Abstract
The aim of this paper is to challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces with the use of metaphor: the story of Professor Kirke’s magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (1950). By explicating and theorising the concerns that arise, we provoke diverse ways of thinking about the complexities of shifting, expanding, constantly evolving educational spaces and places. In our theorisations, we draw on the philosophy of the life-world through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on a post-structural approach through Julia Kristeva’s work, and on the new-materialist perspective of Gilles Deleuze. As these three philosophical perspectives draw upon different basic assumptions about humans and the world, they also illuminate different aspects of a variety of phenomena and concepts, which we elaborate on in this paper to reach a more comprehensive understanding of educational spaces and places. Our argument arises from philosophical engagements with the story of the Pevensie siblings’ transformation – and transportation – to Narnia through the wardrobe, with notions of educational openings and opportunities, to explore possibilities for reimagining the conceptions and realities of places and spaces in education. To conclude, citizens of today, including children, students, teachers, politicians and researchers, need to discuss basic assumptions for education and policy to reimagine the entangled complexities of educational spaces and places.
Keywords
It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more (Lewis, 1956: 154).
The theme of moving beyond the known walls of a space or place is central to this paper. We use Lewis’s (1950) story of Professor Kirke’s magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia, as a metaphorical grounding of our argument for conceptions of educational places and spaces as opportunities for shifts towards unknown and uncertain educational (and societal, personal and relational) futures, pedagogies and practices. Our argument arises from philosophical engagements with the story of the Pevensie siblings’ transformation – and transportation – to Narnia through the wardrobe, with notions of educational openings and opportunities, to explore possibilities for reimagining the conceptions and realities of places and spaces in education.
The aim of this paper is to challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces with the use of metaphor. By explicating and theorising the concerns that arise, we provoke diverse ways of thinking about the complexities of shifting, expanding, constantly evolving educational spaces and places. In our theorisations, we draw on the philosophy of the life-world through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on a post-structural approach through Julia Kristeva’s work, and on the new-materialist perspective of Gilles Deleuze. As these three philosophical perspectives draw upon different basic assumptions about humans and the world, they also illuminate different aspects of a variety of phenomena and concepts, which we elaborate on in this paper to reach a more comprehensive understanding of educational spaces and places.
According to Deleuze (1990) philosophy is difficult. He stresses, that ‘all you should ever do is explore it, play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else’ (139). Following his arguments, we use an exploratory approach, which we claim to be in accordance with the openness and unpredictability that can be found in both Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings, although in slightly different manners (Deleuze, 1990; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Merleau-Ponty & Lefort, 1968), and reflected also in the concepts of revolt and the critical thought of Kristeva (1986). As Lewis (1956) emphasises in the opening quote on ‘re-thinking’, our hope is that ‘perhaps you [the reader] will get some idea of it [educational space/place] if you think like this’.
Methodologically, our examination draws on an adaptation of what Galea (2013) uses as a fictive narrative, where ‘the aim is to ‘move’ readers/listeners towards others so that they are complexly involved in a process of migrating from their usual positions and possibly change themselves in relation to others’ (225). Professor Kirke’s wardrobe, is the focus of our fictive/theoretical interplay, a transformational space and place that becomes a provocation for increasingly open attitudes and orientations towards the nature and experience of education, as unpredictably situated and constantly shifting.
The meanings of the terms space and place themselves overlap and are often used interchangeably, as argued by Rönnlund and Tollefsen (2016) in their examination of the concepts. Variously, for example, place has been defined as ‘ground, location, room, position, area, situation, … locality, locus, whereabouts and space’ (11), and space is defined also as ‘room and place’ (11–12), but further acknowledges space as representing airspace, free space, outer space and so on. How the terms are used, Rönnlund and Tollefsen (2016) note, is dependent on their context. This becomes evident as our paper progresses and as we adapt the terms to the philosophical context of the three perspectives of Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva and Deleuze.
Through all three perspectives, spaces and places of education are seen as a vital and energising influence on educational openings and trajectories. As we progress our argument, spaces and places of education become increasingly revealed as never neutral, but complicated, value laden and constantly evolving, and thus physically, materially and relationally central to the educational experience.
