The Safe Zone(I)

As teachers reflect on the students’ experience of “staying in their safe space” and the energy required to break down walls and communicate, an image of a cage often comes to mind as a metaphor for the so-called “safe space”.

The term “safe” is used, yet that is not the kind of safety where true learning happens. We confuse this reaction of absence or disengagement with safety. Trauma-informed education research and scientists help us understand this state as a numbing response in circumstances and contexts that seem unreachable – the “safety deterministic mechanism” says “numb” now (Thomas Hubl).

Safety is a beautiful, flexible and necessary value for development, but it can also be a limiting belief or a fixed mindset (if this, then safe/not safe).

Safety as the Practice of Open Mind, Open Heart and Open Will

What closes the Mind, and traps us in the cage, is judging a situation based on past experiences and labeling it, limiting it to what “past events have taught us”. No learning or fresh new ideas and connections happen then. This is only learning from the past, or as we refer to later in this article, being stuck in the past, and we continue in a loop.

What Opens the Mind is Curiosity.

How can we practice the Mind of the Expert without letting it get in the way of the Beginners’ mind?

As the student experiencing special circumstances, teachers can reflect with an Open Mind on the possibility of inviting them to share their passions and who they are in a simple way. In Finland, there is a prototype called CV positive, a kind of cartography of a student’s personal development during their school years, which could be transferred to high school.

What closes the heart is cynicism, what opens the heart is compassion.

A teacher in the coaching circle points out that breaking the loop requires a lot of energy. True, as it requires significant energy, we need a larger support system (Dr. Bruce Perry), not just one person, as that person is at high risk of being depleted, and as bell hooks reminds us, “depleted people deplete other people.”

A participant in the coaching circles reflects that she takes away this practice of safe and trust with oneself, then with a small circle of peers, and then a larger circle of a class, etc. When it comes to special and support education, Dr. Bruce Perry said the team working with the young person experiencing special circumstances is an extensive team, and he is aware that this always puts pressure on education budgets. Based on his 30+ years of trauma-informed education, there is no other way.

What closes the will is fear, what Opens the Will and allows learning with attitudes is courage, and courage is not the absence of fear, but the choice to notice the very small actions you take in the company of fear.

Vygotsky’s “Learning Zone”

“When life presents you with a challenge, it is important to step into it, in order to not stay stagnant, not stay stuck, in order to grow and learn” (Pema Chödrön reflecting on Vygotsky’s Proximal Learning Zone).

Safety is not a given, nor a destination; it is a continuous movement, just like learning or change (Bateson) – it is the process (Lonka) of getting from a place we know (learned) to stepping into the unknown in order to relearn, reroute, which is so much needed for 21st-century education, as neuroscience supporting education suggests.

Vygotsky created a representation of the three learning zones: comfort (safe), learning zone, and risk zone. The Learning Zone is the New Safe. Pema Chödrön in her teachings makes it easy for us to understand this continuous tuning, this continuous dance between “comfort” (what in this article we call the “safe cage”) and the risk zone.

Researchers and scientists express this as going to the margins, and we go to the margins in the company of others. In these coaching circle practices with teachers from different countries, M.A. shares her insight from her own experience to serve our work today: “I was a quiet student; it is a beautiful thing to understand the silence, yet to learn, I needed to talk to others.”

The Safe Zone is what we call the “safe cage,” and the more we unpack it, the smaller the cage becomes.

“May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.” (John O’Donohue)

Safety as Agreements

Class agreements can be reached around what Opens Our Mind, what Closes it, What Opens our Heart, what Closes it, and what Opens our Will, what Closes it. These are nurturing class agreements that allow teachers and students to prepare the field on which learning can grow. Once we establish these agreements, like any nurturing elements – if you think of gardening – we check to see how we are doing, are we providing what is needed.

As part of their autonomous learning, students can measure every couple of weeks how they are doing on those agreements (are we doing what we said we would be doing, and if not, what stays in our way – most of the time, our own Closed Mind, Heart and Will, so with a light heart, we acknowledge that). Experiences of individuals and the collective will be different; we want to allow tuning. What could be a very safe thing for someone would yield risk for another. This practice supports self and co-regulation for individuals and the class, and provides a support system for teachers.

Teaching with Attitudes

This invites in the class a porous safety that individuals and the collective develop through different processes, yet supporting one another (Viktor Frankl). Safety here becomes the invitation of the teacher to facilitate where one needs support in building the image of the one learning, as:

– Belonging to oneself (we would refer to as individual learning objectives)

-Belonging to a small group of peers (interpersonal development and collective learning objectives)

-Belonging to a community (learning with attitudes or what we refer to as what we learn in the class, where students and teachers matter to and for the world outside)

-Belonging to a global distributed learning network or image of the one as a global citizen, as they notice the more they know about themselves and the place they come from, the more they open their Mind to the rest of the world and very different systems of beliefs (Freire)

Safety as Pedagogy of Hope

In the “safe cage,” in the unpresencing (or learn out and burnout), it may feel as if the learning relationship is “broken” or unreachable. Yet, as Donna Haraway ( University of California) writes in her book “Staying with Trouble,” the research evidence shows that relations are never actually broken, we need to slow down and presence them.

Cultivating empathetic imagination, which is what allows us to understand the feelings and motivations of people different from ourselves, is vital to becoming a global citizen (Freire) and “noticing” the world (Melanie Goodchild). As we come together in diversity, “two systems of thought do not collide; rather, real people negotiate their way through life, grasping, combining and opposing different elements” (Giordano Nanni). I see this negotiation, this continuous movement, as “safety,” as one of the teacher members of the coaching circle says, “What if the students in some sort of need have the opportunity to help the teacher in some sort of need?”

We can imagine and see in small actions this continuous, porous movement as safety, instead of a very clear, strictly defined area we call safety that soon becomes the cage or the comfort zone (Vygotsky), that is just how “we grow” (Gregory Bateson).

This article is based on the work of teachers from France, India, Portugal and Finland in the Global Coahing Circles organised as part of Oddience2030 Erasmus financed project. I thank each partner and each teacher for their incredible important work brought as case clinics during local and global coaching circles (based on the methodology of U-Lab MIT). Special thanks to Marie-Alice and then Nathalie, resilient teachers and project managers.