Abstract:
This study is an effort to give voice to an experience. The experience in
question is the decision of a student to trust a practitioner. The study also
describes the features which led the student to believe that the practitioner
would provide a "safe place" for interaction around matters of a delicate or
personal nature. This study is the gift oftwo coauthors, each with a unique
story which offers description of critical incidents, and what made these events
meaningful. At the heart of the study is the potential for education and its
professionals to provide safe places for students.
Analysis of the data determines that a safe place involves two parties, one
seeking a safe place and another who provides the safe place-in this study, the
student and the practitioner. The student, with urgency, seeks a safe place to
disclose personal information. In this urgency the student is confronted with
features of control, comfort, respect, felt sense, and nonjudgemental listening.
These features are the constitutive elements of a Safe Place. Capacity to
recognize and construct safe places is a competency which the existing school
lifeworld demands of today's practitioners. Understanding what are deemed to
be safe places and how practitioners might work to create them are the extended
outcomes of this study.