The wardrobe as a metaphorical place and educational settings
In Lewis’s (1950) story, Professor Kirke’s wardrobe enabled Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie’s entry into the land of Narnia. The children enter into what appears to be a drab-looking ordinary wardrobe. On entering it however, they are transported to a parallel universe called Narnia. The transformations arising from their encounters with the space and place of the wardrobe, and the challenges, twists and turns that this leads to are akin, we argue, to the vast unknown of the globally and locally governed, policy-driven educational milieu, to which the spaces and places of educational settings are the entry points for students. The children’s journeys, to which they gain access through the professor’s magical wardrobe door, may be seen as the educational pathways and potentialities that arise for students upon entering diverse educational places: as physical or imaginary places, within or in-between students and the milieu (Alerby, 2009).
A critical consideration in this analogy is that the Pevensie siblings’ journey is imbued from the outset with their histories and realities. The possibility to enter the wardrobe arises amongst the horrors of World War II, during which they have been sent to live with Professor Kirke. Similarly, students in contemporary educational settings and their pathways and opportunities are imbued with their own histories and realities. For contemporary students it is difficult to escape, for example, the strongly globalised, yet still uniquely localised benchmarks and outcomes (Arndt and Tesar, 2015; OECD, 2013) and the corporatisation and business focus of many educational institutions and settings (Duhn, 2010; Mitchell, 2013). Positioning educational spaces and places in the 21st century raises a number of contextual concerns. The knowledge economy places the focus on knowledge and information acquisition as the basis for success, and ability to compete on the global market is paramount (Ball, 2016; Peters, 2013). The assumptions of what is counted as knowledge of significance in relation to how and where learning takes place are in constant flux (Arndt, 2013; Biesta, 2010), still strongly governed, and arguably misled or diverted, by the educational policy milieu (Hannigan, 2013). Considering the children’s experiences with the wardrobe in their historical time and place further implicates contemporary students in a worldly context, connecting them with the anthropocentric concerns of the 21st century (Latour, 2011, 2014). Such worldly concerns and connections can become secondary, however, to the ongoing pressures for international measurement and assessment tools (Moss et al., 2016; Westman, 2014).
In The Chronicles of Narnia the wardrobe is a very particular, complicated place and space. It opens up possibilities, uncertainties and transformations. First Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensie siblings, and then over time also her three siblings, experience the sense of entering the wardrobe, both with trepidation and with expectation, and of being transported to a different place, to the parallel universe that is Narnia. But, as for contemporary students in educational settings, ‘for them it was only the beginning of the real story’ as Lewis (1956: 165) notes, All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia [have] only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before (165).
Further, the transformative space and place represented by the professor’s wardrobe illustrates what might also be transposed into questions about access and predictability in educational contexts. The wardrobe’s transformations are not necessarily available to anybody, or at any time. At first only one of the children, Lucy, the youngest, is able to enter the wardrobe, for example, and when her older siblings try to get to Narnia through the wardrobe they find just an ordinary wardrobe: they open the door but find no opening, no transformation, no depth, no magic, just an ordinary back wall to the wardrobe. When they try again later, at a different time, however, they are able to enter, and are transported to Narnia transformed, through the wardrobe, gaining the same access as Lucy.
Being transported into Narnia impacts more than the physical place and space. The children are transported temporally, relationally and culturally into new conceptions and practices. They experience Narnia life, inscribed by Narnian behaviours, fears, relationships and concerns, and when they return to the earthly world, back through the wardrobe, they once again become ordinary children, living their everyday earthly lives. Perhaps contemporary educational settings represent a similar parallel universe? Many children or students may not have access to physical educational spaces and places, due to waiting lists, entry criteria, or location, for example. Furthermore, they may not be comfortable, connected, inspired or transformed by their experiences. Transformational processes in education might be similarly infrequent, uncertain, hidden, non-existent, exclusionary on the basis of superficial ‘tourist’ approaches, for example to cultural diversity (Papastephanou, 2015), or lead to the perpetuation of ongoing subjugations and marginalisations (Robinson and Jones-Diaz, 2006). Even once they have gained access to educational settings, children’s and students’ subjugation can arise through the practices, processes and policies within spaces and places themselves inhibiting access to the elevated discourses and learning to which they are expected to connect and adhere.
