
relative positionalities

Make the attempt (reflection,
reposition, or revision) to
understand the experience
and contribution of others
engaged in the same shared
educational intention

→

3.8. Safe space at the level of educational discourse
In this chapter, I have worked to develop submappings for safety and
space, at the level of the word and the level of statement, to develop a fuller
understanding of what is meant by an experience of safe space in the
communicative context of my class. First, through an exploration of the history of
two competing understandings of space (finite and infinite), I developed a
mapping for a modern day understanding of the experience of space in
education. Second, through an analysis of the meaning of safety in education, I
was able to develop a mapping for an understanding of safety that disentangled
the concepts of pain, fear, risk, and uncertainty in the context of education.
Finally, the two mappings were blended with the experience of safety influencing
the experience of space, to develop a fuller understanding of the conceptual
metaphor “the safe space of my class”. This blended mapping for the safe space
of my class results in the following:

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Table 3.8-1:

The Safe Space of My Class’s Communicative Context
conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain

[Experience of Safe Space]

[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]
→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific place

→

Establishes legitimate and
relevant communication for
a shared educational
intention

→

Learning and change is
considered as a gradientlike understanding between
legitimate and relevant, and
illegitimate and irrelevant
communication

→

Actions and
communications are judged
as legitimate and relevant
based upon the
maintenance or the
reinforcement of the right to
ongoing membership

→

Specific positionalities
influence the experiences of
fear, risk, and uncertainty
from communication in a
gradient-like fashion.
The stronger these
experiences the greater the
potential impediments to
thinking and learning

→

Make the attempt (reflection,
reposition, or revision) to
understand the experience
and contribution of others
engaged in the same shared
educational intention

Shared Location

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundary that distinguishes the
experience of the location from
all other locations
Possibility for movement

Integrity of the physical body free
from pain or the fear of pain

Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Recognition and evaluation of
relative positionalities

128

With this mapping of the safe space of my class, we can now turn our
attention to what safe space means at the level of the statement in educational
discourse, to determine if this structure needs further revision. When this
mapping is revised, it will be utilized in the next chapter to consider the meaning
of safe space at the level of educational discourse and practice.
In 2016, the philosopher of education Eamonn Callan revisited safe space,
accounting for the many challenges being encountered in higher education
based on the growing gulf between educators and students. Callan also
discussed the growing gulf between educators and those hostile to safe spaces
for what they understood as its anti-educational ends. Callan situated his
discussion within the theoretical development of safe space since the 1970s
when he wrote:
…institutions must be remade to include or become “safe spaces” for
those outside if old patterns of exclusion and domination are to be
eradicated, or so at least it is now commonly claimed (2016, p. 64).
By recognizing that a safe space was not immune from the repressive
social, moral, and intellectual norms it hoped to confront, Callan acknowledged
that higher education had traditionally been exclusionary to many individuals; so
the worthwhile educational aim of a safe space could be to allow those
traditionally excluded to take part. However, he also acknowledged the practical
concerns of trying to develop a safe space in higher education because:
…education worth having will encourage open-mindedness. To that
extent, it must often take on an agonistic spirit as settling beliefs and
values are subject to critique that some students will find distressing
or exhilarating, or both at the same time (2016, p. 65).
As Callan explored this tension between educators and students, he
introduced two useful ways to consider the intentions of educators in a safe
space and the expectations of students for safety. Callan noted that one way in
which educators attempted to practice safety in their classrooms was the
promotion of “dignity space” in which individuals are civil to each other:

129

A fully realized dignity safe environment would confer a distinctively
valuable aspect of human flourishing: the self-respect of someone
confident that others will respect them as an equal. But the best way
to get there is most unlikely to be one that forgoes all words that
wound. … Offending others is the price one pays for disagreeing with
them in the world we have made, and it would be a preposterous
conception of equal dignity whose realization required that we
expunge all offense (2016, p. 68).
In Callan’s view, the practice of safety as a dignity [safe] space took place
when all members of the group respected the right of everyone to be seen as
equal. In this view, no one was deemed inferior or unworthy of being a member
of the safe space, and moreover, this was accepted as a minimal threshold for
participation with the group. This minimal threshold thereby removed the fear of
being physically removed from the class should disagreement or conflict of ideas
occur. Invariably, this was an act of trust practiced by all members of the safe
space because it was:
a threshold condition that will ordinarily be taken for granted when
people are secure in the knowledge that others can be relied on to
treat them as equals, even when disagreement or conflict arises
(2016, p. 68).
This minimal guarantee of safety was thereby able to remove, or at least
limit, some of the risk and uncertainty of not belonging and the ensuing emotional
insecurity that could hinder learning. Callan’s view of dignity space can therefore
be seen to align to the mapping developed in this chapter, specifically the
submapping for the possibility to learn and change without the fear of pain.
Dignity space can be understood as representing specific communicative
action that legitimates all members of a class by acknowledging their collective
shared intention, and thereby maintaining the integrity of their physical bodies
within that space. The practice of safe space as a dignity space creates
entailment relationships that can then promote characteristics like participation
and engagement to encourage deeper learning (Ben-Porath, 2016) at the
submapping for the positionality of knowledge, fear, risk and uncertainty.
Understood this way, the practice of safe space as dignity space shares

130

remarkable similarities to the understanding of safe space from the 1960s and
1970s described earlier in this chapter.
However, Callan also notes that dignity space can be misunderstood by
students when they are focusing on their subjective experience and feelings of
being disrespected or humiliated by its practice:
As a bald empirical matter, a student who gets something less than
A+ in my class might sincerely feel that I have thereby humiliated
them. But that could not license the inference that I denied anyone
the dignity safety they rightly expect in my classroom. So even if
indignation and distress induced by another’s conduct are often
passed off as humiliation, that is not necessarily so in any sense that
holds moral interest (2016, p. 67).
While not holding moral interest to a philosopher of education, this sense
and feeling of humiliation (consequences of emotional uncertainty and risk), can
lead students to conflate “dignity safety” with their desire for an “intellectual
safety” free from critique or challenge to their pre-existing beliefs or self-concept.
A safe space as a place for intellectual safety creates entailment relationships
that can discourage learning by promoting characteristics such as smugness,
indifference, and lack of effort by students (Ben-Porath, 2016). Intellectual safety
may, this way, serve as an impediment to thinking and learning. Therefore, this
intellectual safety represents a mistaken understanding of the mapping for safe
space.
Moreover, the conflation of dignity safety with intellectual safety can lead
students (and some educators) to make demands for the prohibition and policing
of relationships amongst participants which represent microaggressions of the
unwanted repressive social, moral, and intellectual norms that they expect safe
space to be free from. Microaggressions, when persistent, can progressively lead
to or be evidence of a lack of respect toward an individual’s right to membership
in the group. Callan points out when microaggressions are continual, “the
aggregate evidence is such that humiliation is clearly evident” (2016, p. 68) and

131

can warrant the need for further discussion by the group, and perhaps their
active policing by members.
However, these microaggressions which are representative of the
repressive social, moral, and intellectual norms found beyond the safe space
(Callan, 2016; Foucault, 1978; Harris, 2015), need to be recognized as ever
present. Therefore, I believe that a singular instance should be seen as an
opportunity for an inclusive dialogue and discussion of these norms, not an
immediate cause for censure or expulsion from the safe space.
Safe space in education operates in a similar manner to the realities
highlighted by Callan, Foucault, and Harris: a class can never be entirely free
from the repressive social, moral, and intellectual norms found beyond the
educational setting (nor should it). My discussion of the theoretical development
of safe space since the 1960s shows that it is in fact neither simple nor clear. I
would argue that a truly safe space in education is a practical impossibility both
for educators that strive for it, and for the students that demand it. Part of the
reason for this impossibility results from a confusion between safe space as a
communicative means to an educationally worthwhile end, and safe space as an
educationally worthwhile end lacking any clear shared educational intention
toward learning.
As Callan writes, students, educators and administrators face challenges
due to the lack of clarity regarding what is meant by a safe space. This lack of
clarity has resulted in many unintended ideas being transmitted through the
usage of the metaphor amongst those in higher education. Callan notes these
unintended ideas (which I have developed in this work as submappings), which
need further consideration through a more philosophically grounded definition of
safe space. Specifically, while pointing out that practicing safe space as a dignity
space is perhaps the most reasonable intention for educators to adopt, Callan
notes two submappings which have created difficulties, and which I have
endeavoured to address in this work’s mapping of the safe space of my class.

132

The first problematic submapping is an individual’s subjective experience
of dignity in a safe space (their relative positionality). Callan’s example of a
student feeling humiliated (their emotional response) when receiving a poor
grade can result in students understanding safe space as needing to promote an
intellectual safety which serves no educational value. Second, the mistaken
demand for absolute intellectual safety results in the prohibition and policing of
any intentional or accidental microaggression that a student may interpret as
questioning their right to membership with the group in that safe space. The
necessary uncertainty and risk of learning becomes conflated with or deemed
equivalent to physical safety, resulting in calls for exclusion.
This second submapping is particularly problematic because it runs
entirely counter to the theoretical development of safe space, which suggests
that a safe space is not immune to the repressive norms beyond it, as these
norms are present in the infinite relationships amongst members within and
beyond the safe space. Further, prohibiting all practices causing discomfort in a
safe space, rather than considering them moments for developing deeper
understanding, does not fulfil any useful end when these same practices are
encountered again beyond that safe space. As a second-generation Canadian
and a person of colour whose first language was not English, who is writing this
work about safe space in English, it does not escape my notice, nor my own
discomfort, that the repressive norms of colonialism in India and Canada are
present in the stylistic choices and narrative voice that I have utilized in this
writing. These repressive norms are omnipresent and impossible to fully exclude
from a safe space. Moreover, any educationally worthwhile understanding of safe
space, to say nothing of its practical educational application, must account for
and contend with these norms in the safe space of the classroom. This attempt to
address the norms when they are encountered in the safe space of my class, is
what demonstrates that my class is indeed a safe space.
The mistaken belief that a practice of safe space means the exclusionary
policing of its members may, in turn, encourage the mistaken belief that any

133

practice of safe space is a zero-sum endeavor; because the promotion of one
individual’s safety means the demotion of someone else’s safety. As Callan
explains:
We understand space, or rather spaces, as including or not including;
as inclusionary or exclusionary: hence adding more “safety” means
taking away something else (2016, p. 70).
This mistaken zero-sum belief is often couched in the arguments that safe
space places undue limits on academic freedom or free speech (Ben-Porath,
2016; 2017; 2018; Callan, 2016; Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2017; Deresiewicz,
2017; Harris, 2015; Mayo, 2016; Weigel, 2016). However, the submapping
present in many of these arguments is that in the space of higher education or
the greater community, academic freedom or free speech are finite, so there is
only so much to go around (i.e., zero-sum).
This zero-sum submapping is not one that comes from an understanding
of safety, but instead where that safety is metaphorically located, or as part of,
space. This is an understanding of space, specifically safe space, which I have
addressed through this work’s mapping of Leibnizian relational and Newtonian
absolute space in the safe space of my class. As space is relational and infinite,
it means that a safe space represents a never-ending condition that can be
constantly worked toward but never truly achieved, serving as a means toward
some other worthwhile yet infinite educational end, such as the raising of
consciousness. In exploring the philosophical meaning of space and safety,
developing a more complete definition for safe space at the level of the word, at
the level of the statement, and now beginning this consideration at the level of
some educational discourses, the mapping presented in this section of the work
is useful for dispelling misunderstandings about the safe space of my or
someone else’s class.
In the next chapter, I will offer fellow educators a greater appreciation of
how safe space functions at the level of educational discourse and practice. This
will entail a deeper exploration of the distinction between those that experience

134

safety (the students), those responsible for establishing it (the teachers), and the
educational institutions that feel responsible for guaranteeing the safety of both.
That discussion will explore how each of these positionalities (student, teacher
and institution) mistakenly operate under quite different understandings of safe
space, imbued with a Newtonian inheritance. A great irony is that students
demand safety, but often do not understand they are also responsible for coconstituting it. Teachers may believe that they alone establish safety to enable
learning for their students. Educational institutions may behave as if safety is
something that can be established in advance of the teacher-student learning
relationship, and can somehow be maintained irrespective of the uncomfortable
feelings that occur during the experience of learning. I therefore will offer
educators an understanding of a Leibnizian-influenced safe space that is coconstituted by students, the teacher, and the institution. I will then discuss
pedagogical possibilities and practices related to the mapping’s elements of
positionality and evaluation, which educators can pursue in their own
classrooms.

