What is Space For?

Towards a politics and a language for the human in education

Keri Facer
Keri Facer (2014) What is space for? Towards a politics and a language
for the human in education, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 23:1, 121-126, DOI:
10.1080/1475939X.2013.839229
What are days for? asked Philip Larkin. And then mused that answering this question would
bring the priest and the doctor running over the fields. If we ask the same question of Space,
this collection of papers shows that an even wilder array of figures would come running over the
fields with their instruments, theories and implements to proffer answers. In this Special Issue
alone, we see architects, educators, software developers, historians, hardware manufacturers,
learning scientists, collaboration researchers and children all offering answers to the question:
what is space for. Or, to be more precise, what is Space in Education for at a time of technological
change? Such diversity of perspectives and disciplines is evidence of Lefebvres (1974)
observation that space is not simply a pre-existing container or backdrop for social action.
Rather, it is a social construction, constantly produced through social practices, social
imaginations, material artefacts and the lived experiences of day-to-day life.
Why, then, have the spaces of education been relatively under-examined in comparison with
the histories of education? Gulson and Symes (2007) argue that it is because Space, in
comparison with Time, is seen as relatively unchanging. It is easy, after all, to point to the spaces
that we designate as schools and say that these have remained constant for at least the last 100
or so years.
Perhaps this explains why it is that education researchers today, in particular those with an
interest in technologies of education, are now beginning to pay closer attention to the spaces of
education. It is because education spaces are visibly and explicitly becoming subject to
disruption through the changing practices that are enabled by digital technologies. The seeming
immutability of educational spaces is being unsettled. Indeed, it would be possible to observe
that the papers in this Issue are concerned in one way or another not with Space alone they are
not ethnographies or geographies of existing spatial practices after all but with the changing of
Space. They are concerned with the design of new spaces (Sutherland et al), with the attempt to
disrupt existing spatial practices through simulation that take students outside the school walls
while remaining within them (Lui & Slotta; Hamaleinen & Oksanen). They are concerned with
rethinking the places of teacher-student encounters (Hamaliainen & Oksanen), with disrupting
the temporal-spatial organization of assessment (Perrotta), with opening up new spaces of
imagination and inviting new voices into the space of schooling (Burke), with reconfiguring
relationships between schools and the world beyond their walls (Sutherland et al; Burke).
These papers are concerned, fundamentally, with changing spaces. What I want to do in this
short reflection on the papers in this Special Issue is to think together about the issues of politics,
language and emotion, which are raised (sometimes implicitly) in these papers. I foreground
these issues because, without them, we risk treating debates on space and technologies as purely
technical issues, as issues of efficiency and effectiveness that can be resolved by a new technical
fix, teaching strategy or architectural sleight of hand.
The politics of space
The contemporary interest in changing educational spaces is not surprising. To unsettle spaces,
after all, is to disrupt boundaries that have often played a role in constituting and sustaining
particular social relationships and identities. Not for nothing have many of the previous studies
of education that do focus on space originated in critical studies of race, disability and gender
(e.g. Gordon, 1996; Karlsson, 2001; Armstrong, 1999). Struggles to enter education spaces have
characterised civil and gender rights movements from America to South Africa to the Middle
East. The production of boundaries, the building of walls, the policing of access to different
spaces has been a fundamental part of the production of inequality between people of different
colour, different bodies and different genders. The policing of spatial boundaries has also been

instrumental in producing ideas of adulthood and childhood, in delineating what counts as

