What Happens in Lessons? Risks and Incidents at Schools

• Published in: Well-Being in the Information Society. Fighting Inequalities pp. 79 - 87
• Main Author: Lindfors, Eila
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2018
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Incident analysis; Learning environment; School safety
• ISBN: 3319979302; 9783319979304
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97931-1_7

According to a safety paradigm that calls for human factors behind the incidents and emphasizes resilience it can be understood that near-miss cases and accidents are in relation to several physical, social, psychological and pedagogical factors. To be able to develop safety culture at schools there is need to record, monitor and analyze incidents, near-misses, accidents and injuries in learning environments. However there are no systematic procedures in regular use that would allow schools as organizations to learn from incidents and implement alterations in practice to develop their safety culture. It is more a question what schools know about their safety and how they understand their safety culture to develop it proactively. In the paper analysis for 168 incidents from three comprehensive schools in Finland, was executed. On the basis of theory driven analysis the incidents were categorized to physical, social, psychological and pedagogical dimensions. Incidents in pedagogical learning environments are introduced more detailed in this paper. This paper gives prior knowledge of incidents in pedagogical learning environments: what happens, where and to whom. Based on results there is an obvious need to develop methods of reporting incidents in schools as well as the motivation to report, to be able to develop the safety culture. In the future students’ role in recognizing incidents should be emphazised.