Editorial

Rethinking spaces and places offers critical opportunities for reconceptualising policy. This can define learner experiences, learning environments, and many bodily, spiritual or affective encounters in formal and informal educational contexts. Learning spaces and places can be inviting and inspiring, and create expectations and open up possibilities. Places and spaces can also have the opposite effect, however, limiting learning and inhibiting opportunities. Openings and limitations arise in relational entanglements connecting embodiments of learner experiences, notions of space and place, and learner subjectivities. One view is that individuals access the world through their bodies and that the knowledge they develop is always embodied. The body inhabits the world, and learners’ corporeality can therefore be tied to spaces and places – individuals are affected by and affect the space and place in a mutual interplay (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 ). Spaces and places, then, can be seen as complex webs of historicised, localised or other social or material realities (Alerby, Hagstrom & Westman, 2014). Mutual ontological, epistemological interdependencies and affects arise in these multiple entanglements. They can be variously encountered and described, through diverse philosophical perspectives, including phenomenology, hermeneutics, posthuman or socio-material metaphysics, or taking particular positions with respect to subject formations, for example, in connecting and othering teachers and learners, as subjects that are constantly in process (Arndt, 2016; Kristeva, 1998). Policy on spaces and places can intricately, and sometimes intensely, impact on educational practice and experience, in knowable and unknowable ways.

Educational spaces and places comply with and comfortably perpetuate, or disturb and disrupt, norms and dominant ways of working. Conceptualisations of educational spaces and places as fixed structures, or as beyond what is known or knowable, and rather uncertain, non-static, and constantly evolving, evoke encounters with the unplannable, not-yet-thought of, in pedagogical practices and policy. They implicate complexities arising out of cultural, temporal, relational, human or non-human vibrant forces and energies (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013). At the same time, inter- and intra-related contingencies construct conceptions of learners, of human–nature interplays and interspecies relationships (Haraway, 2007; Taylor, 2013). These entangled affective, inter-corporeal and moving relationships and modes of existence within specific milieus, what Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) might express as assemblages, or networks of people, materials and matters, offer possibilities for reconceptualising policy in the contemporary globalised, anthropocentric era, where learning spaces and places are crucially enmeshed with the geographies and politics of worldly ecological crises, survival and constructions of ‘quality’ education (Arndt and Tesar, 2016; Latour, 2014). Spaces and places represent the structures and securities as well as the anxieties and symbolic stasis of national and international quality and achievement benchmarks (OECD, 2013; Siraj, 2008), professional ethics (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005) and teacher education standards. Equally and often subversively, they might also interfere with and undermine their restrictive tendencies (Hannigan, 2013). The convergence of perspectives on and conceptions of learning spaces and places significantly implicate educational policy futures.

The papers in this special issue examine and contest simple representations of the nature and implication of educational spaces and places. In exploring the diversity of space-place responsibilities, the authors present a range of experimental and innovative methodological combinations and cross-disciplinary approaches, responding also to recent calls for increasingly philosophical engagements in specific educational sectors. Each in its own way reinvigorates and provokes reconceptualisations of educational policy on the basis of learner encounters of, in and through educational space and place.

In the first paper, Alerby, Arndt and Westman challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces using the story of Professor Kirke’s magic wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia by CFF Lewis as a metaphor. The authors provoke diverse ways of thinking about the complexities of shifting, expanding, constantly evolving educational spaces and places, drawing on the philosophy of the life-world through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on Julia Kristeva’s poststructural work and on the new-materialist perspective of Gilles Deleuze. In the next paper Heraud, Gibbons, Breen, Deerness, Gilligan and Denton highlight important possibilities of spaces and places that remain somewhat under-imagined in contemporary theorisations of learning environments. They explore ideological drivers behind learning environment discourses with a particular focus on the built environment and on its narration of explicit and implicit ideology, recognising that both space and place are more than the built environment. The authors draw 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.

The next paper, by Blenkinsop, Maitland and MacQuarrie challenge the notion of what a school is and can be, envisioning school as a democratic project. The outcome is an intriguing discussion by the three authors, all of whom played significant roles in the development of an unconventional, place-based school. In the paper, the authors explore four different kinds of policy that are significant for education: explicit (real), implicit (assumed), tradition-based, and imaginatively self-limiting. Each of these forms of policy are explained and illustrated by actual examples that occurred throughout the paper. In the following paper, Mayes draws excellent attention to spatial and material dimensions of power in educational settings, conceptualising the materialities of school governance council meetings. She focuses on the a/effects of spatial positioning if and when students are represented on school councils. The study explored in the paper is concerned with secondary school students’ sense of the benefits and challenges of student representation on school governance councils, and these meetings are understood to be events where the political philosoph(ies) of a school materialise in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and de-form) in and through material-discursive practices.

The next paper, by Hsu, offers an interesting exploration of how pedagogy underlies all food system activity and change. The author reviews and evaluates theoretical perspectives from public pedagogy and space in order to provide an analytical frame for unpacking the learning that happens in food-oriented spaces. By exploring the linkages between public pedagogy and space, the author makes the claim that education is the primary driver for food culture transformation. Alerby’s paper shifts the focus to the often-neglected notions and significance of places for silence in contemporary education. She questions whether places of silence and stillness exist in schools today, and offers insights into diverse understandings of silence, such as aspects of power in silence, and the complexity of silent and/or silenced students, and what it means to be silent. What is essential for future educational policy, she claims, is the extent to which students can be in places of silence and stillness during the school day, and the overall value placed on silence and stillness in today’s schools.

In their paper, Campbell and Speldewinde investigate to what extent different settings or places impact upon the children’s learning experience within a bush kindergarten. Bush kindergartens are an important new practice in the Australian early childhood context, and one that is rapidly becoming part of the kindergarten experience. The authors review the settings of three different interpretations of ‘bush kinder’, considering how the learning experience associated with bush kinder varies according to place and how bush kinder impacts on local policy. In the final paper, Keskitalo offers a critically important insight into an indigenous perspective on Sámi schools that are permeated by Sámi understandings of time and place. Her study examines Sámi schools, where teaching is conducted in the Sámi language, and the ways in which tensions and complexities in intercultural practices, traditions and organisation impact on the space and place of education. In particular, the paper emphasises that the orientations of Sámi world views, or Sáminess, matters not only in how the space and place is seen, but also felt, perpetuated and treated, as a learning environment. This final paper opens up for further engagements with indigenous and culturally marginalised viewpoints and perspectives in educational processes, use of space and organisation, through policy.

We are excited at the scope on educational space and place addressed in the papers in this special issue and look forward to ongoing discussion, further investigation and examinations of other diverse views and practices.