proper educational spaces for children. As Doreen Massey (1998) has argued, the control of
spatiality is part of the process of defining the social category of youth (p122). The granting or
withdrawal of permission to access different spaces whether bars, streets, museums or
cinemas mark activities out as age-related, and in so doing, construct what childhood or
adulthood come to mean.
And this means that we need to pay careful attention when we hear calls to reorganize and
disrupt spatial arrangements. Such disruptions cannot be considered to be simply neutral shifts
in containers for education and social practices, but are part of the shift in modes of production
of education and society (Gregory (1994) Lefebvre (1974)). Indeed, such spatial rearrangements
may be, as Lefebvre argues, critical to the capacity of new modes of production to actually
sustain themselves:
Change Life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing
an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and
1930s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space and vice versa
(1974: The Production of Space, p59)
In recognizing this, we need to acknowledge the politics of space and its transformations in
education. We need to recognize that the reorganization of educational space brings with it
attempts to reorganize social relationships in ways that will better sustain new modes of
production (Harvey, 1973). As the quotations from the body responsible for school redesign in
Sutherland et als paper make clear, the building of schools for the future is not an innocent
building project. Rather it is a project concerned with creating new economic and social
identities, with reconfiguring the relationships between education and the workplace:
Just as the industrial revolution transformed the home and created the school in order to
provide a disciplined workforce for the new factories and offices, the digital and
communications revolution seems likely to transform the learning environment for todays
young people (CABE, 2004,p10)
We can see the struggles that are currently playing themselves out around the meaning of these
disruptions to space and the social and economic relationships that they might support in some
of these papers. Is the rearrangement of classrooms and opening out of spaces described in
Sutherlands paper, for example, a way of constructing new pliable workers for the online
factories of the knowledge economy? Is it about eroding, as Young would suggest, the important
barriers that construct schools as sites of critical reflection upon the world? Catherine Burkes
paper, however, shows us that this is not inevitably the case. She shows how similar
reconfigurations of space that have sought to unsettle disciplinary boundaries or the boundaries
between home and school have held other meanings at different times in the past. She shows
how such disruptions have been concerned instead and at other times, with creating spaces of
solidarity, friendship and fellowship. What the different political meanings of these same
imperatives to change space suggest, is that it is not the physical space per se that determines
the articulation of spatial practices with particular social and economic practices, but the
articulation of the space with other imaginaries, with a set of interpretations and languages
The languages of space
Unsurprisingly, then, papers such as Sutherland and Burkes are intimately concerned with the
relationship between imaginary and lived space, with the disjunction between the ideas of
planners and designers and the lived constructions of spaces by people in schools, with the
struggle over the meaning of these spaces. Questions asked by other papers in this collection
(Perrotta, Hamaleinen & Oksanen) are often questions about why change isnt happening. Or
how it happened in unexpected ways. Or why envisaged disruptions to spatial patterns were
welcomed, thwarted or appropriated (Lui & Slotta, Hamaleinen & Oksanen). Not for nothing do
studies of digital innovation in space draw on metaphors of the scenario and scripts
(Sutherland, Hamaleinen & Oksanen), with their origins in storytelling and dramas. What seems
to have been missing in these less than fully successful experiments, we might conjecture, is the