135

Chapter 4.
What can we learn when considering safe space at
the level of current educational discourses?
The purpose of this chapter is to consider safe space as developed
through its mapping in the previous chapter of this work, at the level of practice
that is situated in current educational discourses around safe space, and equity,
diversity, and inclusion in higher education. This discussion will utilize three
examples from my own practice as a teacher in the Canadian higher education
system, which have all served to motivate and hone the philosophical
interrogation of safe space undertaken in this writing.
In the conclusion of the last chapter, two challenges were identified which
contribute to misunderstandings of safe space in education. These two
challenges are the competing Newtonian and Leibnizian inheritances regarding
our conception of space that result in two fundamentally different views of safe
space in education, and how the differing positionalities of students, teachers,
and institutions can result in differing expectations for the purpose, creation, and
maintenance of safe space. The three examples that follow are therefore
exemplary of current educational discourses around safe space. They are shared
to better interrogate how the two challenges just mentioned can be addressed, to
gain an understanding of safe space that is more useful for educational practice.

4.1. The conceptual metaphor: Safe Space of My Class
When I began this work, I was curious to understand what exactly was
being imparted with my promise to students that our class would be a safe
space. I began with the recognition that the “safe space of my class” was a
metaphoric description of my intentions for the teaching and learning I wanted for
my classroom. For me, safe space represented intentions metaphorically, and
was reminiscent of a quote from Peter Strawson (1919-2006) which I had

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encountered during a discussion of the educational utility of philosophy and
metaphysics during my first semester of doctoral studies:
Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure
of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned
to produce a better structure (1959, p. 9).
In the text Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), Strawson
noted that human beings make sense of the world utilizing their own body’s
senses, which are then compared to other persons, spaces, times, and causation
to derive understanding. The result of this comparison is the ability to derive
meaning, reference, comparison, and truth from our senses. Broadly speaking,
Strawson referred to the work of Aristotle and Kant as descriptive metaphysics (I
would position Newton here as well), because their philosophy was often marked
by its attempt to describe the meaning of a sense experience.
Alternatively, Strawson described the work of Descartes and Leibniz as
revisionary metaphysics because their philosophy was characterized by attempts
to revise the existing meanings given to sense experience by reconsidering the
nature of the initial experiences. Revisionary metaphysics is a general
categorization which draws upon the motivation for philosophical inquiry, to
describe an existing situation or to offer revisions for change. I considered the
safe space of my class functioning to create possibilities to influence positive
change and learning for my students. Moreover, the now-central discourse of
equity, diversity, and inclusion in modern education can also be understood for
the revisionary possibilities it aims to engender. These discussions acknowledge
there is no singular conception of equity in education, especially with the diversity
of identity and experience represented by current student bodies. Instead, equity
represents an unrealized ideal that is educationally and socially worthwhile.
The revisionary possibilities envisioned by contemporary discourse around
safe space offered me the motivation to engage in a thorough interrogation of
how metaphor functions in common language and thinking (Richards, 1936;
Beardsley, 1962; Black, 1962), which led in turn to an exploration of how we

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could consider and understand the experience of safe space at the level of the
word, at the level of the statement, and preliminarily, at the level of educational
discourse. Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur’s interactive theory of metaphor (1975)
and subsequent work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980; 1999) to map
how conceptual metaphors function in language, I undertook an analysis of the
respective histories of the words “safe” and “space” that contribute to the
statement “safe space of my class”.
Since safety can be understood as a quality or description of some other
state, I began with an exploration of the modern understanding of space at the
level of the word (Ricoeur, 1975), how this first influenced the experience of
space, and how this contributed to a metaphorical understanding of the
experience of the communicative context in a class.
I explained how this modern understanding of space at the level of the
word was drawn from competing theories of space first explicitly located in a
1717 debate (Alexander, 1956) between the ideas of Newton, which described
space as absolute and independent from the objects within it, and the ideas of
Leibniz, which described space as infinite, and wholly constituted by the
relationships between objects.
Through this philosophical debate, I began to map (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980; 1999; Johnson, 2008) the experience of space to the experience of the
communicative context of my class, and in so doing was able to explain how our
modern understanding of space at the level of the word embodies inheritances
from Newtonian space. However, when considering space at the level of the
statement, I argued that it embodied relational inheritances from Leibnizian
space – most notably in the practices between subjects/objects that coconstituted the space of a class.
The result of this inquiry into the history of the word space was a modern
understanding of the experience of space, which includes a blending of
inheritances from both Newtonian and Leibnizian theories. This understanding

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was then blended with the results of a further inquiry into the experience of
safety. Together the results of the two inquiries were mapped to the
communicative context of my class, at the level of the word and at the level of the
statement “safe space”. I explained how the modern understanding of safety
does not exist in absolutes (present or absent) in a space, but instead has a
gradient-like or fuzzy quality that permits a near-infinite range of experience
between extremes of safety and danger.
The experience of safety is, according to this understanding, relationally
interpreted based upon an individual’s positionality within the communicative
context of a class. Through the mapping of this experience of safety, it became
clear that safe space embodies relational inheritances from Leibnizian space.
However, a source of conflict and misunderstanding during the use of the term
“safe” at the level of the statement arose from the substitution of Newtonian
inheritances into its meaning. Such substitutions seek to establish invariant rules
or policies, above and independent from the safety (or lack of it) experienced by
individuals. Through a careful mapping of what was meant by the experience of
safe space to the experience of the communicative context of my class at the
level of the statement, I argued that “safe space” embodied relational
inheritances from Leibnizian space in the practices and relationships between
individuals who co-constituted the safety of the class space. This analysis
resulted in the following mapping:

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Table 4.1-1:

The Safe Space of My Class conceptual metaphor

Source Domain

Target Domain
[Experience of the
Communicative Context in
My Class]

[Experience of Safe Space]

Shared Location

Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundary that distinguishes the
experience of the location from
all other locations

→

Distinguished by a shared
educational intention in/at a
specific place

→

Establishes legitimate and
relevant communication for
a shared educational
intention

→

Learning and change is
considered as a gradientlike understanding between
legitimate and relevant, and
illegitimate and irrelevant
communication

→

Actions and
communications are judged
as legitimate and relevant
based upon the
maintenance or the
reinforcement of the right to
ongoing membership

→

Specific positionalities
influence the experiences of
fear, risk, and uncertainty
from communication in a
gradient-like fashion.
The stronger these
experiences the greater the
potential impediments to
thinking and learning

→

Make the attempt (reflection,
reposition, or revision) to
understand the experience
and contribution of others
engaged in the same shared
educational intention.

Possibility for movement

Integrity of the physical body free
from pain or the fear of pain

Positionality of the physical body
to fear, risk, and uncertainty

Recognition and evaluation of
relative positionalities

Central to this mapping was a relational and interconnected view of space
and safety that draws heavily from Leibniz’s writing about how monads derive

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knowledge, which I extended into an educational setting with understanding
being co-constituted by everyone participating in a space. If one accepts that all
knowledge is relational, then instead of judging contributions to classroom
discourse as relevant or irrelevant, we shift instead to embracing a mode of
thinking where I and my students would have to consider how others’ claims to
knowledge are potentially relevant to the current discussion. Attempting to
consider the potential relevance of the others’ contributions would represent a
type of epistemic generosity and humility (Hill, 2020; Levinas, 2006; Derrida,
2000; Butler, 2005; 2006), by acknowledging that there could potentially be more
than one type of legitimate and valid knowledge.
The commitment to epistemic generosity and humility would not imply that
I must immediately (or for that matter, ever) accept others’ claims to knowledge.
Rather, it means that while in the safe space of the classroom I would practice
the generosity to make an attempt to reflect on how another person’s knowledge
could be deemed relevant to the current discussion. If this reflection then led to a
possible action, I would be obliged to make a reasonable attempt to reposition
myself and my thinking, to move toward a version of the knowledge asserted by
others. However, this reflection could also result in a determination that no
reasonable course of action is required to substantiate or incorporate this
knowledge.
Rejecting a student’s claims to relevant knowledge would be acceptable
so long as I had made an honest attempt to understand the knowledge claimed.
The novelty of this way of practicing safe space is that it involves an ongoing
reflective process that can awaken us from what we have accepted as normal,
and what we have considered as legitimate versus illegitimate knowledge. The
primary differences introduced by the Leibnizian inheritances (compared to
Newtonian inheritances) would be the necessity of constantly reflecting on the
current conditions of the class space as they relate to my current positionality,
and then repositioning my thinking and communication to influence the best
possible conditions for learning.

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Having considered safe space at the level of the word, at the level of
statement, and what it could mean in educational practice, I began an
examination of the educational discourse within which the term is utilized
(Ricoeur, 1975; Callan, 2016). It is here, at the level of educational discourse,
where the clashing inheritances from Newtonian space and Leibnizian space are
the most problematic. This is because these inheritances contribute to
fundamentally different views of safe space in education.
First, the Newtonian inheritances contribute to an understanding of safe
space in education that establishes rules or policies that precede, and are
independent from, the experience of the individuals within the space. These
Newtonian inheritances establish an absolute space that is “bounded” not so
much by any physical limits (since I could hold my class outside on a beautiful
day and still have it be “my classroom”), but instead by the thinking that rules,
policies, and laws can be cultivated at a level that is independent of, and
seemingly encompassing of, the subjects, objects and contexts that embody and
create possibilities for learning in my classroom.
The result of these Newtonian inheritances is that some come to believe
safe space to be capable of formulation a priori: that students are entitled to a
class space safe in some unambiguous sense, irrespective of who is taking the
class, what the class is about, and what is going on in the world outside the
classroom. This a priori safe space becomes something that institutions feel
responsible for guaranteeing, and teachers are made to feel responsible for
creating and maintaining, with students feeling little responsibility other than
reaping its benefits.
Second, this Newtonian a priori understanding of safe space is then
interpreted by the relative positionality of institutions, teachers, and students in
very different ways. For institutions of higher education, a priori understanding of
safe space can be revealed in the educational discourses about the use and

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operation of language on college and university campuses (Behrent, 2019; BenPorath, 2016; 2017; 2018).
For students, this a priori understanding of safe space is shown in the
discourses of students feeling betrayed when the promises for a safe space
(which they may feel little responsibility for establishing themselves), are not
fulfilled by their teachers or the institution (cf. the Yale Halloween costume
example). Finally, for the teachers, this a priori understanding of safe space is
understood as being unrealistic in anything other than the most superficial sense,
and instead located in the educational discourses focused on equitable, diverse,
and inclusive pedagogical practices.
The remainder of this chapter will take up a discussion of three examples
from my own educational practice that can be seen to be representative of how
the mistaken Newtonian inheritance of an a priori understanding of safe space
can be encountered in the classroom, and how it can result in very different
expectations for that safe space based upon the Leibnizian understanding of
relative positionality.

