By: Samah Sabra, Teaching Development Coordinator, EDC
As my tour of the new Discover Centre on the fourth floor of Carleton’s MacOdrum Library ended, my head was spinning – in the best way possible. If you don’t already know this about me, part of my interdisciplinary social science graduate education was in cultural geography. I had no background in geography when I first started my master’s degree and only then did I discover that studying geography means a lot more than GIS, rivers, glaciers and maps! It was then that I was introduced to the possibilities that open up when we study the interrelationships between space, its meanings and social relations. While there may be more “professional” ways of saying this, my discovery of cultural geography was nothing short of mind blowing and it shaped the doctoral research I undertook in the School of Canadian Studies here at Carleton University. As I walked through the Discovery Centre, that mind blowing experience was reproduced and it was impossible for me not to consider the spatiality of educational culture in a new way.
In my teaching, I often invite students to analyze the ways in which their classrooms were set up in their elementary and secondary schools. What messages about social interactions within those spaces were being communicated to them? What messages about power relationships? What did the configurations of their desks suggest about how they were supposed to interact (or not) with other students or with their teachers? When and how did they learn these unspoken rules? When did they follow or challenge such rules? How did they do so? Despite these questions, I have to admit that I have not spent a lot of time considering the same questions in relation to my own teaching practices. Yet, if such messages were lurking within the configurations of educational spaces, their social meanings were also being communicated to the teachers – and this is no less the case in post-secondary education.
It’s not that I have never thought about the meanings of teaching and learning that are implicit in taken-for-granted configurations of educational spaces. Yet, the Discovery Centre’s mobile furniture, which students can reconfigure in whatever ways are most conducive to their own learning, made me hyper-aware of how rare it is for spaces like this to exist at post-secondary institutions. This, for me, suggested that students were being empowered to design their own learning experiences and, to be honest, it made me happy and proud to have such a space at Carleton.
Indeed, I was delighted at the prospect of teaching or facilitating workshops at the learning lab. Here was a space with no obvious “front of the room,” a space which ideally de-centres the teacher and lets students know that they can collaborate with one another to discover new answers to their questions.
Then came the day that I finally facilitated a workshop in that space: rather than being de-centred as the source of knowledge in that space and miraculously becoming “the guide on the side,” I became a mobile centre. I had the eerie experience of all of the eyes and heads in the room simply shifting in response to my changing position in the room. There was no physical front, there was a moving front, and it moved with me! I found within this experience a jarring reminder that spaces do not simply transform our practices, but that our own practices can transform spaces. In other words, the kinds of activities that succeeded in undoing some of the rigid structures and messages of lecture halls were suddenly too structured and rigid in this new space. I had to learn how to teach or facilitate all over again in this new kind of learning space: as soon as I stood up from one of the mobile chairs, a new structure was imposed within the room. This is not necessarily a bad thing – although I certainly want those in attendance to feel like they can and should contribute to creating the learning space we share, I also need them to follow the (flexible) structure of the workshop.
My point here is that different kinds of learning spaces do reproduce certain meanings and interactions around knowledge-sharing within post-secondary educational institutions, but as with any space, what we do within and how we use those spaces also shapes our own and others’ interpretations of those meanings. This is why de Certeau argued that we can “poach” the meanings of certain technologies, ideas or spaces. It is, I think, why many instructors can successfully incorporate small group work into large lecture halls!
I hope that you will take this blog post, the first of a series about educational spaces and cultures, as an invitation to join the conversation about the various spaces on our campus where we teach and learn. I know that we will not all have the same experiences of these spaces, but we can learn from one another about the different tactics that can transform educational spaces and interactions. And don’t forget to keep track of our upcoming events focused on specific teaching and learning spaces.