absence of a narrative to connect the new spatial practices to the ideas and imaginaries of the
educators involved. To begin to conceive of new spatial relationships it seems that we need
something more than everyday practice to assist the imagination. We need tools like narrative or
role-play. We need something to help us make our spaces strange to us in order to make them an
object of inquiry and attention.
And this is where new technologies play a distinctive role in feeding the imagination of
alternative spatial arrangements, in opening up our imagination to the possibility of space as
subject to change. These new tools ask questions of us about how we wish to create space, about
how we wish to live. Whether the train, the bicycle or the wireless network, new technologies
open up the possibility of reimagining the places and relationships between the places where we
live, work and teach (Marvin, 1988). As with good science fiction, technological change serves as
a powerful prompt to the imagination. It acts as a good ethnomethodologist, encouraging us to
make strange our current realities to ourselves. It encourages us to ask questions such as Why
are these the boundaries of the school or university? Why is the classroom oriented in this
way?. Hamaleinen & Oksanens paper, for example, shows the radical disruptions to convention
that are enabled by technologies that pose the question Why shouldnt I learn in virtual
rainforests? . Similarly Lui & Slottas paper open up an imaginary space in which the school
becomes the workplace. These new imaginaries require a new set of questions about just what
counts as the space of the school? As Sutherland, drawing on Young, argues in another of these
papers, it is possible that the space of the school could as easily be understood as the space of the
discipline rather than the space of the building.
This making strange of school spaces that is facilitated by new technologies and fuelled by a
changing socio-economic context, fundamentally unsettles the meaning of educational space and
opens it up as a site for politics, struggle, contestation. And arguably, this Special Issue highlights
the possibility that we are in a period of hegemonic crisis where the meanings of schooling are
increasingly up for grabs. As Sutherland, Perrotta and Burkes papers show, the search for new
imaginaries of school spaces is intensifying and the question of whose voice counts in this search
will increasingly matter. As Hamaleinen & Oksanan, Lui and Slotta demonstrate, often missing in
these imaginaries of future schooling are the ideas and experiences of teachers, which are often
over-whelmed by the creative imaginations of designers and developers keen to explore the
latest technical possibilities.
Such struggles over meaning are visible in the highly divergent language used in these papers
reflecting the highly divergent disciplines and sectors that are now staking a claim to assert the
meaning of educational space. We have the architects with their language of more welcoming
arrival sequences to describe school entrances. We have the psychologists with their discussion
of expectation failures in the encounter with new spaces and technologies. We have the
language of local government education is at the heart of Birminghams renaissance and is
fundamental to supporting the Community strategy. Shocking in its contrast with the highly
technical or instrumental language of such disciplines, however, is the language of young
peoples desires in Burkes paper. Even when mediated through researchers own voices, this
language seems anachronistic, redolent of a different age. It is a language of desire, imagination
and, above all, affect: a beautiful school with glass dome roofs to let in the light.
What such a moment of language does is remind us of the extent to which the creation of space is
also concerned with the creation of embodied emotional relationships, relationships that can be
defined by anger and violence, by love and beauty, by embodied present experiences rather than
instrumental discourses of the future. The emotions of such relationships become strangely
muffled as they are translated into technical discourse. Childrens request for safety (Burke), for
example, becomes a discussion of the role of passive surveillance and form the basis for an
analysis of toilet design (e.g. the architects in Sutherlands paper). The desire for beauty, for the
sheer physical pleasure of daylight (Burke) is inferred but not expressly articulated in
discussions of available light and corridor design (Sutherland). The aspiration for understanding
and relationships (Burke) becomes subject of an analysis of frequency and length of interactions
(Sutherland).
Embodied and emotional spaces

Why does this matter in our discussions of space in education? I have to admit to being
influenced by the various places in which I have been writing this piece in feeling that this
matters. As befits the newly mobile academic identity, constantly adaptive to changing
conditions, Ive been writing this piece in many places: in my office, but also in the cafe near my
home; on a train journey between Bristol and Plymouth. And in all of these places, affect has
mattered. A moment of indecision in writing is lifted into a moment of deep reverie by a view of
rich red cliffs and a startling blue sea with the light of an early spring sun dancing upon it. An
attempt to wrestle with a difficult idea is creatively disrupted and sent in a different direction by
the group of young, learning disabled students who are also using the caf as a planning space
for their next theatre production. An hours quiet writing is interrupted by a colleagues urgent
and frustrating request for a meeting. In all of these moments, my responses are not coolly
intellectual, but deeply embodied, emotional.
If spaces are about creating subjectivities and about creating new relationships between people,
perhaps we need to create a language that allows and permits us to talk about affect, about the
joy of living and the sometimes violence of the encounter between people. Humans are unruly,
messy, they get in the way of the smooth flexible transition from school to workplace, from
workplace to flexible employment. If we want to start designing schools that have the human at
their centre, we need to start searching for a language to discuss such spaces that is not
embarrassed about the affective, the emotional, the embodied and the human. Only with such a
language might we remember that one of the most important aspects of any space is its affective
role. At a time when we can begin to create virtual rainforests for children to inhabit, when we
can construct beautiful outdoor spaces for them to negotiate, when we can produce spaces that
encourage friendship and solidarity rather than isolation and bullying, such language may be
important if we are to really to describe the educational spaces that we want. It will also be
important if we are truly to understand the potential horrors of some of the spaces of constant
scrutiny, surveillance and constraint that are being created in education at the present time.
References
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