4.2. Practicing safe space: Institutions and Students
Six months before commencing my doctoral studies I experienced a
severe concussion, which compounded the series of mild to severe concussions
that I had suffered through my teens and twenties. The lingering effect of this last
concussion was that I had to learn how to cope with a new reality of cognitive
and emotional disabilities while undertaking my initial coursework, learning to
teach for the first time, working full-time evenings to pay bills, and managing the
complex healthcare needs of my elderly parents. This is all to say that I was quite
busy and very forgetful, and I sometimes shared ideas out loud that I had not yet
completely thought through.
During one such instance in a doctoral-level educational theory seminar, I
was discussing Martin Heidegger’s work regarding how language shapes

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thinking. A fellow student suggested that I was engaged in nothing more than a
type of intellectual masturbation rather than the important work of considering the
effect of these ideas on classroom practice.
Having it pointed out that I was perhaps overly engaged in ethereal
considerations while my peers were interested in discussing implementation in
their respective practices was nothing new for me. However, my fellow student’s
choice of language, perhaps due to its vulgar nature or its undertones
questioning the relevance of my contributions to the class discussion, silenced
my participation. As I looked to the teacher of the seminar for any sign of support,
I encountered a blank face which I interpreted as indifference to my discomfort. I
stayed silent for the remainder of that seminar and the following.
One benefit of my cognitive and emotional disabilities (stemming from the
concussions) was a very short memory; I quickly forgot about this experience in
the seminar, and instead was overwhelmed by the myriad other issues and
responsibilities I was attempting to juggle. Throughout it all, I found my teaching
(first as a teaching assistant and then as an instructor) a place of solace.
Teaching allowed me to be entirely present for my students, and momentarily
ignore my other concerns. It was calming, almost relaxing, because I felt I was in
control of my classroom and providing a safe educational space within which my
students could thrive. I began work at other regional universities and colleges,
and slowly, my teaching became how I coped with my world.
During this period of the mid-2010s, educational discourse related to
higher education began to focus on the question of how to be more inclusive of
an increasingly diverse student body that consisted of growing numbers of
historically under- or un-represented identities (Williams, Berger, & McClendon,
2005; Ahmed, 2007; Henry, James, Li, Kobayashi, Smith, Ramos, & Enakshi,
2017; Hunt, 2018), while simultaneously trying to balance a desire to maintain
open and free expression of ideas and speech (Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2017;

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Deresiewicz, 2017; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; 2018; Weigel, 2016; Whittington,
2018).
This desire to be more inclusive while maintaining open dialogue for all
students resulted in many institutions of higher education strongly encouraging,
and even mandating instructors to prominently add text or a statement to our
course syllabi indicating our commitment to inclusion and free expression in the
teaching and learning of the safe space of our classrooms (Armstrong, 2011;
Branch, Stein, Huynh, & Lazzara, 2018; Carnegie Mellon University, 2019;
Fuentes, Zelaya, & Madsen, 2021). At the time nothing seemed contradictory
about these two intentions, which I readily included on my course syllabi and
spoke about during class.
Then one afternoon in the summer of 2015, I found a student I will call JoAnn sitting outside my office waiting to speak with me. In the spring and summer
semesters of 2015 I was teaching several undergraduate education courses
when I happened to have Jo-Ann as a student for two consecutive semesters.
Jo-Ann was a remarkable woman who would, in 2018, become a high school
teacher. But in 2015, she had been several years away from school, was working
part-time outside of school hours, and considering what she wanted to focus on
in her third and fourth years of study.
Jo-Ann was a curious and insightful student, always wanting to learn more
about others and why they believed what they did. She pushed her fellow
students to share their thinking through positive reinforcement and an openness
to understand where they were coming from. With her participation, class
discussions were always lively and fruitful, something many other students
communicated in their assignments. Then, early in our second semester of
classes together, Jo-Ann went quiet. I might call on her during class discussions
to share her thoughts, but without that prompt, she seemed to retreat inside
herself. I repeatedly invited her to meet me during my office hours to discuss her
thoughts, and on several occasions even asked if there was something wrong

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which I could help resolve. Finally, near the end of the semester I came across
Jo-Ann waiting for me before my office hours. She asked if she could have a
meeting, and I invited her in.
As we talked over the next half hour, she explained why she had gone
quiet in class, and I was both surprised and shocked to learn it was because of
me. She produced our course syllabi, which included a revised version of my
statement about the inclusive, educationally safe space I hoped to foster with the
class on behalf of the institution in which we were members. She had highlighted
and circled portions. She looked it over once again for herself, then handed it to
me and said:
…you did not protect me during our class discussion early in the
semester when several students were criticizing my opinion; you
promised a safe space for all your students, but when I felt
uncomfortable, under attack, and unsafe in our class, you did nothing
(Jo-Ann, personal communication, July 2015).
I felt a knot of recognition throughout my body after Jo-Ann shared her
sentiment, and it never really went away after that meeting. I explained that our
classroom was a safe space for teaching and learning, but that did not
necessarily mean that all discomfort, which may be a necessary catalyst for
learning, could or even should be removed from the class. Moreover, I explained
that it is not the teacher’s responsibility to protect students from intellectual
discomfort, but rather to prepare students for encounters with this type of
discomfort after they have left the relative safety of the classroom. As we spoke, I
empathized with the profound sense of confusion, betrayal, and disappointment
that Jo-Ann shared with me, because these were all feelings that I had
experienced myself as a student during my doctoral studies and countless times
prior.
This example from my own practice serves to emphasize how the a priori
understanding of safe space can lead to impediments for student learning.
Additionally, the positionality of the student, the teacher, and the institution all

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contribute to differing interpretations of what safe space can and should mean. In
the ensuing discussion, I will consider how this a priori understanding is
influenced by differing educational discourses, and how in turn the positionality of
the institution compared to the positionality of students can lead to radically
different expectations for the practice of a safe space. Consideration of the
positionality of the teacher will be taken up in the subsequent examples and
discussion in this chapter.

4.2.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Institutions and Students
When we consider the similarity of Jo-Ann's experience in the previous
example and my own previous experiences, we can recognize that our presence
and membership within the class, and in turn our participation in its discussions,
was being questioned through the statements of other students. From the
positionality of the student in the example, a promise or guarantee about their
educational experience being safe and free from any perceived harm had been
made by the institution, and now it fell upon the teacher to maintain this safe
space. This safety, it was understood, could be accomplished by the active
monitoring and policing of language such as microaggressions.
Microaggressions entered the lexicon of educational discourse in the mid2010s as a description of actions or language which convey specific cultural,
social, or political repressive norms (Foucault, 1978; Harris, 2015; Freeman &
Weekes Schroer; 2020). Work by intersectional scholars (Crenshaw, 1989;
Collins, 1990) and those interested in meaning and discourse (Ricoeur, 1975;
Foucault, 1978; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) have noted that all communication, no
matter where its takes place, invariably reproduces these repressive norms.
Often, as is the case with microaggressions, the reproductions of
repression are indirect, subtle, unintentional, and often perceptible to only a
select group who have been historically marginalized (Ahmed, 2012; Galanes,
2017; Nittle; 2018; Torino, Rivera, Capodilupo, Nadal, & Wing Sue, 2018).
However, the a priori understanding of safe space as a guarantee to safety has
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resulted in attempts to locate and prohibit the reproduction of these repressive
norms, most often in the form of policing specific speech and expressions.
Opponents of these attempts at the policing of microaggressions, such as
University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, claim that such
policing often takes the form of institutional language policies, teachers’
classroom practices relating to legitimate and illegitimate language, or students
policing the language use of their peers, their teachers, and even the institution
(Marcoccia, 2018). Peterson and others argue that the belief that it is possible
and necessary to inhibit the reproduction of repression that is indirect, subtle, and
most often unintentional on the part of the speaker is incredibly problematic,
because it in no way can account for the countless positionalities of those taking
part in a classroom, which will change with each new semester. I will discuss why
this might be the case.
First, the reproduction of repression may very well represent an individual
invoking their dominance and privilege over others (Ahmed, 2012). In such
situations, it can be pedagogically worthwhile for the teacher to question the
source of this historical and structural dominance and privilege, as represented
by the microaggression, using it as a teachable moment that can foster greater
reflection. In this way, the primary motivation of the teacher toward the
microaggression is pedagogical, and any attempt to address it will take place
within the educational relationship with students. However, should the teacher
adopt the institution’s primarily administrative motivation with regard to the
microaggression, the active policing of it without the care to distinguish the
individual speaker from the idea, and without the care to address the historical
and structural power reproduced with the idea, can result in one individual feeling
ostracized and all others in attendance understanding only that there are strict
rules regarding safety from ideas that need to be diligently enforced.
Second, the policing of microaggressions cannot account for the multitude
of positionalities present and absent in the classroom. Not all students may be

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affected by the microaggression in the same way, as the repressive norm this
specific speech or expression represents functions within a specific cultural,
social, or political discourse. With the diversity of current student bodies, some
speech or expression in the classroom will undoubtedly repress some past,
current, or future student. Hence, the policing of microaggressions at the
institutional level or the class level runs into the practical problem of how to
establish under what conditions this reproduction of some repressive norm
warrants prohibition.
Considered simply, how many individuals need to feel repressed for the
institution or teacher to act? How repressed do they need to feel? Moreover, do
these individuals even have to be present in the class or the institution (i.e.,
someone somewhere is being repressed) to warrant action? Therefore, when we
consider how microaggressions are prohibited and actively policed in some safe
spaces in higher education, we have a vivid example of how the a priori
understanding of space can lead to a false sense of what is possible to
guarantee vis a vis safety.
Microaggressions are understood to be statements or actions that are
representative of some repressive social, moral, or intellectual norm. They are a
part of these repressive norms, but they are not the whole of these norms.
Therefore, the prohibiting and policing of microaggressions, which are but a
component of the whole, does not bring clarity to considering the repressive
nature of the norms. Without the pedagogical opportunity to reflect on the
microaggression as a part of a repressive whole, an individual cannot develop
any meaningful way to mitigate their own reproduction of the repressive norm,
address future instances in which they will encounter similar microaggressions,
or address the larger issue of the repressive norms in life outside their schooling.
An example of this policing of potentially offensive language can be found
in the many critiques of safe space in education, made on the grounds of its
curtailment of academic freedom or free speech (Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2017;

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Deresiewicz, 2017; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015; 2018; Weigel, 2016; Whittington,
2018). Almost all these critiques utilize language to convey the idea of safety,
academic freedom, or free speech as finite, scarce commodities. There is only so
much safety to go around, it is implied; should the safe space offer traditionally
marginalized student groups greater safety, it entails that those student groups in
the traditional majority must give up or be stripped of some of their safety, and in
turn, their right to free speech and expression. The invitation these critiques offer
is to promote a type of virtuous disdain for the forced metaphoric redistribution of
safety through classroom policing.
However, utilizing the language of scarcity to describe freedom, speech,
or safety obscures several problematic implications of an a priori understanding
of safe space. First, this a priori understanding results not so much in the scarcity
of a finite or absolute amount of safety or freedom, but instead an inability to
recognize that any experience of freedom or safety is co-constituted in a
Leibnizian sense.
Freedom and safety are not binarily present or absent, but instead
contingent on a vast array of relationships. The language of scarcity can
therefore obscure the experience of freedom and safety being relationally coconstituted and in constant flux. This results in a scarcity of educational
possibility, not of freedom, speech, or safety. A Newtonian a priori understanding
establishes a singular bounded space which must be uniform throughout. If we
consider free society as the bounded space, then this necessitates all places in
society being free, which results in the necessity for all communication in society
being free, regardless the context or purpose.
This free bounded space is not able to acknowledge and denote a space
within itself that serves some other intention, such as learning. A pedagogical
free space would have to operate differently to communicatively enact its
intentions, but it cannot exist within the free society’s space under a Newtonian a
priori understanding. This a priori understanding results in the dichotomous belief

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that there is either individual freedom or pedagogical purpose, rather than the
necessary tension and trade-off between the Newtonian and Leibnizian
understandings that is continually re-evaluated.
A close analysis of almost all the previously cited critiques of safe space
allows for an important conclusion: the institutional and primarily administrative a
priori understanding of safe space as a guarantee to safety is at cross purposes
with a teacher’s Leibnizian-influenced understanding of safe space as learning
characterized by the experience of discomfort from the unsettling of students’
previous understanding. Attempts by an institution to administratively guarantee
safety for all members of the community can therefore result in the curtailment of
the pedagogical possibilities and practices required for transformational learning
to take place. This a priori Newtonian-influenced understanding of safe space is
an administratively constructed space.
The administrative space is Newtonian in the sense that it is set above,
independent, and indifferent to the objects within it: the teachers, students, and
their learning relationships. The result is a theoretical space devoid of the
recognition of multiple positionalities and the pedagogical possibilities their
acknowledgement can enable for transformative learning. In this very limited and
pedagogical sense, the language of scarcity offered by the critiques of safe
space can focus attention on the implications from the problematic a priori
understanding of safe space utilized administratively by institutions.
Critiques which focus upon the problematic a priori understanding of safe
space and the discursive critiques it has spawned, resulted in many institutions of
higher education responding in two interesting ways.
First, some institutions have reaffirmed their commitment to free
expression and speech in their teaching and learning, most notably with the
development of the Chicago Principles in 2014 by the University of Chicago
(Ben-Porath, 2016; 2018), and their subsequent adoption by colleges and
universities across North America (Ben-Porath, 2017). Appointed by both the

