Teachers' Perceptions of the Lived Experience of Safe Schools: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Approach

Abstract

Beginning in 1996, a rash of rampage school shootings occurred in the United States. "Rampage school shootings occur when students or former students attack their own school" (Langman, 2009, p. 2). Numerous studies have been conducted to determine the psychological and sociological aspects and to provide insight into the question of how and why something this horrific could occur in our American schools (Twenge & Campbell, 2009; Irvine, 2010; Langman, 2009, Newman, Fox, Harding, & Roth, 2004, Epstein, 2007, Levine, 2005; Hine, 1999). The voice conspicuously missing in these studies is the voice of the teachers (NESRI, Fall 2008). Yet teachers have been the victims in many cases as they faithfully fulfilled their job and protected the lives of their students.

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenology study is to ascertain the meaning teachers make of what constitutes a safe school according to the interpretivist point of view. The interpretive paradigm was viewed as the most suitable for this research because of its potential to generate new understandings of complex multidimensional human phenomena. The data from ten teacher interviews is presented according to Max van Manen's (1990) four existential life-worlds: temporality (lived time), corporeality (lived body), relationality (lived other) and spatiality (lived space). Emerging threads of shame, vulnerability, isolation, empathy/relationship, hope/ involvement, and reintegration/forgiveness are examined through the etic theoretical and practical overlay of restorative practices.