Bodies and affect in non-traditional learning spaces

Abstract

This paper considers the ‘knowledge economy’ as it is used in education rhetoric to establish social and educational consent for significant changes both to the spatial organisation of classrooms and their affective economies. We draw on ethnographic data from a study of ‘non-traditional classroom spaces’, where the spatial organisation of schooling emerged as a potential fulcrum through which the imaginary of the conventional primary classroom was being reconceptualised. Traditionally configured classroom spaces and the learning that takes place within them were being challenged and replaced by notions of twenty-first century learning in ‘agile’ learning environments. In the context of this reform agenda, these open-plan spaces were seen as offering new prospects for participation in a globally connected and competitive economic world that requires students to continuously adapt, innovate and respond creatively to a range of different problems. We consider how these everyday moments function as conceptual encounters between affective, embodied experiences and educational reform discourses that rationalise the implementation of non-traditional classroom spaces in ways that have very little to do with children and their futures. This cultural approach takes a step aside from numerous, and necessary, critiques of recent educational policies per se, in order to consider what might be learned from the uncanny spectres of child bodies that haunt them. The paper draws attention to examples of children’s affect in non-traditional classrooms and what that may tell us about current educational reform when sacrifice forms part of the missing account of educational reorganisation for the knowledge economy.     

Re/assembling ‘innovative’ learning environments: Affective practice and its politics

Abstract

In this article, we argue that the interest being taken by governments in establishing innovative learning environments (ILEs) in schools relies on a conception of space as a largely neutral arena. In consequence, relations of space and power inherent in the infrastructural shift to ILEs tend to drop from view. Adopting an assemblage approach to investigating learning environments, and exploring ILEs as they are playing out in Australian schools, we strive to surface what drops from view. Taking ILEs to be sociomaterial assemblages, we work with empirical material and trace how they assemble and reassemble. The account is less concerned with what works in ILEs; rather, its focus is on their ‘workings’ as assemblages of relations and most particularly, affective relations. Thus, we explore two affective encounters involving school leaders, teachers and students showing the ways in which they position and are positioned within ILEs. The argument is made that the assemblage approach which is non-deterministic and relational affords new ways of understanding what ILEs are and how they work and who they work for. And, that attending to affective practice brings into view the micropolitics through which infrastructural shifts and infrastructural policy-making are made.     

Is the classroom obsolete in the twenty-first century?

Abstract

Lefebvre’s triadic conception of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces provides the theoretical framework of this article, which recognises a productive relationship between space and social relations. Its writing stems from a current and ongoing qualitative study of innovative teaching and learning practices in new technology-rich flexible learning spaces, characterised by large open spaces, permeable boundaries and diverse furnishings emphasising student comfort, health and flexibility. Schooling in the twenty-first century, certainly in the developed world, is required to ensure that children and school-leavers have appropriate life-long skills in preparation for participation in the twenty-first century knowledge economy. This world is characterised as complex and dynamic, deeply influenced by globalisation and the revolution in digital technology. Developing these skills calls into question ‘outmoded’ transmission models of teaching and requires teachers and school leaders to approach their work in radically new ways. Open school design encourages flexibility in learning and teaching, and allows collaborative, team teaching, with designers claiming significant educational benefits. This arrangement of multiple classes using innovatively designed, technology-enriched common space, facilitated by multiple teachers, working in collaborative teams, is far-reaching in its likely implications for community expectations and responses, relationship-building, assessment, student learning, teachers’ work and initial teacher education.     

Students’ imaginings of spaces of learning in Outdoor and Environmental Education

In this article, I interrogate students’ stories about the spaces and places in a tertiary Outdoor and Environmental Education course that support and shape their environmental ethics. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study, I explore the ways in which particular sites of learning (outdoor, practical learning) are privileged and how particular stories of outdoor spaces get reproduced. I employ the work of poststructuralist geography scholar Doreen Massey in my analysis to highlight the intersections between space, relations of power and identity. This analysis also underscores the simultaneity of multiple and conflicting stories around Outdoor Education’s outdoor (practical) and indoor (theoretical) learning spaces. I conclude by drawing on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s work on anomalous places of learning to explore some of the spaces in-between the indoor/outdoor binary as a way of interrupting and re-imagining places and spaces of learning in Outdoor Education.     