This ‘wardrobe’ lens helps us to rupture our perceptions of educational settings. It has been previously argued, that what is expected to be a smooth, supportive learning programme, can have detrimental, unsmooth, normalising or marginalising effects on individuals or groups (Arndt et al., 2015). Conceptualising education through the metaphor of the wardrobe offers new conceptual ruptures of the smoothness of educational spaces and places. We utilise these ruptures to develop our argument for attitudes that increasingly welcome and expect openness to uncertainty and the unknown, across educational sectors. The metaphor of the wardrobe is explored now in relation to expanding notions of educational spaces and places, through the lenses of Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva and Deleuze.
Boundaries and infinities of a wardrobe or an educational place
As humans, we have presumptions about different things and phenomena, for example what a place or a room is, or maybe what a wardrobe is. For example, (almost) no one questions that a wardrobe contains clothes, shoes, hats and maybe a mirror. This is taken for granted. However, Merleau-Ponty stresses that presumptions need to be interrogated through a critical self-reflection that interrogates its own possibility, what he describes as ‘hyper-reflection’ (Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968: 38).
On an ontological level we can question what a room is and can be, and there are various ways of understanding a room: be it a wardrobe or a (class)room. One way to understand a room is that it is constrained and defined by its walls. Although the students in a (class)room, or children in a wardrobe, are restrained by four walls, the horizon of the room can be expanded. Another way to understand a (class)room is therefore as an educational space when the learning is taking place beyond the four walls of the physical (class)room. This could be, for example, an outdoor setting, or web-based learning, and in these cases the horizon of the (class)room becomes unlimited in different ways: the boundaries of the room become a kind of infinite infinity. However, these places are not free from boundaries, due to the organisation of the education and the place (Alerby et al., 2014).
The room, be it a wardrobe or a (class)room, as a spatial formation, is the most general form in the world, according to Bollnow (1994), and for him tightness and space stretch beyond the objective room. As humans, we are always situated somewhere: in time and space. At the same time, we can either distance ourselves from the room or establish ourselves in it. We can feel lost and foreign in the room, or safe and in harmony with the room. Given this, a human being is not only situated in a place: the presence in a place is also followed by a certain attitude of mind, and the room affects different people in different ways.
Different people also experience, interpret and use the formation of a room in different ways. A room can be described in terms of geometrical or physical dimensions, but this is not enough. Instead the room must, according to Merleau-Ponty (2002), be described through the human experience: ‘Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible’ (284).
In Professor Kirke’s wardrobe many things become possible for the Pevensie children. Through the room of the wardrobe the children enter the magic land of Narnia. What possibilities do students in general have to enter the magic land of education, and to become kings or queens of their own universe of learning? Perhaps students are also just escaping from the horror of some form of battle or war? Students experience many diverse possibilities during their time in educational settings. At the same time, they can also experience many challenges and limitations, for example in connection to regulations and policies. To some extent, they are controlled by teachers, but also by the physical (class)room. However, the students, can in most cases, only be controlled or restrained bodily by the teacher and the room, not mentally or emotionally (Alerby et al., 2014). The windows of a (class)room can for example be an opening, like in Professor Kirke’s wardrobe, where the students can mentally flee the room: a window may make the room infinite as the horizon extends outwards by looking through it.
Maybe the students might look out on a ‘lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains’ (Lewis, 1956: 154), especially if the teacher does not succeed to engage the students in the learning situation. Given this, a room’s openings, for example windows in a (class)room, or maybe mirrors in a wardrobe, can for some people in some situations be experienced as a threat or as contesting the teacher and the learning situation. They can also, however, be regarded as stimulating openings of creative possibilities for learning. Thus, stretching the educational room to the infinite does not necessarily have to be considered as a mental escape from the learning situation. It can also be regarded as a way to return to, and contemplate, what has just been done or discussed. Students might also relate to another dimension of humans’ presence or being in a room, through their bodies moving within the room. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty (2002): a movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation (160–161).
