Performed by the Space: The Spatial Turn.[1]

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 16 (3): 35-53, 2000.

Peter Appelbaum

Arcadia University

appelbaum@arcadia.edu

I created a vacuum on this planet. Deliberately. I could be president of a college, I could be in college, I could be in Congress, I got the kind of mind to do it. But I stood back, and therefore, where I should be, I am not!

Now, they have a vacuum. Nature hates a vacuum, so other things are rushing in there that are not good. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread ... !” So what they gotta do? They have to listen to what I have to say. I can tell them what to substitute for the vacuum I created. I’m a scientist. I conquered a planet without a gun. Simply by not being in place. You know ... for want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a battle was lost. Well now, that can apply to me and my strategy to defeat a planet that’s doing wrong.

--Sun Ra, interviewed by Graham Lock

http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/AACM/ITUTUSITE/SCIFI.html

***

Curriculum studies has taken a “spatial turn:” the concept of space is a nexus of philosophical perspectives, ideologies of social justice, and curriculum orientations in most discourses on educational theory and classroom practice. Feminist pedagogies, critical pedagogies, post-heterosexist and post-colonial pedagogies have been partly responsible for this “spatial turn.” Each of these constructs “space” as something to be created. Often, these pedagogies collect in cracks -- fissures of theory and practice -- and then crystallize, splitting open a space of possibility (de Beaugrande, Bhabha, Britzman, Grumet, hooks, Martusewicz, McLaren, Miller, Willinsky). Creating a space of possibility is also a feature of some phenomenological and existential pedagogy. Here space is something preserved or inhabited, shared and experienced, possibly lost (van Manen, Olson, Jardine, Smith, Pinar). Images of geography, location, and distance are features of much contemporary discourse on education (Darling-Hammond, jagodinski, Popkewitz, Slattery) and social theory of the last decade (Soja, Vidler, Massey, Harvey, Yaeger). This article interrogates the role of “space” in and of curriculum studies by asking the reader to consider space, not as something to be created, and not as something to be cherished or experienced, but as something which is always there and always experienced. The crucial question is how the space is related to as an object, and what is done with and through the space.

I intersperse a brief historical and cultural critique of space as a discursive element in curriculum studies and classroom practices with a case study of the “pedagogical space” of a particular practice. Using a narrative form (Casey) to build and interrogate theory, I hope to raise questions of theoretical work by developing a discourse of theory and curriculum within practice as refractive inquiry. My own agenda includes destabilizing false dualisms of theory/practice and curriculum/teaching. I start with my interpretation of the recent explosion of reliance on space across the variety of competing and conflicting orientations to curriculum studies. Why this spatial turn? Why at this historical and cultural juncture? And why does the spatial turn construct space as absent until created, or nostalgically recalled, rather than as an object of relation? What possibilities might there be for a critical, feminist, post-colonial, post-heterosexist, spatially conscious pedagogy, a pedagogy that takes space as an object of relation rather than creation or loss?

The Spatial Turn: Where Are We Now?

In what ways are spatial images, metaphors, and discursive practices being used in curriculum studies? I would like to consider three recent and varied statements. The first, taken from Raymond Padilla’s and Miguel Montiel’s new book, Debatable Diversity, is part of a long dialogue that constructs history as memory, working through the difficulties they experienced in constructing a Center for Chicano Studies at an American University:

RP: We need to talk about the ideological framework within which we designed and tried to operate the Hispanic Research Center. There were certain results and relationships that we expected both of ourselves and other Chicano professors who were participants in the center. If you consider out arguments at the time, one of the fundamental ideas was that Chicanos working within universities needed an intellectual space in which we could conduct our work that focused on Chicano issues. We felt that within the traditional departments we lacked the freedom to engage, in an unrestricted manner, the salient issues that required academic attention: who we were, where we had come from, where we were going, the critique of existing knowledge paradigms, and so on. The absence of such an intellectual space penalized us because when we did engage concerns such as these the results often were not well received by our colleagues in the regular departments. Our thinking at the time was that this failure to connect our intellectual concerns with the academic organization caused many of us to be ejected from the university, typically as apart of the tenure review process, if not earlier.

MM: Let’s examine the premise that academic departments are not appreciative of our intellectual products. What evidence do you have for this? They could argue, with some justification, that we were creating very few intellectual products or that our intellectual products were not of high quality. Therefore, from their perspective, the issue is not the thematic content but the quality of the intellectual material.