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president and the provost in July 2014, the Committee on Freedom of Expression
was tasked with articulating the institution’s historical commitment to debate as
expressed by its past presidents:
‘…in light of recent events nationwide that have tested institutional
commitments to free and open discourse’. The Committee’s charge
was to draft a statement ‘articulating the University’s overarching
commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation
among all members of the University’s community’ (Stone, Bertrand,
Olinto, Siegler, Strauss, Warren, & Woodward, 2014, ¶1).
Exemplary of a specific and singular positionality, those who could ascend
to leadership in a prominent institution of higher education, the report offers
examples of an a priori understanding of a safe space for learning that does not
acknowledge and therefore cannot account for the modern diversity of
positionalities present in higher education. Instead, the Committee’s report
assumes that all teachers and learners can experience teaching and learning
with a similar sense of safety, fear, risk and uncertainty, and can therefore
contribute as equals to all debates or discussions. The Committee’s report
outlined that the institution’s:
fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or
deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are
thought by some or even by most members of the University
community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed
(2014, ¶10).
Once submitted and accepted by the president of the University of
Chicago, this public commitment came to be known as the Chicago Principles.
However, this reaffirmation of free expression and speech was established
through an extremely legalistic and formal framework. The framework is
buttressed by rules and policies which cannot account for the intricacies of the
relationships between teachers and students during learning:
They fail to recognize that higher education institutions must address
the current tensions brewing under the heading of ‘free speech’ –
brought on by students, faculty members and outside forces – by
reconsidering, and possibly shifting, a host of practices in

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classrooms, dorms, clubs, and administrations in ways that would
differ across campuses. Those tensions cannot simply be resolved
by endorsing a one-size-fits-all statement” (Ben-Porath, 2018, ¶4).
Ben-Porath points out that the development of safe space through rules and
policies that establish the protection for all speech:
…comes at the expense of the reasonable demands from people on
campuses who argue that free speech that protects the expression
of biased views creates an unequal burden that they are made to
carry…[and] if an institutional endorsement of the principles is the
end of the conversation about free speech, it undermines the ability
of that college or university to fulfill its teaching mission (Ben-Porath,
2018, ¶10).
The intended meaning for safe space in a class setting as an inclusive practice to
promote learning was thereby stripped of these educational considerations.
Instead, from the viewpoint of those who argued for the inclusion of any and all
ideas or thinking, no matter their relevance, plausibility, or lack of logical
consistency, “safe space”, “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings" were simply
a new lexicon for limiting expression and speech.
The second way in which many institutions have responded to critiques of
safe space was by affirming principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion as core
commitments within their institutional mandates (Government of Canada, 2019).
Such commitments recognize the need for greater inclusion of those historically
excluded populations, and the growing diversity of positionality within institutions
of higher learning stemming from the changing demographics of multicultural
societies. For many of these increasingly diverse students and their professors,
who represented or wanted to teach about historically excluded or silenced
positionalities, it was more important to continue growing these inclusive and
diverse practices than to maintain the absolute need for free speech that had
historically privileged one positionality to the detriment of all others.
The understanding that institutions of higher education have a
responsibility to foster inclusivity and acceptance of others in a shared and
diverse society for all (Waldron, 2012) has resulted in the acknowledgement that
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some speech, specifically of ideas that denigrate or inhibit the learning of some
members of the community, are not relevant or necessary in the learning space.
Instead, learning to see society as not just existing for oneself and one’s own
ideas allows for a shared experience of learning where we must attempt to make
room for others’ ideas.
A diversity of positionality and opinion had always existed in traditional
debates of free expression and free speech in higher education. However,
diversity had previously been considered an afterthought, if it was considered at
all. An example of this from my own experience during my bachelor’s degree in
English Literature was the inclusion at the end of the semester of topics such as
Feminist, Postcolonial, Marxist, or LGBTQ+ perspectives. When time permitted,
the professor could turn their attention to these important topics; but they were
always presented as alternatives to the central and primary way to understand
the topic: an addendum to be considered only after understanding from the
unmarked default male, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, white, colonial-settler
positionality was first achieved.
For those who see safe space as a curtailment of the safety of some at
the expense of others (a la Newton), there is a lack of critical consideration
(some less generous accounts might refer to this as a lack of care or empathy) of
the power and effect of a student’s actions on their classmates. Here there is an
understanding of free expression and free speech being set apart and above the
subjects and objects in the space of a class. Thus, expression and speech are
not seen as an interconnected relationship between the individuals in a class (a
la Leibniz), but instead as rules that govern the boundaries of any permissible
relationship between these individuals. What is relevant between these
individuals for the purposes of a shared intention, in the form of what can and
cannot be said, is not a primary consideration.

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4.2.2. Considering positionality for Institutions versus Students
When we consider the positionality of the institution and students in the
previous example, we can better see how the a priori understanding of safe
space and the Leibnizian relationships within can result in radically different
expectations.
I have argued that institutions of higher education actively endorse and
encourage both students and teachers to take a static, Newtonian view of safe
space that exists before, during, and after any educational relationships and
communication that may take place in a class. The institution and its officials feel
not only a right, but an administrative responsibility to guarantee this safe space
for both teachers and students. Yet at the same time the institution is not present
in the classroom, nor is it one of the interlocutors in classroom discourse. Only its
mandates are being heard there. Generally speaking, institutions appear deaf to
the realities of learning requiring some risk on the part of students and teachers,
and their educational experience is considered within the guaranteed Newtonian
safe space. The institution is indifferent to the evolving intentions of the
educational discourse in that space.
The students who hold a static, Newtonian view of safe space enter an
educational experience disregarding how they might co-constitute the safe space
themselves. Instead, students are given to believe it is the responsibility of the
institution (and by extension, the teacher in the classroom as its representative)
to maintain the guarantee of a safe space. The students’ lack of responsibility
toward the creation and maintenance of a safe space is central to this Newtonian
view, because the space is assumed to operate independent of the teacher’s and
the students’ shared educational intention and their communicative relationships.
For both Jo-Ann and I, our positionalities had little bearing on maintaining
the teacher’s guarantee that the class was a safe space. It was not our
responsibility to consider the ideas of classmates and to make the attempt to
understand how their comments could be relevant to our own. Instead, we

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believed it was the responsibility of the teacher and institution to moderate and
curate all discussions, or to police and prohibit certain discussions that may
threaten the relative safety of some students.

4.3. Practicing safe space: Institutions and Teachers
Since 2018 I have been working as an instructor in an English department
at a small for-profit college in British Columbia, Canada. Relying in part on my
undergraduate degree in English Literature, as well as my teaching of
undergraduate academic literacy and writing courses primarily to international
students speaking and writing English as an Additional Language, this
experience has been both challenging and rewarding. I have grown as a teacher
from the many unique challenges that I have encountered in my teaching. I have
also drawn upon my graduate background in educational theory and my work on
this thesis to begin voicing my concerns during department and college-wide
discussions about the appropriateness of the texts that comprise our course
required readings.
During our meetings, our department head has continually reminded
teachers to practice care with the texts we choose to include on our required
reading lists. Part of the department head’s motivation for driving this discussion
is the awareness of how quickly a student’s (or their parent’s) critique of the
inclusion of a specific author, reading or idea they find objectionable can become
magnified through social media, and result in a public relations nightmare for the
college’s administration.
Without the contextual benefit of the pedagogical reasons for the inclusion
of what might be considered objectionable material on our course reading lists,
the implicit message to the teachers in the department is to affirm a commitment
to a safe space for all students. This is accomplished by pre-emptively censoring
your reading material to minimize unwanted critique, before the institution
unilaterally mandates the banning of specific authors, readings, or ideas.

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This example from my own practice serves to emphasize how the a priori
understanding of safe space can lead to instances of a teacher’s pedagogical
decisions being scrutinized by an institution concerned with appearing committed
to maintaining a safe space for all students. Additionally, the positionality of the
student (and perhaps their parent), the teacher, and the institution all contribute
to differing interpretations of what safe space can and should mean when it
relates to the discomfort that some materials and ideas may elicit. In the following
discussion, I will consider how this a priori understanding is influenced by
differing educational discourses, and how in turn the positionality of the institution
compared to the positionality of the teacher can lead to radically different
expectations for the practice of a safe space.

4.3.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Institutions and Teachers
There is nothing new about the need to continually revise reading lists and
other resources in curriculum, especially when trying to reflect personal interests
and positionality as well as evolving cultural and societal beliefs or attitudes.
Such revisions are a common reality for teachers of English in higher education,
perhaps more so than those in other fields of study due to literature’s status as
being representative of certain historic cultural beliefs and attitudes (Eagleton,
1990; Fish, 1980; Foucault, 1978; Gallagher & Greenblatt, 2000).
The choice of what to keep and what to revise in the curriculum is
influenced by what scholars in the field of study and the teacher believe to be
educationally worthwhile. These judgements often result in the utilization of
resources that are historically relevant to learning about a specific topic, but no
longer representative of current beliefs and attitudes (Faust, 2020). As an
example, many teachers including myself have been working through curricular
revisions in our treatment of the writings of American author William Faulkner
(1905-1988) in our introductory fiction courses. Considering William Faulkner’s
problematic public statements and literary contributions, Faust wrote:

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We are in a time when authors’ reputations are overturned, their
works removed from reading lists, their achievements devalued
because of their blindness on questions we now see with different
eyes (2020, p. 81).
At the heart of this discourse is a practical, pedagogical issue that
teachers have traditionally tried to manage within the educational context of the
class: How can we teach about people or their ideas, when we know they
represent beliefs and attitudes that are no longer representative of current culture
or society? Whereas teachers had until recently considered curriculum revisions
primarily a question of pedagogy (cf. Levinas, 1989; Chinnery, 2010), more
recently efforts to balance the shared educational intention of a group with the
experience of students’ discomfort while learning has resulted in instances of
specific authors, texts, or ideas being unilaterally banned at the institutional level
in the name of an a priori understanding of safe space held by those institutions.
Institutions have often been responding to larger societal discourses
identifying individuals or ideas as problematic, and then focusing greater
attention on how they should be considered to better represent the multiple
positionalities of a diverse society (cf. #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter,
Canada’s recognition of its historical treatment of its Indigenous population, etc.).
One specific practice which has gained attention, and some might argue
notoriety (Cohen, 2021), is what has been labelled by its detractors as “cancel
culture” (Gerstmann, 2021; Henderson, 2020; Italie, 2020). Drawing on the vast
reach of social media and moral outrage toward some problematic beliefs,
activists have pushed businesses and institutions to “cancel” their existing
relationships with controversial individuals or ideas, to deprive them of a platform
(Edwardson, 2021; Kurjata, 2021; McInnes, 2021).
For institutions of higher education seeking to mitigate negative social
media attention which could then translate into negative news media attention,
the need to protect their institutional reputations and brands have resulted in
unilateral bans on specific authors, texts, ideas, or controversial guest speakers
(Behrent, 2019). Seeking to guarantee and maintain an a priori safe space for all

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members of their community, I would argue that institutions have placed the
absolute safety of all students ahead of the pedagogical necessity for intellectual
risk and uncertainty.
In many cases, rather than engaging with the difficult and nuanced
distinctions between physical, emotional, and intellectual safety as might be
undertaken by a teacher in their classroom practice, institutions err on the side of
caution to guarantee the safety of all. The result is the barring of a problematic
learning resource and the possible removal of worthwhile teachable moments for
teachers and students.
An understanding of what these difficult and nuanced teachable moments
can look like in the classroom practices of teachers can be found in the
educational discourse of critical pedagogy (Apple, 2004; Fish, 1980; Freire,
1970/2000; Giroux, 1993; Illich, 1971; Kliebard, 1986; 1992; Massey, 1994;
McLaren, 2016; Razack, 2002; Rist, 1973; Roth, 2019). One example, while not
explicitly a text about safe space, is bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). hooks offers a mature discussion
of what these difficult and nuanced teachable moments can look like as inclusive
classroom pedagogy in increasingly diverse higher education classrooms.
At the heart of hooks’ writing about inclusive pedagogy to tackle difficult
and problematic ideas, is the acknowledgement of her own positionality and how
this has contributed to her understanding. Specifically, hooks writes about her
own experiences as a college English instructor from her positionality as a
woman of colour in America, to describe the pedagogical practices she has
utilized to develop her classrooms as safe spaces. Her writing offers an
extremely rich, nuanced, and well-developed understanding of what safe space
can look like when implemented by teachers and students. As a college English
instructor developing my own understanding of safe space that acknowledges my
own positionality, as well as those of my diverse students, I will draw upon hooks’
writing to consider the pedagogical practices of the “safe space of my class”.

