Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives ISSN 2049-2162 Volume 3 (2014), Issue 2 · pp. 22-44 Franklin Vernon, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, US fvernon2@wisc.edu 22 The Paradox of Structured Autonomy: A Critical Ethnography of Challenge-by-Choice and Safe Spaces in Adventure-based Experiential Education Franklin Vernon University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Abstract Whereas conceptual deconstructions and critiques of safe space pedagogies as subtly oppressive are readily available, little empirical research has systematically explored the manners in which students and educators come up against such curricula. This study focuses on a popular American setting for alternative and progressive learning: an adventure and environmental education center that uses safe space pedagogies in manners historically claimed to maximize student experiences. The author posits that unintended breakdowns in democratic learning appear borne of hierarchically privileging structural norms of individualism in safe space pedagogies. The argument highlights ways in which students and educators are actively—if tacitly—renegotiating alternative educational environments beyond the claims of safe space pedagogy. Keywords experiential learning, safe space pedagogy, critical pragmatism, critical ethnography Introduction …an individual, whatever else it is or is not, is not just the spatially isolated thing our imagination inclines to take it to be…the human being whom we fasten upon as individual par excellence is moved and regulated by his[her] associations with others; what he[she] does and what the consequences of his[her] behavior are, what his[her] experience consists of, cannot even be described, much less accounted for, in isolation. (Dewey, 1927, pp. 187-188, emphasis in original)