Understanding families’ conceptions of school readiness in the United States: a qualitative metasynthesis

ABSTRACT

The call by policymakers, education stakeholders, and families for children to enter school ‘ready’ has led to numerous empirical studies that seek to identify how children and their families are or are not prepared for school. In the United States, this empirical work tends to identify particular children and their families ‘at-risk’ for school success and often seeks out ways to intervene so that such risks are addressed. Absent from this work is an understanding of how families conceptualise school readiness, and how those understandings influence their conceptions of whether or not their own children are ready for school. Such work could assist educators and other school personnel in supporting families and their children as they enter their programmes. This article examines this issue by presenting findings from a qualitative metasynthesis of studies that investigated how families conceptualised school readiness. Analysing, synthesising, and interpreting their conceptions of school readiness offers the chance to consider how early childhood stakeholders can be ready for families as they enter their programmes as well as support their efforts in readying their children for school.     

A critical examination of informal learning spaces

ABSTRACT

Globally, the future of the higher education sector is under increasing scrutiny, and questions are being asked about the relevance of universities as traditional sites of teaching and learning. In an effort to adapt to the complexities that beset the higher education environment, universities are exploring the utility and benefits offered through informal learning spaces. However, the emergence of informal learning spaces raises important questions regarding student behaviours and ‘learning’, including the dichotomous positioning of the categories ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. This article highlights a tendency in the literature to treat informal learning spaces in a romanticised and overdetermined way. It challenges some of the popular imaginaries of these spaces as free, open and democratising in terms of students’ use, technological affordances, and a largely unchallenged emphasis on forms of community and collaboration as if they are unproblematic. Indeed, a persistently undefined ‘social’ quality attributed to informal learning settings, coupled with a focus on design and technology elements, elides the possibility of negative social practices such as exclusion and marginalisation. Moreover, empirical treatments of these spaces are dominated by quantitative methods that rely on deterministic cause and effect models, including normative understandings of academic success, as a measure of effectiveness. If universities are to proceed in better understanding these learning sites and the meanings and practices students bring to them, new perspectives incorporating more critical, interpretive qualitative approaches that give primacy to understanding the ways in which these spaces might reproduce marginalising or exclusionary social practices are required.     

Space: the final frontier in the learning of science?

In Space, relations, and the learning of science, Wolff-Michael Roth and Pei-Ling Hsu use ethnomethodology to explore high school interns learning shopwork and shoptalk in a research lab that is located in a world class facility for water quality analysis. Using interaction analysis they identify how spaces, like a research laboratory, can be structured as smart spaces to create a workflow (learning flow) so that shoptalk and shopwork can projectively organize the actions of interns even in new and unfamiliar settings. Using these findings they explore implications for the design of curriculum and learning spaces more broadly. The Forum papers of Erica Blatt and Cassie Quigley complement this analysis. Blatt expands the discussion on space as an active component of learning with an examination of teaching settings, beyond laboratory spaces, as active participants of education. Quigley examines smart spaces as authentic learning spaces while acknowledging how internship experiences all empirical elements of authentic learning including open-ended inquiry and empowerment. In this paper I synthesize these ideas and propose that a narrative structure might better support workflow, student agency and democratic decision making.     

Netflixing human capital development: personalized learning technology and the corporatization of K-12 education

Abstract

Advanced by powerful venture philanthropies, educational technology companies, and the US Department of Education, a growing movement to apply ‘big data’ through ‘learning analytics’ to create ‘personalized learning’ is currently underway in K-12 education in the United States. While scholars have offered various critiques of the corporate school reform agenda, the role of personalized learning technology in the corporatization of public education has not been extensively examined. Through a content analysis of US Department of Education reports, personalized learning advocacy white papers, and published research monographs, this paper details how big data and adaptive learning systems are functioning to redefine educational policy, teaching, and learning in ways that transfer educational decisions from public school classrooms and teachers to private corporate spaces and authorities. The analysis shows that all three types of documents position education within a reductive set of economic rationalities that emphasize human capital development, the expansion of data-driven instruction and decision-making, and a narrow conception of learning as the acquisition of discrete skills and behavior modification detached from broader social contexts and culturally relevant forms of knowledge and inquiry. The paper concludes by drawing out the contradictions inherent to personalized learning technology and corporatization of schooling. It argues that these contradictions necessitate a broad rethinking of the value and purpose of new educational technology.     