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Aspects of hooks’ writing describing the act of teaching and its
pedagogical practices as transgressions of boundaries align with the mapping I
conducted earlier in this work. Drawing upon her own experiences of education
as a black child in the segregated schooling system of the United States in the
mid-twentieth century, she understood education as a relational experience
during her segregated education alongside others of the same relative
positionality. Alternatively, the move toward integration (desegregation) and
greater diversity in schools had the contradictory result of changing her
educational experience to an absolute one:
School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the
messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had
characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our allblack school. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had
no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to
antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that
obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected
of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat
to white authority (1994, p. 3).
Drawing out hooks’ interpretation of education, it is plausible to consider her
relational understanding of education as the practice of freedom, and her
absolute understanding of education as merely the reinforcement of domination
in the form of obedience to authority (1994, p. 4).
hooks’ experience took place within the boundaries of being a black
student in desegrated schools which viewed her not as a full member, but
instead as an interloper. Her past experiences had been marked by an
excitement for learning and the possibility of transgressing the boundaries placed
around her relative positionality as a black person in America, while the
experience in the desegregated and diverse schools was one marked by an
acknowledgement and obedience to these same boundaries. hooks therefore
adopted a relational view for the potential practices she could employ in her own
undergraduate classroom:

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Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive
of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the
learning process. To enter classroom settings in college and
universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement,
was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted
boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full
recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set
agenda governing teaching practices (1994, p. 7).
For hooks, this excitement could be utilized for “expanding beyond boundaries”
(1994, p. 10). This meant that the absolute boundary could be pushed, stretched,
or expanded; or more relationally, this boundary could be recognized as being
arbitrarily erected, temporary, and potentially fuzzy:
Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to
imagine and enact pedagogical practices that engage directly both
the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe
systems of domination (such as racism and sexism) while
simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse groups of
students (1994, p. 10).
This understanding allowed for the possibilities of growth and change,
which could engender similarities to her own experience in racially segregated
schools where her teachers had encouraged a “devotion to learning, to a life of
the mind, [as] a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every
strategy of white racist colonization” (hooks, 1994, p. 2). However, for hooks this
possibility for change in a diverse classroom would not be isolated to students
due to the shared relational experience, but instead provided teachers a similar
and sometimes frightening possibility:
…many teachers are disturbed by the political implications of a
multicultural education because they fear losing control in a
classroom where there is no one way to approach a subject – only
multiple ways and multiple references (1994, pp. 35-36).
Further, hooks recognized how every student could experience risk and
uncertainty, what she called school as “the place of ecstasy-pleasure and
danger” (1994, p. 3) through the possibility of being moved and altered by
learning. There was an inherent discomfort associated with learning for hooks,

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and she found it fruitful to share her own discomfort as a guide, and invite
students to do the same, to connect the experience of discomfort to a greater
phenomenon:
there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving
up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches.
I respect that pain. And I include recognition of it now when I teach,
that is to say, I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the
discomfort it can cause (1994, pp. 42-43).
Finally, the recognition and evaluation of relative positionalities and
excitement for each other’s ideas was for hooks how the teacher and students
could make the attempt to reposition their existing thinking:
As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is
deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one
another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. Since the
vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional
educational practices and concern themselves only with the
presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that
everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be
simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical
practices. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone
influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These
contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the
capacity of any class to create an open learning community. (1994,
p. 8).
Within the discourse of critical pedagogy in education, which strives to
confront difficult and problematic ideas in modern culture, hooks’ writing can be
appreciated for the pedagogical possibilities she shares from her own classroom
as a safe space that nonetheless encompasses exciting possibilities for
intellectual risk, uncertainty, and the ensuing discomfort. Rather than excising
problematic learning resources as done by institutions guided by an a priori
understanding of safe space, hooks offers us a view of how the discomfort at the
heart of teaching and learning can be central to a rich, Leibnizian-influenced
practice of safe space. In the next sections, I will continue to explore hooks’
writing for further examples of what these practices of safe space can look like in
the classroom.

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4.3.2. Considering positionality for Institutions versus Teachers
In the previous example, we can better see how the a priori understanding
of safe space by the institution and the Leibnizian relationships at the heart of the
teacher’s practice can result in radically different expectations.
The institution, for the sake of its reputation and brand (and the resulting
financial implications to its operating budget), responds to negative attention
arising out of problematic learning resources with a static, Newtonian view of
safe space as either present or absent.
This view does not consider the necessity of the educational relationship
between the teacher and students as they negotiate the discomfort arising from
the study of a learning resource – instead, discomfort, risk, fear, and any
possibility for any type of pain must be avoided to serve the administrative need
of protecting its brand. The institution and its officials cannot engage in the subtle
and nuanced pedagogical distinction between physical, emotional, and
intellectual pain, because this distinction is rooted in the relative positionality of
teachers and students who change every semester. This is a relative positionality
that the institution is incapable of acknowledging due to the a priori
understanding of safe space allowing no consideration of the near infinite
gradient of perception between the presence and absence of safety.
In contrast to the institution, the teacher who is engaged in an educational
relationship with students as they negotiate the discomfort inherent in learning
that challenges them, cannot deny the necessary risk-taking needed for growth.
The teacher can and should engage with problematic learning resources in a way
that does not threaten the physical safety of students and does not adversely
affect the emotional safety of students, but which can utilize this temporary
emotional risk and discomfort to foment intellectual change. In this understanding
of safe space, the teacher’s responsibility is then not to protect the safety of
students, but instead to manage this relative safety by deliberately interspersing

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risk and uncertainty to allow meaningful learning to be co-constituted by the
class.

4.4. Practicing safe space: Students and Teachers
While teaching a senior level curriculum theory and practice course to a
mix of undergraduate students and pre-service teachers in the mid-2010s, I
made the decision to dedicate considerable time, readings, discussion, and
course work to the history of Canadian education and the residential school
system. The residential school system was established in the 1880s and
continued into the 1990s, and it served the express purpose of severing
Canada’s indigenous children from the history, languages and traditional
knowledge of their own communities. It instead educated these children in the
dominant historical narrative: the heterosexual male Anglo-Saxon settler-colonist
having brought European enlightenment to the first peoples of North America
(Razack, 2002). As a second generation Canadian, a person of colour and a
teacher, I did not shy away from the tension that I was a product of this historical
narrative, while concurrently holding contempt for its singular positionality.
Rather than claiming expertise over this history, I emphasized that I would
be learning about parts of this history alongside the students and doing my best
to make sense of the conflict and emotions which might arise. The goal would be
to learn more about this history and support each other so that we could begin to
recognize how education was equally about the positionality of institutions,
teachers, and students as it was about ideas.
After 4-5 weeks and several lengthy discussions in class (as well as
during my office hours), several of my students approached me to express their
disapproval with the focus of the course. Some felt that as non-Indigenous
students they had no reasonable way to access this history. Others argued that
they did not see how this history was relevant to their own experiences and
intentions to become teachers. Still others argued that they were not responsible

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for the atrocities and crimes of past Canadian generations against the Indigenous
populations, and they were growing weary of being made to feel guilty for their
whiteness and/or privilege.
This example from my own practice emphasizes how the a priori
understanding of safe space can lead to instances of misunderstanding and
conflict between the teacher’s intentions to discuss difficult yet relevant subject
matter in a respectful manner, and students’ expectations that the safe space of
their learning experience will not be fraught with intellectual or even emotional
discomfort. Moreover, the teacher’s intentions need to be borne out in their
practices to ensure that the students’ discomfort in encountering difficult ideas
does not inhibit their learning. In the ensuing discussion, I will consider how this a
priori understanding is influenced by differing educational discourses, and how in
turn the positionality of the teacher compared to the positionality of students can
lead to the need to develop and engage inclusive pedagogical practices. Some
suggestions for these inclusive pedagogical practices to decrease students’
discomfort will be discussed in the conclusion of this chapter.

4.4.1. A priori safe space in the practice of Students and Teachers
Part of my motivation for organizing my course in the way I described
above was to better reflect the attention higher education had begun to place on
the historical disenfranchisement of Canada’s Indigenous populations.
Institutions of higher education had begun the development and incorporation of
equity, diversity, and inclusion principles into their core educational mandates at
about the same time as the formation of The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2008, its subsequent public testimony (20082015), and then its final reports (TRC, 2015a; 2015b; 2015c; 2015d; 2015e;
2015f; 2015g; 2015h; 2015i; 2016a; 2016b).
During this period, consideration of the experiences of populations
historically underrepresented and marginalized in society based on race, gender,
and sexuality took on more importance within institutions of higher education in
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North America, as they strove to be more inclusive of the experiences and
identities of an increasingly diverse society (Williams, Berger, & McClendon,
2005; Ahmed, 2007; Henry, James, Li, Kobayashi, Smith, Ramos, & Enakshi,
2017; Hunt, 2018). Within the Canadian context, this movement incorporated the
necessity for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples
through a greater understanding of the historical and ongoing experience of the
Indigenous population.
Reconciliation would not necessarily be easy for everyone involved,
especially for those that considered the existing education system as politically
and ideologically neutral, and representative of all diverse positionalities in
society. As bell hooks wrote about her own experiences with colleagues, the
initial excitement by many teachers to acknowledge diversity in their practices
was quickly muted by the recognition that “the education most of us had received
and were given was not and is never politically neutral” (1994, p. 30).
In fact, scholars of critical pedagogy have argued for some time that
education had traditionally been a form of oppression by a dominant positionality
over all others (Apple, 2004; Freire, 1970/2000; Giroux, 1993; Illich, 1971;
McLaren, 2016). Even the use of everyday language can be seen in this light. In
her discussion about language, free speech, and the link between language and
domination, hooks reminisces about a poem she read from Adrienne Rich with
the words “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you” (1994, p.
168).
All language is an act of power, privilege, and domination, no matter the
speaker, context, or content; and as hooks notes:
it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors
do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and
defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate,
colonize (1994, p. 168).
This is a recognition not lost on me as I type these ideas in the words of a
language that I did not understand until I began school at the age of six.
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However, a recognition of the dominant positionality espoused through
education would require teachers and students to confront their own privilege as
members of that positionality, and potentially experience discomfort for the
benefits they have reaped from it. This is an incredibly uncomfortable experience
for most that have never truly considered their own indebtedness to dominant,
and in this case, oppressive positionalities (McIntosh, 1989). hooks described
how many teachers:
found that as they tried to respect ‘cultural diversity’ they had to
confront the limitations of their training and knowledge, as well as a
possible loss of ‘authority’. Indeed, exposing certain truths and
biases in the classroom often created chaos and confusion. The idea
that the classroom should always be a ‘safe’, harmonious place was
challenged. It was hard for individuals to fully grasp the idea that
recognition of difference might also require of us a willingness to see
the classroom change, to allow for shifts in relations between
students. A lot of people panicked. What they saw happening was
not the comforting ‘melting pot’ idea of cultural diversity, the rainbow
coalition where we would all be grouped together in our difference,
everyone wearing the same have-a-nice-day smile. This was the
stuff of colonizing fantasy, a perversion of the progressive vision of
cultural diversity” (1994, pp. 30-31).
The necessary shifts in relationships between teacher and students, and
the teacher’s recognition that the safe space they had fostered up to that point
allowed for only their singular positionality, was too much for some of the
teachers hooks taught. Students who retreated to the critique of cultural diversity
in the classroom as a form of overbearing political correctness claimed that an
attack on intellectual freedom and safe space was underway. This was an a priori
understanding of safe space that could not acknowledge the fantasy of a singular
positionality not being representative of the whole, because that would
undermine its self-fulfilling tautology.
Peter McLaren offers an insightful critique of this fantasy:
Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble
of benign cultural spheres is a conservative and liberal model of
multiculturalism that, in my mind, deserves to be jettisoned because,

