Security is one of the biggest challenges American public schools face today. Many schools work tirelessly to meet the challenging demand to cultivate spaces that are not only positive learning environments but are also zones of safety for all school community members. As schools differ in their security concerns, they also differ in their conceptions of safety and how their community can best prepare for future security threats. This project, which provides funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, will investigate the role that lived experience plays in shaping the future of school safety initiatives in American public schools. Cultivating a more dynamic understanding of school safety concerns, this project will provide greater understanding of the ways in which security concerns impact the day-to-day work of school communities in a localized context.
This doctoral dissertation research project examines how past experiences shape cultural understandings of security in public schools. Through the use of interviews, focus groups, observations, and archival research this comparative project will explore how security concerns are reflected in the implementation of school safety initiatives as they operate in two public high schools located in the state of Florida. This project will utilize a mixed methods approach (behavioral observation, interviews, archival analysis, and focus groups), to ethnographically investigate how school communities formulate local notions of preparedness in the development of school safety initiatives. Data with be thematically coded and analyzed to ascertain how perspectives on school safety initiatives, safety discourse, and safety simulation exercises are developed and implemented in varying cultural contexts. By investigating practices of school safety as they have historically also become related to past experiences and lived realities, this project moves studies of security beyond the study of state or national school safety policy, to a more local context where school safety concerns are lived and experienced. This project will make significant contributions to theories of security, and anthropological debates around preparedness in the school context.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