On the other hand, you do have a point that minority content has not always been acknowledged as an area of study in academia. This, however, is not dissimilar to other areas of study that have had to wait their turn as it were. For example, only a few years ago the study of gerontology or aging was not viewed as an area worthy of study, and the people in this area had to fight hard to get accepted. The same probably applies to woman’s studies and I suppose eventually we will be saying the same thing for gay studies.

(Padilla & Montiel 1998: 177)

My second quote comes from a textbook on elementary social studies:

Welcome to the world of social studies!

(Chapin & Messick, 1996: 2)

And my final quote comes from an essay on recent research in gender and secondary mathematics education, concerning three key characteristics of a mathematics classroom predicated on an inclusive epistemology:

1) the learners make the mathematics;

2) mathematics involves thinking about problems;

3) difference and individuality are respected.

In brief, the first implies the centrality of the students working together to produce as well as criticize meanings, with the mathematics being co-constructed by a community of validators. The second reflects the understanding that a problem-centred curriculum involves the need to take risks, which is a precondition for imagining a different and more just world and that posing and reposing problems helps uncover the linguistic assumptions hidden in their original formulation. Both of these suggest in turn the need to make room for students to move and breathe rather than to experience the current and increasing demands of performativity and patterns of surveillance. Finally, respect for difference and the individual presents a fundamental challenge to the ‘feudal’ discourse of ability, a keystone of the current discourse of schooling in mathematics and underlying all its practices.

(Povey 1998: 139-40)

Each of these, culled from unrelated fields of research and scholarship, is a pedestrian example of the role of SPACE in the construction of meaning for curriculum studies. What they do for me is help me to note some key variations in the ways that spatial images and discourse construct -- to use a metaphor of space myself -- fields of possibility in curriculum theory and educational studies. They highlight the notion of a "centrality," a source of energy as the crucial element in the production of space. As Henri Lefebvre (1991) writes, "Bodies -- deployments of energy -- produce space and produce themselves, along with their motions, according to the laws of space." (p. 171)

Most often I believe, space in this discourse is a gift: it is something given to others for them to use. In this sense it often becomes a property of people, and can get confounded with issues of rights and responsibilities. It might be an intellectual space given by a university president to a group of faculty that feels excluded from the institution; or it might be a world of joy and ceremony bequeathed to others, as the social studies might be thought of by an emerging practitioner; or indeed it might be a generous chance to learn something in ways that are finally possible rather than exclusionary. Janet Miller helps us understand such a way of thinking about spaces: she heroically or stoically or romantically bestows a space upon teachers that is theirs to cherish (Miller 1980, 1990); teachers, for example, are given a space within which they can find their own voice. Here both the giving and the use of that gift express both the production of space and the laws of that space, the field of possibilities that emerges in the production.

Personally I have never thought of space as a gift. First of all, one purchases gifts for others (or the self) with one idea in mind but that other, or even oneself, does not always use gifts in the spirit or with the purpose we give them. This seems to be what is endemic to the Tylerian perspective: we teach something but what is learned? What if outcomes are achieved that we did not intend or test for or plan for? If space is a gift then the giver indeed has property and it must be definable as a thing by someone -- well, perhaps by two people, the giver and the receiver. How can I bestow something on someone that is not necessarily interested or wanting or knowing how to use my gift, or has quite enough of it, thank you? I tell my daughter, I’ll leave you alone in your room; do something terrific; I’ve given you paints and books and so on; if you fail to produce something there is something wrong with you. An activity I once regularly used in an introductory course in a certification program was quite similar: I gave students paper strips, rubber bands and tape, and asked them to do something creative in small groups. After each group shared what was “creative” about what they had done, we generated a list of attributes of “creativity” that could be components of a classroom activity, or attributes of the teaching experience itself: the more of these attributes we could use to describe an activity or our own teaching, we declared, the “better” that thing we described. So I “gave” my students an “opportunity” to construct my own definition of “creativity.” Is this a gift? Were we really “constructing” a definition?

Performed by the Space

The issue of my narrative is the performative nature of differentiated identities (bhabha): the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, “opening out,” remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference. In the narrative, space becomes an object not just related to, and the classroom and the curriculum as objects shift the pedagogy. In theoretical terms, behaviors changed; in terms of practice, signifiers of difference found their agency in a form of the “future,” where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory, and marginalized or minority identities “performed” time.

Perhaps then we could declare space an edifice: something that people build or craft, like a cathedral or a bridge. A Chicano Studies Center, a social studies classroom, or a feminist mathematics classroom may become for us a spiritual place, a connecting arch from one world to another, a platform for political posturing. Now we can begin to talk about repairing the space, or desecrating it, or destroying it. Some spaces become closed or under construction. In a Foucauldian moment we become intellectual terrorists, and blast open the conceptual bridges of common sense in order to make it possible for new edifices constructed out of the rubble of the ruins.