As a consequence of this reasoning, the humans in the room (the Pevensie children or children, students and teachers in educational settings), the room itself, the things, the encounters and the activities within the room, become entanglements of bodies and the world: different dimensions of spatiality and embodiment. Merleau-Ponty and Lefort (1968) articulate this as the ‘flesh of the world’ (248). They also argue that different relationships encroach upon each other in a cross-over, a chiasm, which is presented as an ambiguity without opposites. The concept of chiasm is discussed by Westman and Alerby (2012) in terms of ‘a chiasmic be(com)ing’ (357) in relation to temporality in education. Since time and space are closely connected to humans’ lived experiences, chiasm is a relevant concept for spatiality as well. A chiasmic be(com)ing houses a deep and complex feeling of presence and belonging, still in a process of change, sliding between the dimensions of temporality and spatiality, as the Pevensie children too are sliding in time and space.
Accordingly, we argue that it is important to reconsider the existential dimensions of educational spaces and places. The concept of chiasm may be a fruitful way to overcome binary approaches and expand the discussion of educational spaces and places and their role for children’s and students’ learning. In addition, we find it crucial for educational policies to (re)consider existential dimensions of/in educational places and how these enhance or limit students’ learning and chiasmic be(com)ing.
Foreigners and revolt in a wardrobe or at educational places
In this turn, our argument can be further strengthened through Kristeva’s work. First we utilise her conceptions of the foreigner, to develop the positioning of students, like the Pevensie children, through Kristeva’s (1991) foreigner lens. The Pevensie children, led by Lucy, move between spaces and places, their parallel universes, where they might be seen as neither really here, but also not really there. They hover in-between. They are in-between linguistic, cultural, and temporal spaces and places: influenced perhaps by both, and perhaps by neither, at any given moment. Through Kristeva’s (1991) development of the notion of being the foreigner, she alerts us to the possibility of simultaneously feeling elated, high on the exhilaration of the adventure of tearing away, and being depressed from the sheer and utter struggles faced in the process. While on the one hand the foreigner may love his or her home, or place of origin, and the comfort of the known culture, this is impacted by wider considerations. For the Pevensie children the disquieting effect of the war alters the realities of their home, and probably also the ways in which they perceive and experience Narnia, the escape, the magic, the reprieve.
In 21st century educational settings, to conceptualise children or students as foreigners captures the immense influences of the increasingly globalised educational imperatives and intercultural and social justice challenges that might arise (Besley and Peters, 2011, 2012; Bloch et al., 2014). Students entangled in multiple cultures, for example, both bring and deal with the diverse languages and ways of being that emanate from their multiple respective histories, as do Kristeva’s (1991) foreigners, and the Pevensie children, in-between Narnia and their everyday lives. Sometimes they act within their educational place with confidence, being open and expressive in their linguistic and dialogic encounters, for example, while at other times they react with worry, or confusion, appearing then shy, disengaged or withdrawn.
Children’s, students’ and teachers’ experiences of linguistic or cultural otherness impact on and are impacted by their educational settings and experiences. Kristeva’s (1998) theorisations are useful to understand this idea in complex ways, as she sees subjects as always in process. An individuals’ identity, she says, is ‘constantly in question, … open and evolving’ (Kristeva, 2008: 2). Subjects evolve in diverse ways, according to Kristeva’s theory, including through what she calls the semiotic, by which she refers to inner, often unconscious, reactions or responses to the structural surroundings. Metaphorically, we can again see students’ possible inner reactions to their educational spaces and places represented in the Pevensie children’s various responses to the fear, enticement, dread and assurances found in their ‘through the wardrobe’ experiences in Narnia. Subjects’ constant evolution also occurs through notions such as love, or empathy, and expulsion, or what Kristeva calls the abject, or abjection. These possibilities offer opportunities for complex articulations of the influences of responses and senses in relation to educational experiences. Finally, subjects also evolve through the necessary notion of revolt, according to Kristeva (2002). Through a Kristevan perspective revolt calls for a constant and critical questioning of the status quo. Student subjects, as constantly in process, therefore ‘call themselves constantly into question’ (Stone, 2004: 124), making meaning of their situation in their physical and emotional space and place, developing their sense of ethics, love and the abject, through their experiences.