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when we try to make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and
agreement where social relations exist within cultural forms of
uninterrupted accord, we subscribe to a form of social amnesia in
which we forget that all knowledge is forged in histories that are
played out in the field of social antagonism (Steinberg, 2006, p. 151).
The necessary unsettling of the a priori understanding of safe space, as
representative of only the teacher’s positional safety, is therefore at the center of
the educational discourse of the previous example. Perhaps the most profound
unsettling of the male, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, white, colonial-settler
narrative history of Canadian (cf. Razack, 2002) safe space has been taking
place since the work of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
(TRC). With the publication of its final report and indexes, and the adoption by
provincial education ministries, college and university administrations, and K-12
school boards across the country of the TRC’s calls to action, new priorities,
policies, and a reconsideration of the positionalities represented in curricula have
accelerated.
This educational discourse can be marked by several conflicts between
the intentions of the teacher and those of students, as they first struggle with the
limitations of an a priori understanding of safe space, and then their differing
expectations for the Leibnizian-influenced educational relationships in the class.
One such conflict which can occur due to this a priori understanding is the
lack of consideration for the positionality of students by the teacher. Many
teachers do not recognize that their claim of safe space is only a guarantee and
maintenance of their own specific positionality being considered safe:
In much of my writing about pedagogy, particularly in classroom
settings with great diversity, I have talked about the need to examine
critically the way we as teachers conceptualize what the space for
learning should be like. Many professors have conveyed to me their
feeling that the classroom should be a “safe” place; that usually
translates to mean that the professor lectures to a group of quiet
students who respond only when they are called on (hooks, 1994,
p. 39).

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Moreover, some teachers may react with hostility when students expect that their
own positionalities, their experiences of fear, risk, and uncertainty, are legitimate
and relevant to class discussions:
Within professorial circles, individuals often complain bitterly that
students want classes to be ‘encounter groups’. While it is utterly
unreasonable for students to expect classrooms to be therapy
sessions, it is appropriate for them to hope that the knowledge
received in these settings will enrich and enhance them (1994, p.
19).
The very nature of the a priori understanding of safe space therefore
results in any positionality other than the teacher’s being considered illegitimate
and irrelevant. Additionally, the expectations by those in these diverse
classrooms (both teachers and students) that multiple positionalities can be
acknowledged simultaneously is an impossibility within this definition of safe
space. Students:
rightfully expect that my colleagues and I will not offer them
information without addressing the connection between what they
are learning and their overall life experiences (1994, p 19).
These students expect teachers to explore in class the relationality between what
they are learning and their life experiences, and this is an impossibility due to the
a priori understanding of safe space.
A second conflict that can emerge on the part of teachers and students, is
a misunderstanding that a specific positionality must be present inside the
classroom for it to warrant attention. This misunderstanding often arises from a
conflation of silence with absence, resulting in the belief that there are some
topics, ideas, or positionalities outside the boundary of the classroom which are
illegitimate or irrelevant to the current shared learning by the group.
This type of oppositional insider-versus-outsider-thinking constructs an
unfortunate binary that can lead to arguments about the essentialism of ideas.
The ideas representative of the positionality of the teacher are considered
essential perhaps for no better reason than they may be on the test, while all
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other ideas are disregarded. The previous example, in which some students
questioned the relevance of learning about the history of the residential school
system, can be understood to be asking how knowledge of this history would
contribute to their pedagogical practices as in-service teachers. At the time, I
most likely offered an insufficient or incomplete response to this question that
would have allowed the students to make connections between what they were
learning, their overall life experiences, and their expectations for future classroom
practice.
Finally, within this discourse of educational essentialism that emerges
from the a priori understanding of safe space, is the misunderstanding that what
is currently considered essential learning may be replaced by what was
previously absent. This understanding of safe space does not account for
change, movement, or revision of ideas due to these ideas being either present
or absent. The result is the mistaken belief that existing ideas will be replaced,
silenced, or made absent, resulting in the false dichotomy between essentialism
and diversity.
Students, especially some pre-service teachers, want the essential
knowledge, the nuts-and-bolts practices to begin their teaching careers, and can
mistakenly see discussions of diversity and the positionality of ideas as taking
time away from honing these practices. hooks pointed out that desires for
increased diversity of knowledge in the curriculum have often been muted by
these critiques of essentialism, that there are certain subjects and knowledge
that are necessary first, before other ideas can be entertained. Part of the
challenge created by increasingly diverse student bodies, which are more
representative of the experiences of marginalized students, is that they create an
unsafe space for white students and teachers. This is sometimes done by raising
questions about what is deemed essential, or by asking for more consideration of
historic and traditional politics of exclusion:
a critique of essentialism that challenges only marginalized groups
to interrogate their use of identity politics or an essentialist standpoint

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as a means of exerting coercive power leaves unquestioned the
critical practice of other groups who employ the same strategies in
different ways and whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly
buttressed by institutionalized structures of domination that do not
critique or check it (hooks, 1994, pp. 82-83).
Finally, the mistaken conflation of silence with absence can lead to conflict
between the expectations of students and the teacher for Leibnizian-influenced
educational relationships. The teacher’s decision to discuss positionalities and
ideas previously absent from the curriculum does not mean they are being
introduced from outside the experience of the students. Often, these
positionalities and ideas have been present all along, but have been silenced due
to some students feeling unsafe to share them. Therefore, there are no insider
nor outsider positionalities, but rather those that speak because they share the
positional safety of the teacher and others in the class, and those that stay silent
because they do not share this safety.
hooks notes that we do not have to question the experience of the silent
from an insider-versus-outsider perspective. Rather, silent students do not have
to bring oppositional ideas to the class because they were always present,
despite the lack of notice from other students (1994, pp. 83-84). Mentioning
these ideas out loud, through a teacher’s curricular choices or by a student’s
contribution to discussion, makes the diverse experiences and ideas of these
students more visible by temporarily waylaying insiders with the uncomfortable
recognition that they never noticed this absence from what they considered
complete understanding.

4.4.2. Considering positionality for Students versus Teachers
When we consider the positionality of the teachers and students in the
previous example, we can better see the a priori understanding of safe space
influencing the thinking of both, and how the Leibnizian relationships at the heart
of classroom practice can result in radically different expectations.

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The teacher can be slow to recognize that the safe space of the class they
maintain is primarily in service to their own positionality as the bearer of specific
knowledge. The pervasive effects of a static Newtonian view of safe space can
result in the teacher adopting an insider-outsider dichotomy, in which they take
those experiences and ideas which represent their singular positionality to be
intrinsic to defining and valuing the space of their class. This is a sentiment that
can more readily be shared by those students who recognize themselves as part
of this singular positionality, whether through prior experience or future
pedagogical purpose. However, should the teacher adopt a Leibnizian relational
understanding of the safe space for the class, they will recognize a need to
explain their philosophy, strategy, and intent to connect ideas to students’
experience and practice. Such explanation not only helps foster a shared
relational understanding of safe space, but also provides a necessary recourse to
the Newtonian view, because students often subscribe to the a priori
understanding of safe space that is guaranteed, maintained, and provided to
them wholly by others.

4.5. Leibnizian relational safe space and inclusive
pedagogy
The adoption of this Leibnizian relational understanding of safe space and
the inclusive pedagogical practices that can then be enacted in the classroom will
be discussed in the final chapter of this work. What is important to note is that
these practices, while initially modelled by a teacher, require students to take an
active responsibility for their ongoing use in the creation and maintenance of a
safe space for the entire class.

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Chapter 5.
How can a richer understanding of safe space inform
our practice in educational spaces to ensure equity,
diversity, and inclusion?
The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the understanding of safe
space developed throughout this work, and then weigh its implications for both
educational discourse and practice. In Chapter 4, I considered three examples
from my own practice as a teacher that were illustrative of current discourses
about safe space. Through the analysis of these examples, it became clear that
positionality, and its negotiation of pedagogical relationships, was central to any
meaningful attempt to realize safe space in the educational practices of an
institution, a teacher, or students. In this final chapter I will begin the work of
considering how this Leibnizian relational safe space in education can be
expanded to considerations of a modern and diverse society.

5.1. Safe space, EDI, and our educational spaces
The discussion in the last chapter included several problematic
implications arising from the common a priori understanding of safe space. In this
final chapter, I am especially concerned with addressing the institutional (and
primarily administrative) a priori understanding of safe space in higher education,
often framed as a guarantee of students’ safety in every sense. Influenced by a
desire to protect their reputation and brands from negative market forces,
institutions of higher education wield their commitment to safe space as a
response to increasingly consumerist and individualistic demands by students for
an educational experience that is supposedly devoid of the potential emotional
risk, uncertainty, and discomfort necessary for learning.
This administrative understanding can lead to the institution, and some
students, being at cross purposes with a teacher who draws on a Leibnizian-

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influenced conception of safe space to co-constitute relatively safe learning
relationships which are open to the experience of discomfort. The institution’s
administrative attempt to guarantee safety for all members of its learning
community, without any requirement of these members to transform themselves
through uncomfortable learning, curtails pedagogical practices required for
transformational learning to take place. Therefore, at the level of the institution,
clarification is required to develop a richer understanding of safe space and to
ensure its alignment with priorities such as equity, diversity, and inclusion in the
classroom.
One avenue toward this end is to consider the responsibility of institutions
of higher education to the modern liberal democratic societies of which they are a
part; and therefore, what exactly is at stake should they fail to fulfill this
responsibility. In his critiques of the intersection between consumerism and
education, Canadian philosopher of education Trevor Norris writes:
Since their founding, perhaps the most important task of schools was
to help make political citizens and create a sense of shared civic
identity. New research into the impact of consumerism reveals that
one consequence of consumerism is that people begin to think of
themselves as consumers first and foremost, more so than they think
of themselves as having a civic identity or being members of a
political community. Consumerism provokes intense identification
and preoccupation with brands and their symbolic meaning (2020,
p. 879).
I would argue that the institution’s administrative a priori understanding of
safe space, expressed through written declarations and guarantees, responds
more to consumerist and economically driven motivations (i.e., public relations,
corporate branding, marketing, and the maintenance of its ongoing financial
stability) than it does to the non-commercial interests of an increasingly diverse
society. The public interests of twenty-first century societies, increasingly marked
by a vast array of identities and by shifting visions of democracy and
sustainability, are less defined by a narrow economic rationality. Instead, a
different kind of civic identity is called for, in which consumerism itself is

