Abstract
This article explores the ideological drivers behind learning environment discourses with a particular focus on the built environment and the ways in which the built environment narrates explicit and implicit ideology. The built environment reinforces ways of thinking in the day-to-day ordinary activities of the school space. However, it is important to recognise that both space and place are more than the built environment. In part, this paper’s task is to show how a theorisation of the relationship between policy and the built environment opens up a politics of space and place. The paper draws together the work of Penetito on place and Rancière on politics to provide a critique and theorisation of the experiences of school communities when subjected to the discourses of new learning environments. In order to engage in opening up to new ideas for policy making, the paper turns to space and place in design thinking. We look then to our knowledge of architecture, art and design to explore possibilities that remain somewhat under-imagined in contemporary theorisations of learning environments.
Introduction
A series of associated learning environments discourses has entered the education policy domain over the last decade. These discourses began with the Modern Learning Environment (MLE), moved to the Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) and then changed relatively swiftly to the Flexible Learning Environment (FLE). Swift change indicates a shifting policy terrain – posing a problem for the critique of both policies and underpinning discourses. In addition, these shifts pose a problem for any critique of the broader 21st century teaching and learning discourse that pervades all the nooks and crannies of educational thinking and operates as a largely unquestionable rhetoric in education policy – which is not to say that this rhetoric is not questioned (see, for instance, Biesta, 2016; Loveless and Williamson, 2013).
These are globalising discourses, given a privileged place in the policy guidance of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2013) and driving school design in many OECD nations (Charteris et al., 2017). While the OECD does not speak for all nations, communities and systems, its position on any educational matter becomes a concern for all education policy makers, and all educational communities, whether or not they like the policy directions and put them into practice. That we believe such an imposition to exist is an element of what drives our shared interest in writing about the relationship between place, space and educational policy.
We are interested, more specifically, on how policies focused on space and place position any community with a shared interest and focus on education. For instance, how do primary and secondary school communities find themselves positioned by the language of learning environments? In order to explore this question, we engage with the work of Jacques Rancière (2010) on politics and Wally Penetito (2009) on place. Through their work we explore how policy impacts on space and place, and also how space and place can and should impact on policy.
We begin the paper with attention to the ideological drivers behind learning environment discourses and challenge them for their limitations, particularly in terms of the neoliberal conceptualisation of innovation in education. Our interest in space and place is here focused on the built environment and in the ways in which it narrates explicit and implicit ideology, saying something about what can be said and by whom. The built environment reinforces ways of thinking in the day-to-day ordinary activities of the school space – activities that have ‘the most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 188) However, it is important to recognise that both space and place are more than the built environment, and in part our task is to show how a theorisation of the relationship between policy and the built environment opens up a politics of space and place. The first section looks to the work of Penetito (2009) and others in order to bring the theorisation of space and place to bear on education policy. We then look to Rancière’s (2010) work. His attention to politics and aesthetics, and in particular his assessment of the relationships between politics and police, provides a critique of the lived experiences of any school community. His understanding of politics in relation to the hearing of the unheard leads us to think about the built environment as having something to listen to with care – in other words, the politics of design requires a dedicated listening to the voice of the built environment. In order to engage in opening up to new ideas, the final section of this paper turns to space and place in design thinking. As a writing team of six, we are interested in intersections of disciplinary thinking. We look then to our knowledge of architecture, art and design to explore possibilities that remain somewhat under-imagined in contemporary theorisations of learning environments.
Section One: Theorisations of educational spaces
At the same time as it forms a part of a movement of liberalism […] modernity also involves the transference of everything which had to do with the imagination, dreams, the ideal and utopia into a technical, operational reality: the materialization of all desires, the realization of all possibilities. (Baudrillard, 2001: 51)
That work, the work of 19th century British school designers, invoked the disciplinary possibilities of industrialised school spaces at a time when mass schooling was being entertained as an idea, and when the open commons of the large schoolroom was replaced with the soon to be predominating cellular classroom (Markus, 1993; Paetcher, 2000). These built environments have maintained certain ‘asymmetries of power’ (Markus, 1993: 317) for long enough to appear ‘unproblematically as free from ideological contestation and struggle, somehow pre-existing and even immutable’ (McGregor, 2004: 15). Hence the ‘classroom reality is rarely presented as socially constructed, historically determined and mediated through institutionalised relationships of class, gender, race and power’ (McLaren, 1995: 35). Any challenge to the design of classroom spaces must then also be considered in relation to these relationships. Are challenges to design also challenges to ideologies, or are the ideological drivers reinforced in new ideas about the built environment of educational institutions?