In an extension of the critical questioning by subjects in process, we argue that revolt also involves calling into question the spaces and places themselves. Perhaps then educational settings too are in a constant process of construction, open and evolving, like the student/teacher subjects? And perhaps evolving educational settings also develop through the same elements as the subjects, the students, teachers, managers or administrators in the early childhood, school or tertiary setting? How might such a shift in conceptions implicate particular learning environments? What if they were conceived, at one time, as a delineated space, as is the wardrobe, with walls, doors, a floor and a roof, operating by particular rules and common understandings of how they are used, and then, as they evolve, such conceptions change, but not at predetermined times, just as the children could not predetermine when the wardrobe would change, or what kind of a wardrobe they would find at any given time, an ordinary standard wardrobe or a transformational one. If the back of the wardrobe represents the structures of an educational setting, an early childhood centre, for example, or a university, then maybe those structures too can be seen as penetrable entry points, as transformational spaces, that operate instead of by predetermined, fixed rules, by unfamiliar rules, entangling the educational place in uncertainty, instead. Kristeva’s lens lends, again, rather than a particular solution, a framework for ongoing questioning, also evoking our own responses to educational spaces and places, as lecturers, researchers and learners.
Ruptures and lines-of-flight in a wardrobe or an educational place
So, let us now as a third detour, follow some thoughts of Deleuze and his co-writers. As for the Pevensie children in Professor Kirke’s wardrobe, the educational place within an educational setting might be just an ordinary everyday place, an ordinary wardrobe with assemblages of suits, shirts, ties and shoes. This stratified space can be seen as a rhizome crossed with molar or molecular lines, which territorialise, organise and restrict the space and its intra-actions. From this new-materialist perspective the intra-actions may be both human and non-human, as material and matter are regarded as active or performative agents, to use the words of Barad (2007). At other times, the wardrobe or the educational place seems to be a smooth space, a space that is not so stratified, not so limited or restricted by codes or rules, where ruptures and lines-of-flight might appear. These lines-of-flight create or produce new possible plug-ins, openings and networks in which matters, material and humans intra-act, become and learn: ‘There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line-of-flight, but the line-of-flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9). According to Williams (2008) rooms have the possibility to become smoother when we free ourselves from habits and habitual patterns. For the Pevensie children, as newly arrived in Professor Kirke’s house, the wardrobe was not only a small room with clothes, but a space within a world they were about to discover. That is to say, wardrobes or educational places can become assemblages of desire, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call war machines that create lines-of-flight.
Before going into desires and war machines as part of changing educational places, let us outline the concepts of assemblages and rhizomes. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage (1987) describes the ‘unexpected, disparate and productive connections that create new ways of thinking and living’ (Colebrook, 2002: 76), or becoming, a sort of ‘incorporeal transformation’ (Buchanan, 2015: 390) as these processes of becoming run through ongoing entangled and moving relationships and modes of existence (Deleuze, 2004). As Buchanan (2015) has expressed it: ‘the assemblage is the productive intersection of a form of content (actions, bodies and things) and a form of expression (affects, words and ideas)’ (390).
Within assemblages there is ‘a multiplicity of dimensions, of lines and directions’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 100). These lines form us: ‘we are made up of lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 93). In the rhizomes new plateaus and lines are possible: like ‘movements of deterritorialization and the processes of reterritorialization which appear in an assemblage’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 100). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) express the concept of rhizomes in the following: It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills… the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature (21).
According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), war machines have nothing to do with wars, neither the war that the Pevensie children just escaped from, nor other wars, but rather with desire. The war machine or machine of desire can be seen as another form of revolt, as a machine with ‘revolutionary powers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2010: 9) as ‘the nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 24). This thought can thus be connected to, but also differs from, Kristeva’s concept of revolt, where revolt is ‘an opposition to already established norms, values and powers’ (Kristeva, 2014: 4), offering openings for constant critical renegotiations of limiting, marginalising or normalising practices and orientations. The four children in Lewis’s fiction could thus, in Deleuzian terms, be called nomads, who through the wardrobe created their own desire and war machine. Using the concept of nomadism as developed by Deleuze, may help us to think somewhat differently about what happens with the children in the wardrobe or about what happens to students within a transforming and changing educational place.
