Browsing by Subject "turvallisemmat tilat"

Objectives. The importance of safety in the learning environment has been recognised in both legislation and research literature. Research literature has identified safety as a factor in academic success as well as well-being. Legal texts leave safety open to interpretation, but the normative text suggests that safety also covers issues of equality, such as accessibility. Safety is therefore a fluid concept, which often remains undefined in research. The study examined the meanings given to safety in research literature, other social discourses and the produced data related to higher education and educational sciences. In Finnish research literature, safety has rarely been associated with issues concerning marginalised groups. In particular, the study describes and interprets responses in the data in relation to discourses of safety related to inequalities, such as safer spaces, content warnings and the ethos of resilience and vulnerability. Methods. The data were generated by means of a four-item open-ended text questionnaire. Respondents were asked to define what safety in the study or work environment means to them and what experiences of safety and insecurity they have had on the university’s spaces. The questionnaire was answered by 48 members of the Faculty of Education at the University of Helsinki. The majority of them were students and the rest were staff members, doctoral researchers or recent graduates. The material was approached by means of dialogical discourse analysis. Results and conclusions. Safety is an ambiguous concept for which there is no clear definition. In both international literature and the data, safety was associated with issues such as insecurity, external threats, violence against women, bullying, microaggressions, discrimina tion, racism and the climate and discussion culture in the faculty. In Finnish research litera ture, security was not associated with issues related to marginalised groups or accessibility. Attachment to security as a conceptual tool may contribute to a better discussion culture but does not necessarily contribute to dismantling of broader structures of oppression.