Representation and safe space: conflicting discourses in RE teacher education supervision

ABSTRACT

This article explores supervision conferences in RE teacher education in Sweden. Two discourses that are often articulated in supervision conferences are ‘representation’ and ‘safe space’. These are investigated and presented as necessary components for becoming a competent teacher of upper secondary school RE in Sweden. The empirical material consists of observations of six RE supervision trialogues and interviews with the participants – student teachers, upper secondary school supervisors and university-based teacher educators. Based on the analysis of the empirical material, representation and safe space emerge as essential ‘RE teacher knowledge’. Furthermore, the antagonism between representation and safe space that emerges in the supervision trialogues is explored and highlighted. By way of conclusion, the presented discursive struggle is reflected on as a battle over power within the supervision triad.     

Between work and learning: on pedagogic practice and interstitial space

In this paper I develop a response to a continuing problem in work–learning research, the connections between education, learning and work. These connections are commonly conceived in terms of the concept of transfer, integration or boundary crossing. Thinking these connections in this way, I claim, serves to consolidate a unitary, stable and fixed idea of the relationship between learning in educational institutions and work and inadvertently reduce its complexity. Drawing on empirical data collected over the course of qualitatively exploring the links between a problem-based program of teacher education (‘learning’) and the practice of participants in this program upon initial employment in schools (‘work’), and deploying actor network theory, I trace new sorts of associations between work and learning and propose a relational conception of their connection. Challenging the common counter-positioning of work and learning, empirical analysis reveals their mutual constitution and partial connection in practices, here, of a predominantly pedagogic and spatial/material kind. Practices that occupy interstitial spaces have a particular resonance with regard to challenging this counter-positioning and unsettling the hierarchies of value which often arise from it.     

Family learning and the socio-spatial practice of ‘supportive’ power

Family learning has been an important mode of education deployed by governments in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years, and is positioned at the nexus of various social policy areas whose focus stretch beyond education. Drawing on qualitative research exploring mothers’ participation in seven different family learning programmes across West London, this paper looks at how this type of education is mobilised; that is, how mothers are ‘encouraged’ to participate and benefit from this type of programme. Framed by a neo-liberal policy climate and Foucauldian writings on governmentality and surveillance, we explore how participating mothers are carefully ‘targeted’ for this type of learning through their children and through school/ nursery spaces, and how programmes themselves then operate as a supportive social space aimed at facilitating social networks, friendship and personal development linked to positions of gender, ethnicity, class and migrant status. It is the socio-spatial workings of ‘supportive’ power and power relations that enable family learning to be mobilised that ensures its popularity as a social policy initiative.     

Digital technologies and parental involvement in education: the experiences of mothers of primary school-aged children

Abstract

This paper makes a contribution to the developing field of the political economy of educational technology and to an understanding of the significance of digital technologies for home-school relations. The digitalisation of social life is increasing and the impact of digitalisation on home-school relations, parents, and children is under-researched. This article draws on a new qualitative study where fifteen mothers were interviewed about parenting a primary school aged child in England with a focus on digital technologies, home-school relations, and parenting. I argue that processes of digitalisation are contributing to a bureaucratisation of home-school relations. Drawing on Weber’s social theory, I argue that managing communications and information is taking precedence over other aspects of parental involvement in education. In this process, digital technologies are contributing to increasing demands for involvement in education that are placed on parents, reinforcing the wider norms of the intensification and professionalisation of parenting.     

Trajectories of smooth: the multidimensionality of spatial relations and autism spectrum

This paper examines how two men with autism spectrum (AS) experience educational spaces having attended public school in Nova Scotia, Canada. Smooth and striated space is mobilised as the main conceptual framework to account for the men’s affectivities when experiencing the educational terrain. The central aim when applying smooth and striated space is thinking through variation with attentiveness to the men’s situated movements. A discourse focusing on the men’s affective relations to school spaces counters over-coded special education frameworks that have largely centred on students with AS functionality in remedial educational settings. The concern when only knowing students with AS through normative functionality discourses is that it produces a homogenous line of thinking with limited attendance to their everyday situated worlds. Here, by attuning to the men’s spatial experiences we can begin to think in more open ways rather than AS subjects preconfigured to given positions.     