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redefined based on shared civic and ecological values that reflect this increasing
diversity.
Norris notes that since the 1960s and early 1970s, the motivations of
students entering higher education have gradually shifted away from “broadbased and publicly oriented aims towards individualistic and economic aims”
(2020, p. 881). One example of this shift at Simon Fraser University could be the
relative lack of communal gatherings or protests in Convocation Mall since their
heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s. Concomitant to this “profound shift away
from values of community and public mindedness towards competition,
materialism and disconnection” (2020, p. 881) have been dramatic increases in
economic inequality (Stiglitz, 2012), individualistic consumerism (Barber, 1984;
Norris, 2011), political partisanship (Mansbridge & Latura, 2016), and intellectual
tribalism (Kruger & Dunning, 1999; Dixon, 2016; Mohajer, 2015), that have all
contributed to the increased strains on societal cohesion.
The reduced investment in higher education by provincial governments
during this period has also served as a none-too-subtle message that higher
education is not a public good, but rather a private good that students should pay
for themselves. This individualistic and economic understanding of higher
education, mixing with official laws and policies mandating multiculturalism,
equity, and diversity, has interacted with the a priori understanding of safe space,
resulting in an invitation to students to bring your culture, beliefs, and biases, but
to feel free to stay exactly who you were at the outset of your educational
experience. Therefore, the contestation of this consumerist mindset within the
institutions requires, among other measures, the rethinking of safe space
discourses to foster transformational learning in service of an educated citizenry
capable of continuously co-constituting an inclusive, shared civic identity.
In this sense, the a priori Newtonian safe space supports the institutional
and ideological goal of producing graduates capable of economic success, which
may then trickle down through society, while quietly abandoning any more

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ambitious goal of contributing to the public good. This understanding of safe
space also produces graduates who are not likely to be educated citizens “aware
of the history of [their] country – or aware of the different cultures within it”
(Norris, 2020, p. 880) so they can engage with the difficult questions of
reconciling, renegotiating, revising, and practicing a renewed shared civic identity
that encompasses the true diversity in society. This is what is truly at stake when
institutions of higher education uncritically adopt the Newtonian interpretation of
safe space as a guarantee of comfort.
Therefore, at the level of the institution, it is necessary for the a priori safe
space to be replaced with an alternative discourse grounded in the relational and
co-constituted safe space influenced by Leibnizian inheritances. Could this
Leibnizian safe space be wielded and propagated through the institutional
mechanisms of public relations, corporate branding, marketing, and the
maintenance of ongoing financial stability, by promising students the educational
opportunity to learn from the diverse positionalities in a modern society? The
result could then be a shared experience of teaching and learning full of
intellectual risk, discomfort, and transformational change – exactly what is
required of an educated citizenry with a shared civic identity.
Much of our present educational discourse pertaining to equity, diversity,
and inclusion in higher education can be understood to reflect the Leibnizian
“safe space of my class” mapped earlier in this work (Table 4.1-1). That mapping
developed safe space as a shared location with a temporary (possibly fuzzy)
boundary that allows for the possibility for modification in understanding through
learning. This learning is marked by the guarantee of a stable membership in a
teaching and learning relationship. Further, recognizing through language and
evaluating the influence of specific positionalities on the experience of fear, risk,
and discomfort in the educational relationship become central to this learning.
As discussed in the Chapter 4, bell hooks’ (1994) inclusive pedagogy is
exemplary of elements in this earlier mapping, and the understanding of safe

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space that it revealed. Therefore, for the discourses of equity, diversity, and
inclusion to be wielded by institutions of higher education as educational
opportunities to learn from the diverse positionalities in a society, and to better
serve the needs of that society into the future, special attention must be paid to
the potential relationship between language and positionality.
In the introduction to his 2012 book The Harm of Hate Speech, Jeremy
Waldron succinctly describes what is at stake in modern liberal democratic
societies when the necessary care is not paid to the relationship between
language and positionality as societies strive to become more inclusive. While
Waldron is specifically responding to those that argue for an absolutist
understanding of free speech in society, the similarity to this work’s discussion of
the a priori Newtonian-influenced “safe space of my class” is clear. Waldron
describes the absolutist position in which those who believe they can and should
say whatever they wish, no matter the pain, fear, risk or uncertainty it may cause
to others, and:
…those who are targeted should just learn to live with it…they should
learn to live their lives, conduct their business, and raise their
children in the atmosphere that this sort of speech gives rise to
(2012, pp. 3-4).
For Waldron, there are two specific threats this approach to speech can
produce. First, he describes inclusiveness as a shared public good that is
created by the formation of any society, and as a necessity to ensure the ongoing
sustainability of that society. Hate speech, or speech that may cause pain, fear,
risk, or uncertainty then:
…undermines this public good, or it makes the task of sustaining it
much more difficult that it would otherwise be. It does this not only by
intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living
nightmares of what this society was like – or what other societies
have been like – in the past. In doing so, it creates something like an
environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison,
accumulating here and there, word by word, so that eventually it
becomes harder and less natural for even the good-hearted

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members of society to play their part in maintaining this public good
(2012, p. 4).
The second threat is to the traditionally vulnerable minorities and
positionalities meant to benefit most from inclusiveness, when their equal
membership and good standing within the society, or what Waldron calls their
dignity, is undermined and called into question by hate speech. This happens
because inclusiveness is meant to benefit all members of a society, but for those
minorities who in the recent past have been hated or despised by
others within the society [inclusiveness offers a dual meaning as] a
confirmation of their membership: they, too, are members of society
in good standing; they have what it takes to interact on a
straightforward basis with others around here, in public, on the
streets, in the shops, in business, and to be treated – along with
everyone else – as proper objects of society’s protection and concern
(2012, p. 5).
Therefore, as the institution draws on societal discourses of equity,
diversity, and inclusion to inform its understanding of a Leibnizian relational safe
space, special attention needs to be paid by institutions, teachers, and students
to the relationship between speech (more broadly, language) and positionality
during teaching and learning. Safe space in this sense is a space meant to help
develop an educated citizenry capable of navigating uncomfortable discussions
about meaningful inclusion in a diverse society. Given this educational purpose,
discourses that advocate for a practice of cancellation, prohibition, censure, or
erasure of problematic language or positionalities (rather than the necessary
recognition, analysis and evaluation required to disrupt their intended or
unintended reproduction) can be seen as counterproductive. As an educated
citizen, the student will (eventually) need to engage with differing positionalities
and views to co-constitute a civic identity that recognizes diversity and works
toward equitable inclusion for all members of society.

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5.2. Safe space as pedagogy and practice
Institutions and teachers can together draw on societal discourses of
equity, diversity, and inclusion to inform pedagogical practices within Leibnizian
safe space. From the Leibnizian-influenced understanding of “the safe space of
my class” mapped earlier in this work (Table 4.1-1), both the institution and
educators can consider as a minimum threshold condition the guarantee not of
total safety in every sense, but of every student’s right to membership in the
class without fear or risk of this status being jeopardized during the learning
relationships formed with others (Callan, 2016; Waldron, 2012).
Such a guarantee allows the institution to retain legal safeguards meant to
protect the physical security and safety of all members of the learning
community, as well as policies protecting against the use of hate speech
amongst members that may be permissible in society at large. These protections
are often situated in codes of teacher ethics and responsibilities (Schroeder,
2017; Marcoccia, 2018; Flaherty, 2020), as well as student conduct, integrity, and
discipline policies (Chamlee-Wright, 2018; Cox, 1995; Ma, 1995).
Simultaneously, language, ideas, or positionalities deemed to be problematic can
be considered by the teacher and students from the perspective of the
pedagogical value their evaluation may provide to the shared educational
intention of the class. Ideas that may be uncomfortable for some (including the
teacher) can still be recognized as having pedagogical potential.
hooks (1994) describes classroom practices she has crafted to afford
students greater understanding of how differing positionalities can influence the
experiences of fear, risk, uncertainty, and discomfort incurred through
communication during learning. These practices foster the ability of students to
reflect on the experience and understanding of others, and potentially reposition
or revise their own experience and understanding during future learning.
Together, hooks’ inclusive classroom pedagogy and its practices should be
understood not only for their contribution to a student’s future learning, but also

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for their ability to expand students’ capabilities to positively contribute as
educated citizens to a society’s evolving civic identity.
Not only teachers, but also those responsible for professional and
curriculum development should consider hooks’ inclusive pedagogy as a starting
point in developing supports for diverse student bodies. Below I will discuss
specific classroom practices described by hooks, which serve as exemplars of
and guideposts toward an inclusive safe space, while avoiding misleading
Newtonian absolutes.

5.2.1. Explaining one’s philosophy, strategy, and intent
hooks worked in her own practice to move beyond her own need for
immediate affirmation from students. She did not judge her success as a teacher
by whether students had definitively achieved or concluded some outcome.
Instead, she focused on students’ ongoing experience, something which would
be meaningful years later after leaving the classroom. She learned to make this
explicit through explaining not only the philosophy or theory behind her teaching
to her students, but also the strategy she was undertaking to fulfill this intent. She
writes:
In the transformed classroom there is often a much greater need to
explain philosophy, strategy, intent than in the ‘norm’ setting. I have
found through the years that many of my students who bitch
endlessly while they are taking my classes contact me at a later date
to talk about how much that experience meant to them, how much
they learned. In my professorial role I had to surrender my need for
immediate affirmation of successful teaching (even through some
reward is immediate) and accept that students may not appreciate
the value of a certain standpoint or process straightaway. The
exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is
respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback
because students do feel free to talk-and talk back. And, yes, often
this feedback is critical. Moving away from the need for immediate
affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher (1994, p. 42).
This description of hooks’ classroom practice is illustrative of a relational
Leibnizian understanding of personal and social (or civic) space. While
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pedagogical work is being done within the safe space of the class, it serves as
preparation for ongoing learning in the spaces students move through in their
subsequent lives.
In her classroom practice, hooks seeks to contextualize the philosophical
and theoretical knowledge at hand, thus cultivating the shared educational
intention of herself and all her students (“Shared Location”, Table 4.1-1). This
shared educational intention is what temporarily binds all the students into a
single class, but also contributes to the educated citizens that the institution and
teacher are helping the students to become (“Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundary that distinguishes the experience of the location from all other
locations”, Table 4.1-1). This learning and change are spread along a gradient,
as throughout the class the students should become better able to understand
how each current discussion topic contributes to their learning, and how it can
continue to contribute to their potential futures (“Possibility for movement” &
“Integrity of the physical body”, Table 4.1-1).
The opportunity for students to recognize the connection between the
teacher’s philosophy and the strategy she is utilizing to fulfill a specific
educational intention can allow them to evaluate her positionality in the
connection she is striving to develop (“Positionality of the physical body to fear,
risk, and uncertainty”, Table 4.1-1). The positionality of the teacher can then be
compared to the student’s own, as well as to that of other students, allowing
them to make the attempt to reflect on these comparisons and potentially
reposition or revise their own understanding (“Recognition and evaluation of
relative positionalities”, Table 4.1-1).

