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This chapter provides foundations of differentiating the sophisticated and various theoretical approaches towards safe spaces demonstrated in this book. For the purpose of framing the examples provided in this collection, we offer three broad ways of thinking about safe spaces: safe learning spaces as separate, counterhegemonic, or third spaces; safe learning spaces of difference, sameness, and intersecting identities; and deliberative and democratic learning spaces. It needs to be noted, however, that these are not mutually exclusive but different aspects to consider and that they each operate within and across, and are therefore influenced by, the five levels of inequity discussed in Chapter 2. That said, not all levels of inequity are necessarily addressed by any given space, regardless of the frame used to interpret it. This discussion respects the multiple paradoxes in education, especially the one of pluralism and sameness, offering approaches to modes and learning settings of inclusion and exclusion and how they create different, yet “safe,” spaces.

The early childhood education classroom space is intrinsic to developing localized youth culture. Through a four-month-long qualitative research project in a space that focused on meeting the most rudimentary child needs due to staffing and fund restrictions, young children’s creativity through the arts was stunted. In a classroom setting focused on structure and strict routine at the forefront, children’s creative expression was observed through independent action and creative twists on order, instead of through activities deliberately designed to nurture creativity and expression. Since the children at the site did not seem to regularly participate in any kind of art making, or unstructured creative expression, my focus instead became the fundamentals of creativity and how young children in the classroom demonstrated choice making and agency. The objective of this study was how to understand the space from a child-centered approach to better project how to include art making, creative education, and creative expression within early childhood education sites that do not currently employ it in their curriculum. This chapter aims to situate how young children created a culture of creative expression within the boundaries of a structured early education classroom when top-down teacher interaction was at a minimum, and open-ended, non-directive materials were provided.

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa a 22-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in Tehran by so-called morality police due to wearing her hijab improperly. After that, thousands of Iranians, led mainly by Gen Z women, poured into the streets protesting the Islamic Republic’s police actions. Named after the protesters’ main rally cry, the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement swept across Iran very soon and covered other aspects of Iranians’ frustration with the government. The rallies have been confronted with a violent crackdown by the regime, which denied all the accusations and blamed Western countries for sponsoring the protesters. In the lack of dialogic space, Iranians have created their own spaces of autonomy. Calling these spaces the third spaces of engagement, the authors shed light on the protesters’ disruptive daily activities on social media as well as physical spaces as leadership activities through the lens of leadership-as-practice theory. This chapter reframes the issue of hijab as an issue of authority which WLF as a youth-led movement is challenging. Observing protesters’ practices via video clips, news, photos, and social media posts, the authors give an analysis of the movement’s practices based on Harro’s cycle of liberation. The authors argue that while the movement made a huge breakthrough in building a public community around its main slogan, it is suffering from a lack of unity and inclusive collaborative dialogue. Finally, the authors offer suggestions for the movement’s future actions.

Social media and their changing nature present compelling public and private dilemmas for higher education. Instructional delivery faces obstacles to effectively reaching students who often prefer online communities and spend considerable recreational time using these social networking sites. CMS has limited appeal as an inviting space for students. An effective learning environment provides a communal place for student–professor interactions and an accessible and interactive space for collaboration and global knowledge distribution. This chapter focuses on some considerations educators should take into account as they manage courses through an increasingly socially mediated landscape.

With the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, higher education is becoming a more contested and complex space for both teachers and students at different localities and contexts. Such complexities create possibilities as well as challenges for educators who should address these diversities yet maintain the quality of teaching and learning. Both local scholars/educators and transnationally mobile academics/teachers face these challenges in different ways. This chapter focusses on the affordances of the latter: academics who have been engaged in diverse teaching/research contexts and developed certain perceptions of ‘Being’ in ‘intercultural’ spaces within and without boundaries and across time. In particular, the experiences of a female academic, from the Middle East, involved in teaching and researching English Literacy pedagogy transnationally, as a former academic at an Iranian university and then in a Western university, will be examined through autoethnography and in reflection upon her positioning, both as a student and a teacher in these local and global contexts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of insided-ness, outsided-ness, and in-between-ness, and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory (DST) will inform this chapter philosophically. Recent work in higher education on ‘complexity thinking’ and ‘relationality’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018) will ground this chapter too. These conceptual frameworks enable the author to scrutinise diverse perspectives on ‘Being’ and ideologies (ontologies), and diverse formation of knowledge (epistemologies) which result in diverse teaching and learning practices. The author links these diversities to the notion of ‘literacy’ in global times and shows, through her narratives, how her particular cultural, social, historical, and embodied literacies position her pedagogically as a non-Anglo academic in English education within a Western university. This affords her to construct her in-between position by not fully assimilating the target culture, nor fading her Middle Eastern identities. Instead, she brings affordances of her intercultural Being in creation of the ‘third space’ for her own teaching and learning practices. In turn, this has led to how her students across subjects are encouraged not to dissolve into the dominant frame of thinking; but to search for their own ‘Being’ through reviving individual, local stories and to express themselves globally, yet act as ‘glocally’ literate people who are able to make particular changes in their own life and in the lives of others.

This chapter concludes with challenging the implicit ideological position in global higher education which promotes a unified and homogenised epistemology (often Western/Anglo) within the multicultural, multilingual, and even plurilingual context of education. The author, echoing Yun and Standish (2018) specifically questions how internationalisation of education has led to a reductive dichotomisation of local students versus international students (through a deficit lens) rather than of establishing a rich platform for bringing to the fore heterogenous voices, diverse narratives, and plural/multiple knowledge platforms to argue, create, reflect, narrate, and collaborate more fruitfully. Instead she claims for expanding, extending, and extrapolating ways in which knowledge can be (de/re) constructed by people (both learners and teachers) as active agents of change, inter/trans-culturally.

The nature of immigration to the United States has varied tremendously over the course of the last 100 years. While the rate of immigrants in comparison to the total population was as high as 14% in the early 1900s, it steadily declined due to regulations passed at the beginning of the First World War reaching its lowest point in 1970 at less than 5% (Bernard, 1998). Yet, ever since the early 1970s, in response to the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments that replaced national-origin quotas with a single annual worldwide ceiling for all other immigrants while eliminating any numerical limitations for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, the number of immigrants has been continuously on the rise. In 1996, about 1 of every 10 residents in the United States was foreign born. This is exemplified by the fact that more than one fourth of the present foreign-born population of the United States arrived after 1990 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2004).

American sex education is continually under fire due to conflicting morals surrounding hegemonic sociocultural norms. These programs, and ultimately the students, are often victims of information inequities which leverage adult control over minors to prevent access to sexual health information. Withholding salient sexual health information infringes on intertwined tenets of human rights, such as education and information access. Spurred by recent disputes and barriers to updating unethical curricula in the states of Arizona and Texas, this chapter uses a human rights lens to explore the current information inequities in K-12 sexual education and students’ precarious positions in policy spaces. This framework demonstrates how libraries are uniquely protected spaces for intellectual freedom and the roles librarians can and should play as sexual health information providers in order to help students overcome information inequities. This chapter will provide recommendations for librarians and other educators to inform and organize advocacy as well as leverage current library operations to support adolescents’ sexual health literacy.