Children’s friendships in diverse primary schools: teachers and the processes of policy enactment

Abstract

Drawing on data from a project exploring children's and adults’ friendships across social class and ethnic difference, this paper focuses on the enactment of national and institutional policy around children’s friendships as realized in three primary schools in diverse urban areas in London. Through a focus on the way in which social and emotional learning (SEL) and teachers’ understandings of children’s friendships seek to govern children’s friendship behaviours, we turn to Foucault’s work to explore how power shapes relations between policy frameworks and teachers’ practices, and between those who teach and those who are taught. We discuss the disciplinary potential of SEL and teachers’ ‘common sense’ understandings of children’s friendships, but conclude by noting possibilities for teachers to create spaces in which all children can safely explore the nature of friendships.     

The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden

ABSTRACT

This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.     

The ghostly workings of Danish accountability policies

Abstract

This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of introducing an assessment culture and improving the management of the Danish public school. I explore how all the routines and habits deemed outdated and sought annihilated by a new policy paradigm continue to haunt head teachers as seething presence of lurking resistance towards the policy aims as well as insidious doubts. Thinking about the ghostly contributes to studies of education policy by locating the reality of power in the mundane everyday doings and experiences of educational practitioners and insisting on the very tangled way people sense and intuit the complexities of contemporary forms of power.     

Home,school and the museum: shifting gender performances and engagement with science

Abstract

Research has highlighted that engagement with science is highly gendered and that the masculinised culture of science makes it difficult for many girls/women to engage. Meanwhile, a growing body of research has explored the potential of out-of-school spaces to provide more equitable engagement opportunities. In this paper, I examine engagement with science among working-class, self-identified ‘girly’ girls aged 11-13. I discuss how gender performances and engagement with science shifted across science lessons, school trips and family trips to science museums. The findings suggest that engagement with science is complex, contradictory and varies across spaces – girls’ performances of hyper-femininity supported engagement with science in some spaces, but made it difficult in others. Different spaces also afforded the girls different opportunities for performing gender, which in some instances opened up new ways for engaging with science. I conclude by discussing the implications for more equitable science education.     

Dancing with children in the field: on the relevance of embodied knowledge and its methodological consequences

ABSTRACT

In contexts where dancing proves a relevant daily practice, dancing with children may provide an extremely interesting strategic option for education ethnographers. Drawing from my empirical material, I describe how dancing was accidentally introduced as a role in the field (dance teacher) before later becoming an unexpectedly great ethnographic tool. Through a series of different breakdowns, I found this constituted the key to gaining better access to complicated domestic fields and thereby also attaining a closer cultural intimacy with participants, getting more easily integrated into educational contexts, overcoming communication problems and issues with reluctant informants. From this methodological insight, I here reflect on the theoretical aspects involved: should we overlook practices deemed irrelevant from the school agent point of view but essential to domestic contexts, we risk reinforcing symbolic violence through research. Therefore, I conclude by stressing the importance of focusing on apparently ‘irrelevant’ forms of domestic embodied knowledge transmission.     

Imperfect/I’m perfect: bodies/embodiment in post-secondary and elementary settings

ABSTRACT

Using researched perspectives of bodies and embodiment, alongside dramatic structures, where bodies are foregrounded, this article looks closely at bodies and embodiment inside of school settings. Specifically, it investigates a community in Southern Ontario and the perceived, affective, relational, and critical ways that study participants story their identities about their bodies. Findings suggest that body image itself (i.e. how youth perceive their bodies) and embodiment (i.e. how youth use their bodies for communication and learning) are vital but sometimes invisible topics in today’s school settings, where bodies are continually interpreted, admired, shamed, moved, rejected, and positioned. Though drama and other subjects like the arts focus on embodied ways of knowing and offer unique opportunities for learning, they can also hold unique challenges in school settings.     

Selfies,relfies and phallic tagging: posthuman part-icipations in teen digital sexuality assemblages

Abstract

Inspired by posthuman feminist theory, this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the bio-technological landscape of image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest that we are seeing new formations of sexual objectification when the more-than-human is foregrounded and the blurry ontological divide between human (flesh) and machine (digital) are enlivened through queer and feminist Materialist analyses. Drawing upon multimodal qualitative data generated with teen boys and girls living in urban inner London and semi-rural Wales (UK) we map how the digital affordances of Facebook ‘tagging’ can operate as a form of coercive ‘phallic touch’ in ways that shore up and transgress normative territories of dis/embodied gender, sexuality and age. We conclude by arguing that we need creative approaches that can open up spaces for a posthuman accounting of the material intra-actions through which phallic power relations part-icipate in predictable and unpredictable ways.