School buildings, like city spaces, are objects of policy that give voice to particular ideologies and discourses – they say something about what is believed and what is valued by a community and/or society (Davis, 1990; de Certeau, 1984; Gagen, 2000; Haymes, 1995; Lefebvre, 1991). While we are interested in how place and space influence policy, it is also crucial to understand how place and space, including but not limited to the built environment, are shaped by ideology. School buildings, and the wider environment of the school and all of its visible and material content, are social products that ‘project a system of values’ (Burke and Grosvenor, 2008: 8). The material structures of a school then create a relationship between a system of values and a culture of education – a series of choices that reflect what count as educational relationships and educational spaces. To understand the process of determining what counts, we need look no further than the tendency to talk about education as if we mean school – when these things are not the same (Kupferman, 2016).
While the learning environment policies emerging over the past decade might appear to be innovative in some of their explicit implications (and even on this point we would argue that the innovations are reiterations of the open plan agendas of the 1970s plus the Internet), the implicit directives of such policies are highly predictable and reinforce very narrow and familiar approaches to educational intervention. Most notably here we are thinking about two elements: new learning discourses reiterate a narrow relationship between education and work; and, as a result, this relationship is driven by the economy rather than by school communities that cannot question the driving principle that schools, as with all other spheres of public life, must run like businesses within an education market. The school designs of 19th and 20th century liberal governments are then exemplars of the limitations of a liberal laissez faire ideology and foretell the turn to neoliberal interventionism.
In order for the reforms of the 1970s to take hold, some aspect of spatial innovation had to convince not the public but the policy makers and those who influence the education policy community. What was arguably missing in the 1970s was an economic rationalisation. This is no longer the case, with writers, including Nair (2011), arguing that students of contemporary school environments are not prepared for contemporary and future workplace environments in their 19th century classrooms. Any reforms to educational spaces must then fit under the ideological umbrellas of capitalism and neoliberalism (Baker, 2016).
It comes as no surprise that these are the criteria for successful integration of new built environments and the discourses associated with them. Cuban’s (1992) analysis of educational reform indicates that any significant sense of innovation in the built environment will be innovation only inasmuch as a new method to meet old aims is designed. The modern, flexible and innovative spaces may look different, but their purpose is very much the same – and this purpose, continuing and amplifying the liberal tradition, is to teach children how to think, determining not just what can be said and by whom, but how a citizen comes to think about what it is they want to say. This is the essence of neoliberalism (Olssen and Peters, 2005) and its educational task of mass producing particular kinds of knowledge workers. Space and place have a very particular role to play here that reinforces the Modern tradition of regarding the world, and Nature, as standing reserve (Heidegger, 1977), material to exploit.
Our central point here is that not only is there nothing particularly innovative or flexible about new built educational places and spaces, but neither should or could there be. Innovation, as a concept, and innovations, as something new, are a problem for neoliberal policy in education because they are difficult to predict and contain. In a neoliberal paradigm, uncertainty in education requires the kind of policy that operates to reveal how things will happen. This is the technocratic manifestation of policy futures (Olssen, 2003; Slaughter, 1987). The built environment should say only what it is told to say, and the possibility that it says more than what is coded into it is the raving of posthuman heresy. In the study of the place of space in education policy, the environment as an active and interconnected element in a broader ecology then offers something heretically innovative to design processes and, more than this, to the very aims of education. Through the idea of questioning the aims of education, place-based pedagogies provide a new way of thinking about the relationship between education and space, and new ways of listening to the environment (see, for instance, Penetito, 2009), including the built environment: Much of the literature on place-based education (PBE) arises out of the work by teachers and researchers with indigenous peoples as much as with those interested in exploring the physical environment. As a consequence, the purposes underlying PBE are often intended to satisfy indigenous peoples’ aspirations in education as a priority, but in every case, the objectives and strategies recommended are offered as being of direct benefit to everybody. (Penetito, 2009: 6)
PBE takes certain elements of education (attention to the immediate and wider physical, political and cultural characteristics of an educational space, encouraging learning through active participation in the community, and applying integrated and project approaches to the curriculum) as largely unrecognised rather than non-existent. Penetito (2009: 7) argues that these ‘characteristics envision a purpose of education that is always present but often only in a tacit sense’. His work is specifically focused on Māori learner engagement in ‘mainstream’ New Zealand schools, arguing that engagement and outcomes will be positively influenced by increased attention to these characteristics of identity and location in mainstream educational settings, such that the experience of school is not made artificially distinct from the experience of home and community: the experience of place.