This last interpretation is where I locate (space again!) feminist and other post- theories of educational studies, filling the cracks and fissures, expanding in the spaces that allow for initial collection and flow, and eventually weakening the dominant structures of intellectual life. De Beaugrande (1988) writes, “feminist and post-heterosexist curriculum and pedagogy collects in cracks, fissures of theory and practice, then crystallizes and splits open a space.” (p. 258) While Martusewicz (1992) writes that “... to live as a feminist educator is to live a tension between a critical theoretical space and an affirmative political space. It is within this in-between, this ‘elsewhere’ that we must seek the educated woman.” (p.155) And here is where we find many theorists of curriculum, including those heirs to John Dewey and Maxine Greene, who write and talk of public spaces built by the members of a community, those who build together a democratic space of social action. Madeline Grumet (1988): “We need to create safe places, even in schools, where teachers can concentrate, can attend to their experience of children and of the world, and we need to create community spaces where forms that express that experience are shared.” (p. 90) Figgins & Ebeling (1991): the “TalkHard space,” a messy, painful, and hopeful place where irreverence is allowed to do its work and their experience of pedagogy is reflected on by students who need not negotiate the power relations of the traditional classroom in order to speak.” (Pinar 1995, p. 588) Fine, Weis and Powell (1997): "These spaces … are sprawling, challenging, safe, and threatening; they open as a site for critical work, analysis, and sewing together fragments of self, marginalization, and questioning. Most profoundly, perhaps, this space poses a threat to the larger systems within which young people's lives sit." (p. 250)

Arcade

It was a ratio arcade. Seven machines of edutainment were set up around the room, and people were racing to the one that looked the best. But there was no history to this arcade, since none of us had played these games before. Furthermore, none of us knew that this was an arcade yet: We had come to a course on mathematics and science education, and none of us brought quarters in our pockets. For seven minutes, groups explored the center to which they had gravitated: At one place, participants “read” a book that seemed to be zooming in and out of a location with every page turn (Banyai 1998); they were asked to create their own books as a prize. Others were carefully creating a prototype building with rainbow cubes, and then a scale model of a different size. Around the corner the teacher had morphed into a magician performing a card trick that the audience was challenged to figure out. Still others were turning rubber bands into “percent calculators” while a group nearby was designing a way to introduce eye examinations into an elementary classroom. And yet another group was investigating the important variables involved in the area of sight visible with different sized scope tubes. When the seven minutes were up, everyone was disappointed: give us more time! We're not finished! We’re just beginning to understand this! Come back later after you’ve waited in line, they were told. Every seven minutes, a person’s time was up, no matter how well they had played the game. Others were waiting.

Of course, if space is an edifice, then it is built in a space that allows for that edifice to be constructed, and the materials for that edifice come from somewhere. So that we have built a space of a space we did not speak of. How could we build a space without taking space into account? If a space is a bridge, then what does it connect except other spaces we have not yet discussed? And if we build it, can we change it? Can we say we built it poorly? In many ways this form of talking about space invites many new questions that need answers themselves, and so it remains a powerful image of educational space. If I am desecrating a space, then I am taking on a space with a history and a cultural context, a space that is already there to be desecrated: who built it and why? How? Why there? And like the gift, a space may be built and then used in a way the builders never intended: there is the chance that the users of a space can “use” it as a cultural or political resource, turning it into a potentially unrelated space.

Dinner Party

When everyone arrived, I had laid out a couple of options for them to try. But I did so in a way that was both inviting and not inviting, for I had no desire to require them to taste my treats. I just hoped they would find them intriguing. The group straggled in after their long day at work, finding friends and new people they had not yet met. Soon people started to talk, about the traffic, about their ongoing assignments, about the upcoming comprehensive examination. “Would you like to try this new way of playing mancala?” I asked Viola. I asked this in the same way that I might offer tartines chevres to guests at a dinner party in my home. “Come, Nancy,” called Viola, as she turned her head. “Let’s try it.” “Shareefa might want to try this one too, have you met yet?” “No, somehow we haven’t had a class together yet,” noted Shareefa, as she joined the group; “Let’s find one more person, and we can play in pairs.” I walked away, content that they had met through the mancala game. Who else might find a friend here? Perhaps I could suggest Traverse to both Sal and Fatima ... Later, we would sit together for the main meal: A Jasper Woodbury episode on laser disk.