According to Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement’ (2010: 44). The Pevensie children’s war machine desired something other than the current state, maybe World War II, that they could not affect or the quiet and calm life in Professor Kirke’s house. Their desire could then be seen as a resistance or disapproval, a revolutionary-machine, in which different intra-actions and deterritorialisations are made possible: The bodies and environments are traversed by very different speeds of deterritorialization, by differential speeds, whose complementarities form continuums of intensity, but also give rise to processes of reterritorialization. At the limit, it is the Earth itself, the deterritorialized … and it is the nomad, the man of earth, the man of deterritorialization – although he is also the one who does not move, who remains attached to the environment, desert or steppe (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 101).
In relation to an educational place, the discursive and material state apparatus limits or enhances certain ways of acting, talking and learning while others are yet to be desired. For example, there are moments when activities occur in a totally different direction than the teacher plans for, when the educational place is smooth and rhizomes with lines-of-flight appear, and lead the learning in totally new directions. Another example is the digital, blended and hybrid learning places that have increased in today’s educational contexts, as already mentioned above. These educational spaces and places are in a way beyond the physical room as the students often are wirelessly connected to the web, through computers, tablets and smartphones, and as Alexander (2004) points out, the’ nomadic swarms [of students] are already arriving’ (67). We could say that the students become nomads in intra-action with digital techniques – the computer or smartphone becomes their own sphere. Conceptualised thus, it remains that commonly shared spaces are where the students distribute themselves, whether on Facebook, Instagram or on platforms set for education.
To conclude this Deleuzian detour into wardrobes and educational spaces and places in transformation, the concept of assemblages opens up rhizomatic thinking about an educational place. All agents involved have the opportunity to become something else, in a metaphorical becoming-kings-and-queens-of-Narnia, becoming-agents-of-change or becoming-new-curriculum. Ongoing affective, entangled and moving relationships and modes of existence can form assemblages that are both inter-corporeal and entangled.
Reimagining existential, discursive and material dimensions of educational places for future policies: Final words
‘It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste’ Lewis (1956: 154) states in the opening narrative. Or seen through the exploration in this paper: it is as hard to explain how the future of education, educational spaces and places and their policy will look, as it is to tell how the apple of unknown, shifting knowledge tastes. However, just because it is hard we cannot avoid it. Instead, and as Merleau-Ponty emphasises, presumptions need to be interrogated through a critical self-reflection that interrogates its own possibility (Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968). From Kristeva’s perspective, there can be no evolution without revolt (Stone, 2004). In other words, revolt lays the foundation for critical questioning and renegotiations, as mini revolts, to rethink uncertainty and difference in relation to educational spaces and places, in small inner ways, as well as in wider societal, political and global ways. As the world is in constant flux, unexpected, disparate and productive, it is critical, therefore, to create assemblages that produce new ways of living and thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
Our exploration of the complexities of educational spaces and places raises two key theses for future education policy: i) the importance of educational policies and practices valuing, appreciating and facilitating openness, unpredictability, and critical and novel thinking for the benefit of children’s and students’ ongoing becoming and unlimited learning; and ii) the importance of examining existential, discursive and material dimensions of educational spaces and places when formulating educational policies and practices. These factors, we suggest, are critical to overcome binary approaches and simplified marginalising notions, to reach comprehensive and complex understandings of education and educational settings.
In conclusion we argue that inherent and localised assumptions about education and policy should be confronted and explored by all members of educational communities, children, students, teachers, politicians and researchers, to reimagine the entangled complexities of their educational spaces and places. The crucial questions are fundamental, involving examinations, for example, of: What kind of education is desired and valued? What importance is assigned to education, and to the space and place in which it occurs? These questions return to the age-old quest to wonder about what kind of society we really want. In this paper we have elevated diverse existential, discursive and material dimensions to disrupt narrow responses to these and other such questions. We have argued for increasingly unsettling assumptions about educational places through the three lenses of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze, with the hope that, perhaps, to return to Lewis’s opening quote, we may have opened up to some new ideas ‘if we think like this’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to extend a sincere thank you for a STINT Initiation Grant for supporting this research. We also acknowledge our respective affiliations, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden and the University of Waikato, New Zealand. In addition, we want to thank CF Lewis for creating the fictional narrative of the magic wardrobe with ruptures and openings, and the Pevensie children for moving us towards and beyond different dimensions of places and spaces.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The work was supported by a STINT Initiation Grant (grant number IB2015-6471).