Penetito notes the value of spatial metaphors in challenging and developing educational practices. Following Penetito (2009), it makes no sense to talk about education without talking about space and place. In this paper we are interested in taking this proposition seriously by adding that it makes no sense to talk about education without listening to space and place. This is an innovation for policy makers, who can be challenged to reconceptualise the experience of space and place as both metaphor and reality.
Critical theorisation of space understands the Foucauldian point that the power of policy is never total. Spaces engage in their own micro-practices because their designs are never ultimate reproductions of the intentions of the state and the state’s architectural design teams. Recognising and amplifying the voice of educational spaces requires a different way of thinking in policy. A PBE for policy makers opens up to the dynamics of ecological thinking in increasingly diverse cultural communities. The challenge we have here is to theorise how space and place have something to say, how the very design process can amplify an awareness that space is saying something, and how a politics of space means listening imaginatively to what a wall, a beam, a door, a light fitting or an entire classroom has to say.
Section Two: Rancière
This section engages with Rancière’s thinking about politics and police in order to develop a theorisation of learning environment policies, and in particular the relationships that are evident between policy, space and place. Rancière’s work explores the idea of the sensible through a turn to aesthetics. Hence, he also has something to contribute to how we sense what is being seen and said by the learning environment.
On politics, Rancière (2010: 37) makes an important distinction, arguing that ‘politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable’. He understands the task of this intervention as a ‘configuration’ of space – space is required in order to be seen and heard. Politics is contrasted to police, where police aligns with the idea of the functions of state and so is evident in state policy. Policing occurs in forms of state intervention that lay a claim to what is taken for granted, obvious and entitled – police determines what can be seen and heard and hence also what cannot be seen; in Rancière’s (2010: 37) terms, ‘here, on this street, there’s nothing to see and so nothing but the space of circulation’. These occurrences are manifestations of a demographic ordering, enumerating and distributing individuals into communities. The socially agreed, instrumental drivers of the policing state focuses a society on techniques of order and control and require well-formed, logical differentiations and hierarchies in place, with the purpose of the effective running of the machine. From this perspective, where economic policy is central, where management of capital and distribution of wealth predominate, whether seen as fair or otherwise, there is an absence of politics.
Employing the imagery of a street protest, Rancière (2010: 37) suggests that politics interrupts the circulation, the movement of the seen, and makes visible and heard something different – an ‘appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens’. Politics occurs where a space is claimed by a group or community, even if for the briefest of moments, and the group or community recognises itself as something different within a wider social sphere. Politics is ‘the irruptive event that challenges this hierarchical order in the name of radical equality’ (Bassett, 2014: 887). Politics invents new forms of collective enunciation; it re-frames the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible, new configurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time – in short, new bodily capacities. (Rancière, 2010: 139)
Hence we have a ‘democratic paradox’, explained thus: ‘democracy as a form of government is threatened by democracy as a form of social and political life and so the former must repress the latter’ (Rancière, 2010: 47) – this repression in the interest of social order. Politics, he observes, appears to be missing in our contemporary experience of government: If the idea of the political government means anything, it must imply an extra something, something superadded to the government of seniority, fatherhood, science, strength, etc., that is, to the forms that already exist in families, tribes, schools and workshops, and that provide patterns for wider and more complex forms of human communities. (Rancière, 2010: 52)
These two forms of democracy are further differentiated - the democracy of government as a liberal democracy, and the democracy of the people as a ‘democracy to come’ as and a ‘space of an unconditional openness to the event and to otherness’ (Rancière, 2010: 59). In this latter form of politics something new appears, introduced as new by those who have had ‘no part’ in governing, ‘who allow new objects to appear as common concerns, and new voices to appear and to be heard’ (Rancière, 2010: 60).
Rancière’s ‘search for a new political radicalism has involved rethinking the very meaning of politics, subjectivity, and community’ (Bassett, 2014: 887). Following Rancière, Bassett (2014: 887) states, ‘we should take the equality of every speaking being with every other as a presupposition […] an essentially affirmative or “active” view of equality’, which for Bassett acts as a challenge to any evident hierarchies: A genuinely political struggle is thus not a struggle for identity by pregiven subjects or classes (this would simply involve a reclassification within the police order) – it is the collective action through which one becomes a subject. Such a subjectification process involves both a ‘disidentification’ with the existing order, and the emergence of a new subject name different from any already identified part of that order. (Bassett, 2014: 887)
Section Three: New spatial turns as a politics of education
How, then, to take a spatial turn (Massey, 1993; 2005) as a politics of education that reveals to education policy different forms of space-oriented policy making? The third and final section of this paper takes on this design space to consider what could be new and possible for learning environment policies and policy making. According to Edwards and Usher (2003), there are few studies that critically theorise space in education beyond technicalities and efficiencies. Siegel’s (1999) research is one example of attention to the implications of spatial arrangements for a teacher’s work in the classroom and beyond, while research by Fine et al. (1997) indicates the more or less hidden discriminations coded into the design and organisation of school spaces. While policy makers may be logically reticent to think that there is any other way to think about building new schools and refitting old ones, educational theory, and more importantly school communities, should engage in a politics of education that takes seriously relationships with space and place (Peters, 1996) – that configures, and is configured by, space and place.
In Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Ministry of Education’s (2017) Reference Designs: Standard Classroom Block Upgrade prescribes an approach to learning from space and place in the design of school learning and teaching spaces. In this governmental reference document, a generic set of principles is offered for the upgrading of existing school blocks. The central themes in designing an upgrade include knocking out walls, creating break out and wet zones, and adding mobile screens and boards. While each of these solutions to innovation in classroom design may support teaching and learning, they have a highly prescriptive feel in the reference document. In other words, whether intentionally or not, they create a paradoxically standardised and uniform approach to innovation.
Modern-day architecture and the ancillary professions can often employ a standardised, singular solution to satisfy a common concern. In one sense, this process can save significantly on time and costs whilst satisfying a given problem with a recognised successful solution. The problem, however, is that the standards do little to recognise a school’s specific needs. The ensuing architectural intervention will arguably appear cold to the situation at hand and ill-equipped to adapt to the local environment – more than this, the solutions may start to filter outwards, putting pressure on the community to accept generic ideas as universally valued. The standards appear to have little tolerance for the local and the idiosyncratic, or for the benefits that these have for education and for communities. In the biomimetic turn, such prescriptive standards are evidence of an architectural thinking that has ‘confused strength with rigidity’ (Pawlyn, 2011: 28).
Pawlyn (2011: 28) argues that in ‘nature, strength is usually achieved not by forming completely rigid structures but by accommodating movement’ – it follows that the flexibilities evident in space and place can be coded into the built environment in ways that keep the school and the classroom open to future possibilities for future generations. The space is innovative in its fluidness on account of its ability to cope with the uncertainty of what the learner and teacher may bring.
That future is of course a future that promises some technological innovation. Hence, when considering the built learning environment and relationships between space and place, it is worth considering the role of new media. For instance, consider the possibilities of weaving augmented reality into the fabric of the ecological system (Akçayır and Akçayır, 2017; Buxton, 2015). We might also look to how design and innovation spaces are conceived and built in particular ways to encourage particular kinds of relationships in and with space and place. The general direction of education policy regarding the built environment appears convinced of the benefits of modern, innovative, flexible spaces (see, for instance, Abbiss, 2015; Benade and Jackson, 2017). This confidence is observed despite concerns about a lack of evidence regarding their impact on teaching and learning (Aldridge and Galos, 2017) or evidence to suggest that current design principles are tinkering with the wrong elements of design (Barrett et al., 2015). The single cell classroom has clearly fallen out of favour and the discourse associated with new learning environments is verging on hegemonic in its unquestionable status. The hegemony is one that argues for ILEs as ‘unprogrammed’ (Wells et al., 2017), personalised and agentic. The hegemonic rise of these rather programmed spaces (as argued above in relation to government reference documents) is evident in their prioritisation in OECD research, a priority that has translated into policy and practice in 25 countries around the world. In Aotearoa, learning spaces are being reconceptualised in relation to this policy work by school leaders who are confronted by an impetus to lead pedagogic change (Charteris et al., 2017).
School communities, and in particular teachers who fail to get with the new programme, are a problem and require enculturation through professional learning and development programmes. School leaders are challenged to embrace digital technologies, rethink the roles of students, teachers and school leaders, remodel physical spaces in schools, and consider significant shifts to school administration and leadership (Benade et al., 2012; Charteris et al., 2016). It is considered that there is a need for a theoretical framework of learning-leadership, relational trust and risk-taking to examine how leaders broker change to implement ILEs (Charteris et al., 2016).