A special space is a frontier, and indeed we have Star Trek to thank for the slogan of this interpretation, that space is indeed the FINAL FRONTIER of curriculum studies. Space is something found, not given or created. It is to be explored and discovered, and has colonialist and imperialist legacies. It could also be hidden or invisible, and it is out of this latter notion that post-colonial narratives of space emerge. The social studies are a world to be discovered, and oh, what an adventure it will be! Chicano studies are only just found, and wow! What we will be seeing now that our center is established. And my! What a mathematics classroom becomes, once we unleash it from the shackles of an oppressive, anti-inclusive epistemology! Phenomenologists sometimes sound like they are exploring a frontier, as when Margaret Olson writes, in a “Room for Learning,” (1989) of how she avoids a discussion of efficient employment of classroom resources in order to focus on questions regarding the pedagogical nature of pedagogical space (p.178); the Star Trek we encounter is Deep Space 9:

It is a shared space. The contents of the room hold personal meaning for all who inhabit it. ... The presences of teacher and students pervade this space, not as isolated individuals, but as a mingling of thoughts and actions, each enhanced by the other.” (p.183)

David Jardine:

The children all around us, then, are not given objects with certain properties, but persons about whom and with whom we must decide how to live our lives. ... This is the sphere of practical understanding, the sphere of living our lives together with children and thoughtfully, asking after what is best for them and for us, deciding ... what should we do? (p.185)

Salon

When Peter told us we would be discussing this book, I figured I’d scan it over the weekend and come in with a few questions that would provoke him. I know it’s easy to do: just start in on the fuzzy math versus meaningful math debate again, and the class will fly out from under him. Then we can see how he amusingly returns us to the discussion he wanted to have. So I picked up the book Sunday night and -- yikes! This stuff was incomprehensible. I called MaryEllen. What is this stuff ABOUT? No, I don't get it either. Yeah, one page of each chapter is enough for me. I don’t know. Well, see ye’ on Tuesday.

Tuesday night we sat in a circle around the table -- somebody had brought chips and guacamole; somebody else had brought ginger ale. The discussion was funny: I keep expecting the lecture, but instead here we were chatting about a book we had all (?) “read,” and the questions were ones the STUDENTS posed. Peter would take his turn declaring an opinion, but he never tried to teach us anything or win an argument with us. He seemed to relish having a good time listening to each of us. One thing he seemed to be working on was getting each of us to feel like what we had to say was at the center of the discussion we were having -- I think everyone felt like they had made a good point. I know I wanted to come back next time, either for the conversation or just to be there with the others. It was like going to my great aunt's house when she had people from around town over for coffee and cake. They would talk about important things and leave knowing Aunt Edith wanted them to come back.

In some ways, we might say that this shared form of space is really a special case of the space as edifice. For example, space as a modernist meaning maker might be juxtaposed with space as a (post)modern web or network of links to be explored and surfed. But I see it as more fragile, more like a spider web rather than a skyscraper. In “Who Has the Floor?” Deborah Britzman (1989) wrote of the processes of intersubjective critique among herself and her students. She focused on ways in which she worked with students as well as ways in which students worked with her to reproduce and challenge traditional relations of power and authority. The “floor” was conceptualized as relational, and thus, as necessarily infused with a diversity of cultural expressions and productions which enabled students and the teacher to construct their educational and lived worlds. In this way a web was an edifice both to craft and explore.

Workshop

Taking Alan Block (1999) seriously, I wanted the space of the education to be an object to which we related. But I also wanted my students to try to use this as a tool of curriculum theorizing and curriculum development. What could that mean? First we tried together to create experiences in our class in which we acted so as to evoke a relationship with the space. So that I planned a night when the experience was one of being at an arcade. Here the arcade “performed” the students: they acted as if they were at an arcade. Of course I never imagined that the classroom space WAS an arcade, or that it could compete with an arcade for having a good time. Instead I used the arcade image as a creative tool for constructing a space of education that would “perform” the participants. Later I went on to create a salon atmosphere periodically as a component of the class meeting, and an art studio atmosphere, in which students were busily at work on their own creative productions.

This was a course for experienced teachers in a master’s degree program, entitled “Creative Tools for School Mathematics.” Most students expected a beginning graduate course in manipulative materials and how to use them. They were pleased on the very first night when I mentioned technology as well as manipulatives, but they were a little confused when I also suggested that “tools” did not have to mean physical things that we use, that tool could refer as well to a way of thinking as long as it helped one to accomplish a task, and was used in such a way. Thus did we enter a period of three semesters in which I asked teachers to examine the notion of the classroom space, and to use theorizing about the classroom space as a creative tool for school mathematics. The reception was mixed, and mostly muddled. By orchestrating activity, my initial attempts to "do" space as curriculum constructed students and ideas as things moving through or in and out of the space of our classroom. But we’ll share that later. Right now I want to introduce you, through a narrative of my work, to a mode of theorizing in practice that problematizes the relationship to the classroom space. It is not a place but an object, writes Alan Block, and I take him seriously.