5.2.2. Sharing a confessional narrative to demonstrate the
positionality of learning
For hooks, learning is inherently associated with intellectual or emotional
pain, fear, risk, or discomfort. She found it fruitful as a narrative guide to share
her own fear and discomfort with her students, as well as to recognize their fear

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and discomfort. This sharing was an invitation for students to connect their
experience to the greater phenomenon of gaining knowledge and understanding.
She writes:
Students taught me…that it is necessary to practice compassion in
these new learning settings. I have not forgotten the day a student
came to class and told me: ‘We take your class. We learn to look at
the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and
class. And we can’t enjoy life anymore’. Looking out over the class,
across race, sexual preference, and ethnicity, I saw students
nodding their heads. And I saw for the first time that there can be,
and usually is, some degree to pain involved in giving up old ways of
thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. I respect that
pain. And I include recognition of it now when I teach, that is to say,
I teach about shifting paradigms and talk about the discomfort it can
cause. White students learning to think more critically about
questions of race and racism may go home for the holidays and
suddenly see their parents in a different light. They may recognize
nonprogressive thinking, racism, and so on, and it may hurt them that
new ways of knowing may create estrangement where there was
none. Often when students return from breaks, I ask them to share
with us how ideas that they have learned or worked on in the
classroom impacted on their experience outside. This gives them
both the opportunity to know that difficult experiences may be
common and practice at integrating theory and practice: ways of
knowing with habits of being. We practice interrogating habits of
being as well as ideas. Through this process we build community
(1994, pp. 42-43).
hooks utilized this recognition of the shared experience during learning to
establish a threshold condition for membership in class: the necessity for
students to read to one another. At least once each semester, no matter the size
of the class, hooks required everyone (including herself) to write an
autobiographical example about the subject being discussed, and how they may
have experienced some type of intellectual or emotional pain or uncertainty,
while trying to better understand the subject. Each member of the class was then
required to read their example to at least one other member of the class. She
writes:
It helps create a communal awareness of the diversity of our
experiences and provides a limited sense of the experiences that

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may inform how we think and what we say. Since this exercise
makes the classroom a space where experience is valued, not
negated or deemed meaningless, students seem less inclined to
make the telling of experience that site where they compete for voice,
if indeed such a competition is taking place. In our classroom,
students do not usually feel the need to compete because the
concept of a privileged voice of authority is deconstructed by our
critical practice (1994, p. 84).
hooks established the threshold condition for membership in her class as
the shared intention of writing an autobiographical example, and then reading
(and listening) to one another (“Shared Location” & “Temporary, possibly fuzzy
boundary”, Table 4.1-1). The autobiographical writing then focused on the
subject being discussed and how a student may have possibly experienced
some type of intellectual or emotional pain, or uncertainty, while trying to
understand the subject (“Possibility for movement”, Table 4.1-1). hooks
established and reinforced every student’s membership in the class through the
shared practice of physically reading their example to at least one other member
of the class (“Integrity of the physical body”, Table 4.1-1).
This sharing could be understood as each student reinforcing their right to
membership in the class, and concurrently each listening student recognizing the
right of others to the same membership. The reading then demonstrated how
varied positionalities could influence learning, even for those not as fluent or
capable with English (i.e., non-native speakers of English could read in their first
language, speech-impaired students could use other methods to communicate),
by utilizing the narrative contributions of students reading to each other
(“Positionality of the physical body to fear, risk, and uncertainty”, Table 4.1-1).
For the students listening to the autobiographical reader, they recognized
varied positionalities in the presentation of these narratives, allowing those
witnessing students to better understand how positionality could influence
learning in sometimes drastically different ways (“Positionality of the physical
body to fear, risk, and uncertainty”, Table 4.1-1).

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This practice allowed marginalized students, whose positionalities and
knowledge are often silenced in typical classrooms, an opportunity for inclusion
and recognition by at least one other student listening to their experience. The
positionality of the reader and their experience could then be compared to the
listening student’s own, as well as to that of other students who might feel more
comfortable and willing to share with the class after this practice. This experience
allowed students to then reflect on these comparisons, and potentially reposition
or revise their own understanding (“Recognition and evaluation of relative
positionalities”, Table 4.1-1).

5.2.3. Recognizing that the acknowledgment of positionality is not
dependent upon presence in the classroom
According to hooks, the teacher’s actions in class can be deemed to be
tokenism if it appears that the only reason a particular positionality is being
discussed is because it is present in the classroom. This might suggest, for
instance, that certain students’ experience has provided them with access to
expert knowledge about that positionality. As hooks notes, experience does not
alone make one an expert, nor should the experience of positionality be accepted
as uniquely privileged knowledge in a classroom (1994, pp. 43-44). Instead,
within a relational, Leibnizian setting knowledge is generated through dialogue
among and across positionalities.
Only with an unbiased, inclusive perspective in which the members of a
given social group do not need to be present for their perspective to be
acknowledged can a Leibnizian safe space for ideas truly exist. Issues related to
gender, sexuality, race, etc., should not be included merely on the grounds that
they are representative of students within the class. Instead, these ideas should
be included because they represent real and important positionalities of people in
society, whose experiences have traditionally been silenced or absent, and
therefore not acknowledged as a vital part of the society’s shared civic identity.

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While teaching the senior level curriculum theory and practice course that
I offered as an example of my own practice in the previous chapter, my decision
to dedicate considerable time and course work to the history of Canadian
education and the residential school system was not due to there being an
Indigenous student in the class, nor any specific expectations within the
institution to cover this material. In fact, the reality of the cultural genocide
perpetrated by the residential school system on the Indigenous people of
Canada, and the benefits of wealth and privilege afforded to non-Indigenous
Canadians from this crime, were largely ignored in the practices of many
teachers until quite recently. I reasoned that the only way that any teacher
(myself included) could learn how to present others with such a difficult and
unsettling history was by taking it up, along with their own fear and discomfort,
within a relational, Leibnizian safe space affording dialogue among and across
differing positionalities.
hooks established the pedagogical intention by the teacher for careful
consideration of who the students in a class and society at-large may be before
the first meeting of the semester (“Shared Location”, Table 4.1-1). Moreover,
hooks committed to distinguish any experience from a specific positionality, with
that about a specific positionality, to ensure that no student could claim their
firsthand experience as a direct route to expert understanding. She did this in
part to ensure that all students recognized the difference between the value of
experience and the value of expertise, and that experience does not always
denote expertise. In so doing, hooks establishes the necessity for all students to
move beyond their own experience (or lack thereof), and toward an
understanding more representative of the positionality at a social or cultural level
(“Temporary, possibly fuzzy boundary”, Table 4.1-1).
The possibility for change and growth through this learning is then twofold.
For those students with access to firsthand experience of the specific
positionality through their own lived experience, their reflection on the value of
experience versus the value of expertise can necessitate a change from

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understanding their experience as representative of the positionality, to instead
understanding their experience as only a part of that positionality. Students
without this embodied experience can at least begin to consider positionalities
that may have been absent from their thinking (“Possibility for movement”, Table
4.1-1). With no single individual being objectified as a singular source of
knowledge, those with access to the specific positionality through their own lived
experience do not have to feel their ongoing membership as being contingent
upon their willingness to share. At the same time, students lacking firsthand
experience of the positionality can engage with others free from the sense that
they have no place in the class (“Integrity of the physical body”, Table 4.1-1).
The voice of experience masquerading as equivalent to expertise is
tempered through this practice; namely, students with experience silencing those
without. All students are afforded the opportunity to consider how specific
positionalities contribute to an understanding of the shared educational goal of
the class. Through dialogue among, across and about differing positionalities,
students can better understand how fear, risk and uncertainty can contribute to
understanding about the topic in the classroom, and then at the societal level
(“Positionality of the physical body to fear, risk, and uncertainty”, Table 4.1-1). If
during the attempt to revise their understanding through dialogue among and
across positionalities they can recognize some of these positionalities in their
fellow students, they will have learned how to see more inclusively as an
educated citizen that can contribute to a more diverse understanding of civic
identity in society (“Recognition and evaluation of relative positionalities”, Table
4.1-1).

5.3. Why this matters for educational practice and future
scholarship
With contemporary dialogue about safe space politicized between
conservatives and progressives, this work has focused greater attention on a
contentious educational concept. For many years, teachers have referred to their

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classrooms metaphorically as safe spaces for student learning. However, all
metaphors simultaneously reveal and conceal, and I became concerned by what
the metaphor of safe space concealed. This concealment, while initially an asset
offering imaginative possibilities of meaning, can also be pernicious in debates
about the nature and purpose of education in modern society. In these
educational discourses about safe space and education, specifically as education
strives to contribute to a greater recognition of issues related to equity, diversity,
and inclusion in society, the lack of clarity around all that the metaphor of safe
space conceals has served to influence radically different interpretations of
meaningful educational practices.
With the recognition in Chapter 1 that safe space is a potentially
problematic metaphor in discussions of education, I began to clarify how this
metaphor functions. In Chapter 2, I explored several theories of how metaphors
function through comparison, substitution, or interaction to derive new meaning
and understanding of lesser-known ideas or experiences. Chapter 2 and its indepth analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s interactive theory of metaphor suggested the
reasons why safe space is such a contentious educational concept. Safe space
is a conceptual metaphor that conceals contradictory philosophies regarding the
concept of space, and thereby is incapable of accounting for how Newtonian
(and Kantian) cosmology is enmeshed in Western modernity.
Chapter 3 mapped the multiple concealed and competing meanings of
safe space represented at the level of the distinct words “space” and “safety”, at
the level of the combined statement “the safe space of my class”, and at the level
of educational discourse infused with modern societal considerations of equity,
diversity, and inclusion. The resulting mapping offers a comprehensive
understanding meant to lend clarity to discussions of safe space in education.
However, during the consideration of this mapping within the context of
educational discourses in Chapter 4, it became clear that positionality was
central to any meaningful attempt to operationalize safe space into practice by an
institution, a teacher, or by students.

187

It has become clear throughout this work that there are two starkly
differing and competing understandings of safe space in education. The first
understanding of safe space is a Newtonian a priori safe space, which is
assumed to operate in an absolute fashion to guarantee safety with no concern
for the pedagogical necessity of risk and uncertainty that are associated with
learning. This a priori understanding is assumed to operate independent of the
educational relationships it purports to enable or safeguard. The second
understanding of safe space is a Leibnizian, relational safe space, which is
structured by educational relationships among those who co-constitute
knowledge and understanding through their practices. Only this Leibnizian
understanding of safe space serves an education pursuing greater equity,
diversity, and inclusion within society at large.
In the final chapter of this work, I began the process of considering how
this Leibnizian, relational safe space in education could be extended to connect
with broader societal considerations served by higher education. Recognizing the
importance of education to provide an educated citizenry responsible for the
long-term sustainability of a society, I drew on Waldron’s (2012) understanding of
how safe space can be operationalized at the national or societal level. In his
writing, Waldron offers insight on what this operationalization of safe space could
look like:
We are diverse in our ethnicity, our race, our appearance, and our
religions. And we are embarked on a grand experiment of living and
working together despite these sorts of differences. Each group must
accept that the society is not just for them; but it is for them too, along
with all of the others. And each person, each member of each group,
should be able to go about his or her business, with the assurance
that there will be no need to face hostility, violence, discrimination, or
exclusion by others. When this assurance is conveyed effectively, it
is hardly noticeable; it is something on which everyone can rely, like
the cleanness of the air they breathe or the quality of the water they
drink from a fountain. This sense of security in the space we all
inhabit is a public good, and in a good society it is something that we
all contribute to and help sustain in an instinctive and almost
unnoticeable way (Waldron, 2012, p. 4).

188

The actual practices of safe space that contribute to this public good of
inclusiveness are currently undertheorized in educational discourse. Four
pressing questions regarding this connection between the safe space of
education and the public good of inclusiveness in society therefore require further
attention:
1. How does the conceptual metaphor of safe space map to
modern society? How can this metaphor be operationalized in
the recognition of diversity and the practices of inclusiveness
required for the continuous renewal of shared civic identity
amidst difference?
2. How can the competing Newtonian a priori and the Leibnizian
relational understandings of safe space in education be related
to sociological theories about the nature of modern society and
citizenship? Might the competing Newtonian and Leibnizian
understandings be consistent with the theory of solid and liquid
modernity (Bauman, 2000)?
3. What are the practices of learning required to see society as not
just for oneself, but for others as well? How do these practices
help to constitute safe space? What are the primary hindrances
to the creation and maintenance of such spaces?
4. How can institutions of higher education utilize a Leibnizian
relational safe space to steer the public away from the belief in a
narrow, individualistic and consumerist economic good derived
from education? How can this different kind of public economic
good, marked by the embrace of the shared civic values of
equity, diversity, inclusion, and ecological sustainability be
fostered in the practices of education and society at large?
The politicized dialogue about safe space in education amongst
conservatives and progressives has led many to talk past or outright dismiss the
other side. The concerns raised by conservatives about what safe space could
mean, as well as the laudable intentions by progressives regarding what the

189

practice of safe space could contribute, are both worthy of further engagement
on the part of educational theorists and practitioners. The consequences are
potentially dire if we continue to dismiss safe space as a benign concept or figure
of speech. If education is unable to confer on future citizenry the public good of
inclusiveness so they can co-develop cohesive civic values and identities,
currently smoldering social issues related to equity, diversity, and inclusion have
the potential to uncontrollably ignite and further imperil the long-term
sustainability of our society.

190

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