I love books. I love books and independent bookstores and used bookstores. I love reading and learning. I love being challenged by what I’m learning, or feeling my horizons expand. I love getting so deep into the notes and references and traveling wherever they take me, to other books and other authors. I love when books I’ve read are sources for other books, when writers I respect mention other writers I respect.

It was that love that drew me to BooksActually last weekend, one of Singapore’s independent bookstores. BooksActually is particularly special because it also operates its own publishing house, making it the go-to destination for books that are truly Singaporean and might not have a significance audience elsewhere. This is where I found I Will Survive, an anthology of stories from Singapore’s LGBTQ community. While much in the book touched me, it was a line in the foreword that first got me thinking. Juliana Toh writes, “I was left thinking of Henri Nouwen’s book Reaching Out, in which relationships are viewed as contexts for the creation of hospitable experiences.” This particular way of defining relationships was new to me and I found the idea of “hospitable” really compelling. Maybe it was because we’d just started school and my students were on my mind, or maybe it was because I was reading about LGBTQ young people, but I immediately extrapolated from Toh’s statement and began to wonder what our schools would look like if we moved from creating “safe spaces” for young people to creating “hospitable spaces” instead.

Defining
The word “hospitable” has two definitions:

1. friendly and welcoming to visitors or guests
2. (of an environment) pleasant and favorable for living in

It seems reasonable that a hospitable space would inherently be a safe one because anywhere that is “pleasant and favorable for living in” implies safety. I think this idea fits really well in the context of school settings. After all, school is where young people spend most of their time and we know that we all do better when we feel comfortable.

Take a moment to consider what we want for the young people in our care. We want them to learn, to grow, to explore. We want them to feel good, at ease, and valued as individuals. We want them to connect to each other, to create, and to become their best selves. We want them to see and care for those around them and we want them to make the world a better, more peaceful place.

Doing this work requires that our students feel more than safe, which is currently what we tout as a goal for our schools and classrooms. A learning environment in which the above aims can be realized would be closer to “pleasant and favorable” than safe.

Rethinking
In my eight years teaching, my classroom has always been a place where students wander in and out during breaks and before school and where they stop by after school to chat about a variety of things. Like the rest of us, students spend time in places that they enjoy, places that are welcoming and pleasant and where they feel affirmed, or perhaps part of a community.

So what would schools look like if we explicitly focused on creating hospitable spaces rather than safe spaces? The biggest difference, I think, would be in the ways we approach students as individuals. The goal of safe spaces is to provide a protective, inclusive environment that embraces diversity on a range of levels. I wonder, though, what would happen if we started emphasizing the need for welcoming, pleasant spaces instead of merely safe ones. A space can be safe without being welcoming, pleasant, and favorable, but places that are favorable to us, places we want to be, will more than likely also be safe.

Imagining
As a reader, I’m a believer in the power of language. George Orwell’s 1984 does a better job illustrating this than I could, so I refer you there. Now, let’s pretend “hospitable space” was a common phrase used to talk about schools, an idea accepted and embraced by the school community.

Creating hospitable spaces would require all involved to treat one another, at the minimum, as individuals with dignity. It would require authentic communication and connection, which would foster an environment in which adults and young people work together towards common goals and in which each learns from and guides the other. A hospitable space would be positive, energizing, and a place where we all enjoy spending time. It would be flexible, open-ended, exploratory, creative. It would be a space where we grow as individuals and as a community, a space where we’d recognize first our common humanity and then the diversity that makes us each who we are.

Imagine the learning that would happen in this hospitable space.

Moving Forward
Of course, not all of us work in school and with students. But we all develop relationships with others, whether friends or colleagues or romantic partners. We all want to feel loved, affirmed, and valued. We want to grow and help others grow, to become better tomorrow than we are today.

All relationships take on colors, flavors, and textures. All relationships are built inside a metaphoric space. So let that space be hospitable. Let yourself be open to others. All of our lives are better when we can take a breath and know that someone else is doing the same.