Curriculum often uses metaphors of space in yet another style when it frames things as the movement of particles through a space, and in turn bases assumptions on Cartesian systems of location, or even in terms of the location of culture (See bhabha 1994). jan jagodzinski (1992), for example, studies six layers of aesthetically embodied skin, through which he theorizes curricular form, lines employed as maps that become in practice reality.

Curricular outlines as maps are the necessary starting point. It is only when the journey is plotted with precision that they become programs of repression. (Pinar 1995, p. 161)

Deborah Britzman (1999), too, finds solace in such a space. If we are to bring the body back into theory and practice, we must posit the geopolitics of sexual space -- "global migrations, global displacements and traveling, and how these movements produce sexuality."

When bodies move, more than the scenery changes … travelers perform sexuality differently in different spaces … "sexual landscapes," or the geographies of sex, signal something about the polyvalence of the traveler's body and something about the polyvalence of cultural meanings. (p. 380)

Thus, as Britzman understands it, theories of sexuality as movement open very different conceptualizations of safer sex pedagogies. The sites of safer sex pedagogies are in this way "expanded to the travel agent, the barber, the cosmetic counter, the grocery store: all places where bodies travel, meet, and care for the self." (p. 380) Seen this way, curriculum and pedagogy is an issue of relocating bodies, reassigning positions of culture, gender, age, neighborhood, and so on.

We can see the attraction of this way of conceiving space. It helps us connect with power/knowledge/desire/pleasure, and all that it entails. Thus Suzanne de Castell (1999)can articulate for us:

When teachers instruct students to "find their place in the text," they invariably refer not to the actual reader's own place, the place that only readers can find for themselves, but to the place in which the teacher, acting for the institution, seeks to position them. (p. 408)

It is a simple step from this construction to the precious little space that exists in such institutions for what de Castell notes as the sanctuary of the always ambiguous text, "a place for subversive readings, for readings "against the grain," readings that are not only against the grain of the text, but against the grain of the world -- a sanctuary for identity formation which is both rare, then, and vital to our survival." (p. 408) The next step is to focus on this "reading of the text," to note with de Castell the place of the text within the "post-literate" culture, to move within that space and encounter the text itself as a kind of place, and further to occupy this "literate space," finding oneself within such a space. Without a doubt, a teacher's organization of time and space it intimately embroiled and erotically intertwined with power relations and the production of knowledge (Manke 1997).

The enormity of it all calls increasingly important attention to the "ambiguity that must be our destination in all our journeys through literate space" (de Castell p. 408)). Here we enter a new mode of relation. The problem with ideology is that it is so all-embracing that even a "new mode" can be reinterpreted as a mere shift in a kind of space. I do not intend that here. I intend a significant change in the object of relation, away from things in the space toward the relation with the space as the object. This still includes stuff like identity formation in a way, but it avoids the unified identity required by location. And it still includes other stuff like marginality and the politics of difference, but I want to call attention to the importance of these issues in ways that are not trapped in the prison of "space."

I am using what Marla Morris (1999) calls a ludic strategy. A cyborgian pedagogy. And with her I ask for teachers to "not only tear down assumptions that may serve to oppress, but also inject creativity back into the classroom." (p. 422) Morris' "passionate construction" is, she writes, "an uncertain space, an occasion for uncertainty." But most importantly a ludic pedagogy re-interprets and re-contextualizes visions of an uncertain horizon. In doing so, I ask that we break out of the "vision" ideology itself, because if we do not, we are always back to our ironically disempowering "spaces of possibility."

Ludic strategies teach that pedagogues might walk a path without a path. As an educator I might carry on a shared conversation, a shared dialectic without resolution, without resolve. A cyborgian pedagogy is a monstrous space, an uncertain space, a funny, ludic space, a ludicrous space. This shape-shifting space is a place where teachers and students learn as they unlearn, discover as the uncover. A ludic pedagogy is also a place of resistance. A cyborgian pedagogue is resistant to uni-forms, uniformity, conformity, comfort, domestication, uniform knowings, standarized curricula, standardized testings, standardized knowings. (p. 422)

Sun Ra captures for us yet another perspective on space. His vacuum is related to Jacques Daignault’s curriculum as “gap.” By phrasing curriculum as thinking, Daignault implies an opposition to any reification or belief in representational thought. As with jagodzinski, for Daignault curriculum or thinking is always moving, diversifying -- in Deluezian terms, it is always nomadic. Curriculum does not exist but happens: “Curriculum is beyond words, that is what I say; with words, that’s what I do.” (Pinar 1995 p. 483)Here space is no longer a space to be filled but instead becomes an important emptiness. As Pinar writes (1992), “To let me be” can mean to permit some space of separation: “a thought, a field, a relationship, is never ours alone; it is theirs as well.” (p. 93) And Langeveld writes of places where children act as children, where they have their own place (for a recent discussion of this, see van Manen & Levering 1996).