While there are clearly merits to rethinking learning environments, merits that are shaped around a simple attention to the built environment as qualified to teach, our concern at this point is the exercise of a top-down learning environment policy process that appears antithetical to its own rhetoric regarding participatory, personalised, student-centred, socio-constructivist manifestations of school spaces. The discourses of new learning environments that engage the language of constructivism, openness and flexibility (Magen-Nagar and Steinberger, 2017; OECD, 2013; Osborne, 2013; 2016), we argue, are applied to schools with little semblance of openness and flexibility. In other words, some of the knowledge might be new, but the power relations are not. This is arguably no surprise. It would be illogical for any neoliberally-minded government to allow communities to dictate their own innovations in learning. Yet, paradoxically, they must be seen to be dictating their own innovations. Hence the role of government is to police what can be said and by whom. Teachers and students, if they are to say anything about the design of the new school environment, require a particular discourse in order to be heard.
Our interest, to reiterate, is that there is little room for politics in terms of democratic participation, and in particular, following Rancière, of being entitled to have a say. Who gets, within the technicalities of the system, to say which problems require innovative solutions? If the teacher and learner have no voice, if they continue to be unheard in the domain of education policy regarding built environments, what is being properly yet tacitly understood and reinforced is that the policy agenda is a matter for police and not politics. The learner and teacher have no space to be seen. Of interest to us here is how an alliance can be drawn between the space, the built environment and the school community in their unseenness and unheardness. How does the built environment enter into its own politics of space? How also does the wider ecology engage in this politics of space, having a say in the policing of learning environments?
School communities can suggest some different purposes for schools through the act of having a say in regard to the built environment. This is the politics of school design that draws upon the proximity and intimacy of the school community with respect to the space and place of the school. In other words, the politics of space, the voice of the space, is embodied in the teachers and students who can speak in different ways to policy makers about what is possible for the built environment. Space and place make possible more intimate imaginations about what is possible. We are interested in the concept of imagination because of its association with social innovation (Sacks, 2011). Imagination can rightly be named our most human and important faculty. Neurological and philosophical investigations have established that our imagination is crucial even for our processes of perception, thinking and memorising. Altogether we create the world in which we live through our imaginative capacity. (Pallasmaa, 2014: 84)
Biomimicry (Pawlyn, 2011) offers education policy a mode of thinking about design processes and possibilities that addresses the ecological system as holistic. The biomimetic turn looks to interconnections between architecture and nature, the built environment is itself a theorisation of nature through nature. More importantly, biomimicry applies design ideas observed in the immediate, local ecology – creating an integration with an observed sense or logic of the land and the elements. A school community’s engagement with its built environment is then at the same an intentional engagement with the many aspects of the ecological system – in this sense, building is recognised as pedagogy, and buildings are recognised as pedagogues that have an intimate relationship to the community. The built environment is a provocation (see, for instance, New, 1989; Strong-Wilson and Ellis, 2007) that invites the learning community to engage with space and place in particular ways. The question then becomes whether ideas of space and place have informed the design of a school or early childhood centre, creating the bidirectional relationship that grounds the school community in a particular relationship with the world.
Conclusion
As government policy makers attempt to seed a 21st century way of thinking into education systems, it is not the industrial models of the classroom that their predecessors built that are regarded as the resistance, but rather the school communities who require prescriptions in their building of innovative spaces. Following Rancière (see, for instance, Bassett, 2014), our concern is not just an absence of politics in the policies of building the school environment, but rather an active depoliticising in which the school communities are regarded as having nothing to say. We have added in this paper the depoliticisation of space and place – the built environment is seen to have nothing to say in the policy process.
However, through conscious awareness of the power of school architecture to reinforce the divisions and social structure of wider society, we can also find leverage for potential social change in new design. We can choose to consciously design environments that have something to say. This process calls for deep engagement with all intergenerational stakeholders in the expansive act of learning, rather than consultation with the people who most benefit from the capitalist paradigm, who are biased to produce better fits for the job market. What do we, the whole spectrum of society, imagine that new learning environments could say? In learning environment discourses, school communities have an opportunity to re-identify and advocate for what is valued in education. The values that collectively emerge about learning will be the materials that embody ILE design. Collective, shared, design strategies can enhance the continued identification of values that intimately fit each school community at ILE inception and throughout its permutations (Day and Parnell, 2003; Ewald, 2016). Long after a structure has been built, the interweaving flows of people, encounters and use of space can either have scope to develop new patterns of conscious relationships or be restricted to limited choices engendering repetition and habit. Encountering an ILE designed with an ideology that supports the agency of all people would be experienced as entering a field of potential and could be a continuing live collaborative process of making sense of the world. The daily frequency of participation in place-making offers situations of live responsiveness and awareness of agency; it is a formative context, then, in which the people and the place unfold in relationship.
Footnotes
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: This work was funded by the Auckland University of Technology Faculty of Culture and Society Research Grant AX16/11.