Abstract
It is a rare opportunity to be able to review the only dedicated monograph on Henri Lefebvre and his contribution to educational research for a special issue that specifically explores the impact of Lefebrve’s teachings on educational policy and theory. Sue Middleton’s book, Henri Lefebvre and Education: Space, History, Theory, is indeed a beautifully written and timely analysis of the impact of Lefebvre’s translated works on educational research. Based upon a close reading of all of Lefebvre’s works that have been translated into English, Middleton has distilled the key concepts from his sociological explorations of everyday life that she believes are productive for educational research. These concepts include space and time, rhythmanalysis, everyday life, production, alienation and social relations. Each of these ideas is carefully defined in Middleton’s first chapter, which provides the reader with a useful overview of Lefebvre’s history, geography and theoretical toolbox. Middleton regards these ideas as the threads constituting Lefebvre’s central trope of the ‘pedagogy of appropriation’.
By pedagogy of appropriation, Middleton suggests that Lefebvre regards education as ‘an opening out towards the possible’ and learning as ‘a mediation between dressage and education’ (179). By dressage, he is referring to the pedagogies of bureaucracy that have overlain education with drills, routines, constructed spaces and linear time. Appropriated space (or the lived) for Lefebvre is the opposite of dominated space (or the conceived). Lived spaces and times are ‘natural, spiritual, spontaneous and creative’, whereas conceived places and times are ‘transformed or mediated by technology’ (43). People modify or appropriate spaces in order to ‘serve the needs and possibilities of a group’ (43) and they do so by transforming nature rather than destroying it. In other words, to engage in pedagogy of appropriation is to involve students in making knowledge their own so that they may adapt it to serve their everyday life with all of its sensory rhythms of time and space. In this way, Middleton argues, Lefebvre is seeking to ‘fuse time with space, history with geography/sociology and the perceived with the conceived and lived’ (21).
In the conclusion, Middleton argues that this produces four pedagogical principles which include: the self-management of learning; the mutual engagement of teachers and students in a critique of everyday life; an exploration of the contradictions and moments of revelation and rebellion that make critique possible; and an engagement with the arts and in producing spatial histories. Importantly, Middleton outlines how Lefebvre’s theories can be put to work in the Southern Hemisphere in the introductory chapter, which also demonstrates how feminist and postcolonial theories can be connected with Lefebvre’s work, and then provides evocative and powerful illustrations of these Southern applications in chapters 2–6 that present a series of spatial histories of educational research projects that particularly feature Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Chapter 2 investigates the production of space in the new colony of Wellington by both Māori and settlers and the ‘pedagogical’ work of the New Zealand Company in shaping the bodies of English labouring families into ‘immigrants of the right type’ (37). Chapter 3 traces the ‘travels of the spiritual beliefs, political ideals and social-scientific theories’ of the New Education Fellowship and the transnational relationships that flourished between its members. Chapter 4 explores Lefebvre’s ideas about dwelling and habitation through the juxtaposition of the literary works of Aotearoa/New Zealand writer Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Virginia Woolf. Chapter 5 analyses the life histories of education doctoral students in order to trace how they managed time and space during their studies. Chapter 6 focuses on the alienation experienced by academics in the late twentieth century in an Aotearoa/New Zealand university as they grapple with the research assessment exercise that transforms their intellectual work into auditable outputs.
Each of these spatial histories, which draw upon archival and ethnographic data, can be read as a self-contained demonstration of the intriguing Lefebvrian methodology of rhythmanalysis. Rhythmanalysis seeks to trace the multi-sensory and multilevel rhythms of everyday spaces with their shifting densities and paces of cyclical and linear time. This kind of analysis is particularly useful not only to understand how the pulsing, sensory body interacts with and interrupts particular places, times and pedagogies, but also to trace the relationships and disjunctures between micro, meso and macro levels of social reality. This enables Middleton to link the micro analysis of everyday life with macro, transnational patterns.
Sue Middleton is an internationally renowned feminist scholar who has made a lifelong contribution to critical studies of education, especially focusing on history, gender, cultural geography and sociology. This book brings together her eclectic and challenging work and synthesises many of the significant contributions she has made to educational research and theory. It is also an illustration of her power as an ethnographic writer. The book is wonderfully written and full of evocative metaphors that delight the reader. For example, she describes Lefebvre’s description of a pedagogy of appropriation as ‘throw[ing] a conceptual lacework over educationalists’ core object of inquiry – the pedagogical’ (10).
I read this book with considerable excitement as someone who has not grappled before with the works of Henri Lefebvre but has been exploring for some time now the entwined themes of history, spatiality and epistemology in intercultural doctoral education. I also read this book as an Australian who has recently spent three years working in Wellington. I very quickly became deeply attached to the temporal and spatial rhythms of Wellington, where I wrote my recent book perched on the hillside of Mount Victoria. Middleton’s vivid accounts of colonial Wellington in chapter 2 took me on a vivid journey back across time and space.
This book is also very relevant for my new collaborative research that seeks to interrogate the role of history and time in the supervision of Australian Indigenous, migrant, refugee and international (non-Western) doctoral students. This research adopts a postcolonial/decolonial theoretical framework for capturing Indigenous and non-Western doctoral students’ and supervisors’ life histories. We analyse these life histories in order to: explore the creative possibilities and tensions evident in the intersections between personal and cultural histories; the histories of colonialism and decolonisation; histories of place (geography); and the histories of disciplinary knowledge production. We are also using Zerubavel’s (2003) idea of ‘time-maps’ to trace collective historical memories of both individuals and cultural groups and to depict the ebbs, flows, ruptures and varied intensity of historical narratives. Lefebvre’s methodology of rhythmanalysis will provide a generative addition to this approach.
There are, however, a few shortcomings of the book that should be mentioned. The most significant issue with the book is its over-reliance on direct quotes from Lefebvre, which are not always fully explained or clarified. It would have been very helpful to hear more directly from the author about how she would put these concepts into her own words. For example, when I went to write this review I was trying to find a pithy definition of Middleton’s interpretation of Lefebvre’s pedagogy of appropriation but instead found the concept grappled with in various sections and often through the use of more of Lefebvre’s own words. This may be partly because Lefebvre’s concepts are very rich, multilayered and interdisciplinary but it would have been helpful for the reader to provide more interpretation of this and other significant tropes.
Secondly, in her concluding chapter, which is all too brief, she argues that Lefebvre adds to history of education in two ways. She clearly explains the first of these as ‘highlight[ing] the everyday experiences, activities, perspectives, dreams and emotions of theoretical authorities, teachers and students’. However, the second contribution to history of education is not clearly explained. There is a quote from Lefebvre about Praxis but little explanation about what this means and why this represents a contribution to this subfield of educational research.
Despite these few shortcomings, I would recommend this book to educational theorists, researchers and policy-makers. Middleton has made a unique contribution to our understanding of how Lefebvre’s work is relevant to the field of education and its many intersections with other disciplines like history, geography, sociology and philosophy. It would also be very relevant as a theoretical and methodological introduction for masters' and doctoral students embarking on their own educational research journeys. It makes a significant contribution to the spatial turn in educational studies and carefully links this with history and the materiality of everyday experiences of pedagogy.