Studio

I didn’t find a lot of serious discussion about my individual confusions until we got to that last semester. We would have that open work time, something I might have done in my own classroom back at school but originally found silly for myself at graduate school! I grew to love that time: we would work on math problems, or use the time to work on our group projects. The best thing was when we would get stuck and really wanted to talk with somebody. We could do that, but even better, we could ask at the meeting time for advice: I could say, this is how far I’ve gotten and I’ve tried this, or that, and then say, what do you think? People would help me see how much I had already accomplished, but they really could help me think through the best way to rethink what I was doing. Sometimes I would change what I was doing; sometimes I would be able to decide I didn’t need their advice after all.

Space is also the distracter from the space-off -- the space not seen through the lens of the space seen, or heard/not heard, and so on (Appelbaum 1999). As Teresa de Lauretis has written (1987), if a view is nowhere to be seen, not given in a single text, not recognizable as a representation, it is not that we haven’t succeeded in producing it (p.25). It is possible that what we have produced is not recognizable (to us precisely) as a representation that could be perceived. De Lauretis borrowed the term “space-off” from film theory in expressing the space of feminist theories of gender: the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible. She noted that classic commercial film erases the space-off within a narration. But avant-garde cinema has shown the space-off to exist concurrently and alongside the represented space; this is done by remarking its absence in the frame or in the succession of frames, showing it to include not only the camera (the point of articulation and perspective from which the image is constructed) but also the spectator (the point at which the image is received, reconstructed, and re-produced in/as subjectivity). The (at least) two spaces are not in opposition or placed in a sort of competitive relation themselves; they coexist concurrently and in contradiction, simultaneously in harmony, counterpoint, and cacophony. To inhabit both spaces is to live a contradictory tension. This is, indeed, the condition of education: the critiquing quality of its theory, and the positivity of its practice. A negotiation of terms for a Center of Chicano Studies is a study of the politics of university funding and organization; an entry into the teaching of the social studies is a statement of bureaucratic policy; a fantasy about gender and the ideal secondary mathematics classroom is a careful commentary on class and race.

Rave

This one I wasn’t sure of, because I was concerned about how my students would feel if they thought they were not in control of the situation. If others carried them along intellectually, and they could not think ahead, but were forced to merely enjoy the experience, would they in the end enjoy the experience? An “authentic” sense of “being there,” of losing oneself in being there, was something that all teachers would hope for in their students: but my students in particular -- the graduate students who were teachers --seemed intent on always keeping a comfortable distance. They did not enjoy risk taking at the beginning. That last semester, we did a lot of group problem solving activities in which we were not analyzing the situation but were part of that situation, and I think this was a start.

One caveat is required: the notion of edifice is particularly dominating because educational discourse emphasizes the doing, the agency of the actors of education, and justly so if we want to note the potential for change and transformation. And this is the mode for most educational discourse. The edifice thing is a big thing, however. One can (these days?) “build” organized systems as much as building or bridges -- create a wetland in Montana to make clean-up of heavy metals easier, for example. Likewise, one “builds” genetic mutations, bombs, targets, and so on, and markets, stores, engines of capital. So, like architects we who think about space construct culture. jan jagodzinski calls space “the lived experience of the cosmos, and in this sense represent[ing] the architecture of a culture.” (p.161) The space-off of the culture is the independent line that works in non-relation to the home/homelessness dichotomy, the nomadic experiences that refuses to enter into the line of the culture.

Workshop

First the students had to think of an image for the classroom space. We brainstormed together: vacation tour group; birthing center; hospice; triage unit; theme park. In their groups they tried to work out how these could be used as maps of the space and as lenses of interpretation (refraction) and reflection on the classroom activity. The problem with this, as we were to learn, however, was that this treatment of the images as maps turned the space into something that is constructed, something that we can make. Once we make this space, we theorized, we could enter that space: The teacher could be the tour guide, or the triage nurse, or the midwife. The students would be tourists, patients, or birth a painful but creative new life form. The danger though, was that we were no longer evoked by the space. We were performing the space. And when we tried it, it was very artificial. In this respect, we learned that performing the space results in an extra layer in which the participants are then performed by the space as another space: the space is actually a space of performance of a space. In other words, we reproduced the common problem of education in which the students and the teachers “perform” school, negotiating ways to “look like” they are “doing school” but are really just getting through the day. Here we were performing a new performance of school, but were not successfully changing the nature of school experience, just the way it looked as a performance of that school.

For Alan Block, the performance itself defines a “space” made “real” by the performance. So that one saying a prayer at the edge of a stream turns the bank into a temple. Tying a person to a tree turns a wooded lot into a prison. “Doing School” in a typical classroom makes a prison or a torture chamber. In Tangled Up in School, Jan Nespor (1997) writes that bodily movement itself organizes space: Nespor distinguishes between the body as generator of space, and the body as an object in a space defined by administrative or technocratic practices. Drawing on the work of De Certeau and Lefebvre, Nespor notes that much of contemporary school experience is like sending children up to the top of a skyscraper to learn about a city, whereas a key part of the process of living in a city is being there in the city and controlling one’s body in that city. Instead of living primarily in their immediate, local settings, children, writes Nespor, begin to take place in abstract spaces defined by text and representation. Nespor calls for an understanding of bodies in space. He writes of the relationship to the space. But Block is describing something I believe is more compelling: it is not about abstraction or presence, about the distance of the observer versus the experience of participation, although this is of course an important distinction. For Block, it is about the space that emerges both as abstraction and as bodies. Following Block, one could go to the top of the skyscraper or live within the city, and both might be educative or miseducative. What is important for education is the space of relation in either case.

Theme Park

What is it like to experience a theme park? This seemed like a good question, since we all knew that thematic units were expected of several of us back at our schools. Could there be a connection beyond the common word between thematic units and theme parks? Here the dilemma became apparent to me as the instructor of the course. It was the second semester with this group: they were negotiating among and across the boundaries of their identities, and they were all multiply-identified -- as teachers (of a grade), as teachers (of a subject or of a self-contained classroom), as graduate students, parents of children (of different ages), or non-parents or adoptive-parent-hopefuls, and of different racial, ethnic, and classed perspectives on the role of education in their own lives, the lives of their students, and the lives of their family members. What experiences of theme parks had we all had, and how had we had them? This became a key question. Thus the space of theme park investigative team performed our entry into the identification of areas that evoke continual and contingent "opening-outs" of boundaries between and among ourselves. There was no way to claim any sense of simple agreement, nor did we find it necessary to do so.

For Lefebvre (1991), social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products. It instead subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity (p.73). Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others. Among these actions, some serve production, others consumption. The whole enterprise of "producing space" is a construction of an ideology whose history includes Cartesian reality, and perspective as an axiom of truth.

The Moment

One feature of a theme park is that the visitor comes occasionally, not every day. It is a “special” event. Another is that rides do something to the rider: the rider is the passive recipient of surprises and scary things they know (in the back of their mind) cannot hurt them. What experiences can happen at a school that do something to the students mathematically, that surprise and scare them in a way that is clearly not threatening?

Lefebvre identifies Leibnitz as the key to understanding how space "in itself" is neither "nothing" nor "something" -- and even less the totality of things or the forms of their sum. For Leibnitz space was indeed the indiscernible. In order to discern something, he required axes and an origin, and an orientation of those axes, and thus he generated the requirement that space be "occupied" in order for it to "exist."

Early on, my students, who were the teachers, would have thought to have us pretend we were on a trip to a theme park. It would be a fantasy event. As we entered the room, we would role-play paying an entry fee, and then various centers around the room would have roller-coaster-type names. At this point we now understood our purpose on two new levels: First, we were not pretending to go to a theme park, but using our remembrance of theme park experiences to search for curricular organization that evokes the “way of being” at a theme park. Second, we knew that we could not create the space to be entered. The classroom could not be set up ahead of time to evoke an experience mapable to a theme park day. Instead, we as participants had to be called upon to relate to the “space of education” in a way that might be comparable to the way we enact our relationship with a ride at a theme park.

There is a tension to deal with in curriculum theorizing, which grows out of an historic expectation. Curriculum takes a perspective out of which grows specific aspects of educational practice. If we persist in this originary conception of curriculum theorizing, then we are tying ourselves to Leibnitz' origin and axes. We will only be able to see space as a place created by movement of bodies through this space. So we will end up perpetuating a way of understanding curriculum that does not allow us to focus on the relationship with the space of pedagogy as an object. And it is here that I find the greatest challenge in working through some "new way of thinking" that tries to avoid old lacunae. Lefebvre writes,

Unfortunately a metaphor cannot do duty for thought. We know that space is not a pre-existing void, endowed with formal properties alone. To criticize and reject absolute space is simply to refuse a particular representation, that of a container waiting to be filled by a content -- i.e., matter, or bodies. According to the picture of things (formal) content and (materials) container are indifferent to each other and so offer no graspable difference. Any thing may go in any 'set' of places in the container. Any part of the container can receive anything. This indifference becomes separation, in that contents and container do not impinge upon one another in any way. An empty container accepts any collection of separable and separate items; separateness thus extends even to the contents' component elements, fragmentation replaces thought, and thought, reflective thinking, becomes hazy and may eventually be swallowed up in the empirical activity of simply counting things. The constitution of such a logic of separation entails and justifies a strategy of separation. (p.170)

Birthing Center

A birth is a painful, frightening, and exhilarating experience. One parent is evoked by the encounter as birthing parent, the other as observers/supporters. The midwife’s role is to witness and to ease the painful, horrifying, joyous event. My experience working with teachers searching at first for concrete lesson plans, working with them on issues of classroom space, was indeed the creative and threatening experience of birth. And indeed the birth of new ideas and forms of relationship has transformed each of us after the life-changing encounter. Now: it’s never too soon to talk about psychotherapy. If the space is an object related to, then how can we theorize the psychoanalysis of educational space? How do we play out the work of therapy and object relations in the interplay of curriculum theory and classroom practice?

"The most pernicious of metaphors," writes Lefebvre (p.297-8), "is the analogy between mental space and a blank sheet of paper upon which psychological and sociological determinants supposedly 'write' or inscribe their variations or variables." Lefebvre argues that technicizing, psychologizing, or phenomenologically oriented approaches displace the analysis of social space by immediately replacing it with a geometric -- perceived as neutral, empty, blank -- mental space. In this way, objective space and the subjective image of space -- the mental and the social -- are "simply identified." The ultimate effect of these sorts of descriptions, writes Lefebvre, is either that everything becomes indistinguishable or else that rifts occur between the conceived, the perceived, and he directly lived -- between representations of space and representational spaces. The lesson plan and the lesson, the curriculum outline and the lived curriculum, collapse upon one another in practice and in theory. "The concept of space is not in space." (p.299) Hence the educative moment is not to be found in policy. The theoretical problem then becomes how to relate these spheres to one another, and to uncover the mediations between them, how to rethink curriculum in terms that allow for both preparation and experience.

Group Therapy

Is it no surprise that education has embraced the talking cure? All over the country, standards are calling for increased talk, explanations of arriving at a point in a problem. What my students and I sometimes called studio might more appropriately be labeled a group therapy encounter session. As we laid out for each other our thoughts and associations, our fears and joys of the problem solving that was part of our course, it became increasingly necessary for me, as the group leader, to take on roles often associated with clinical psychologists. As an object-relations theorist, I had difficulties avoiding discussions of my students’ own classrooms as families of origin. Yet, had I not evoked this role for myself? Just as a therapist had once assigned listening exercises to me and my wife, I had been asking these students (of mine -- the teachers in the schools) to practice techniques of clinical interviewing, with the express goal of improving their skills at listening. How else, I wonder, had I set myself up to be evoked by the space as a psychologist, with these students (who were teachers) as pathological or seeking counseling?

Space does have a "content," but this content is such that abstraction can "grasp" it only by means of a practice that "deals with it."

Case Study: The Conclusion

Now this has become a case study, to be relayed in an article. As I put together a narrative I am on my way to my own encounter group. I search for a talking cure, a conference session where I am scheduled to speak about my experiences, and the patterns of thought that emerge as applicable to future analysis of object relations. At this point, I am fairly sure that the space of education is an object to which we relate, and not a thing that we create. It evokes us as participants in an encounter as we ourselves begin the space by being present for the space.

In a classroom in any school, the people there are evoked by the space of that encounter, and if we are not yet pleased, it is because we hope for a different way of relating to the space. It is about time we stopped making recommendations for how to construct new spaces, and about time we started relating to what is there in a new way. This is the space-off. It was there outside our frame all the time. And, by not "being there" in the creation of spaces, but instead being somewhere else, in the elsewhere, relating differently to the space, we and curriculum are performed in an other way.

"Simply by not being in place."

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[1] I want to thank Alan Block, Mary Manke, and Kathy Malu for their encouragement with this work; and I want to apologize to each for all of the advice I failed to take.