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IntroductionIt is impossible to discuss the issue of spatial programming without also referring to the relationship between space and pedagogy. While many functional components of the learning environment - the school - do not appear to be directly connected with the learning experience (secretarial work, filing, staff rooms, toilets etc), we must always keep in mind that the ultimate aim of the school is learning. In a very real sense, therefore, the arrangement and organisation of all of these contextual facilities and spatialities can be considered to also be (or play) a large part of the learning experience. The child in school is not just learning what is in the currriculum, but also who determines the curriculum, how authority is exercised in institutions and how it is expressed symbolically and spatially within the learning environment. These learnings are part of a much broader social conditioning that has its roots in the system of production in society. Let's look for a moment at pedagogial space.
Pedagogical Space The shape and quality of a learning environment can have a significant impact upon the learning process - not just how learning happens, but, more critically what learning is possible, and most particularly what precisely is learned. Letʻs look at a range of different learning spaces. Pedagogical Space: Different forms of pedagogical practice
From their earliest experiences of institutionalised education, children are inculcated with a respect for external authority and an acceptance of conformity and quiescence. In Kindergarten children are "allowed" to assume an informal seating arrangement at "mat time", generally clustered around the teacher in informal groupings that reflect their relationship patterns. From the earliest moments of awareness, up and down have associations with authority and obedience or subservience and this is reinforced in the kindergarten environment. Even in kinderharten, the teacher takes up a position of authority, seated above the infants and looking down on them (teacher on a chair, children on the floor). As time progresses, and the children are expected to know the rules of non-disruptive behaviour, their positions are often changed or allocated by teachers to break up distruptive relationships. In more dramatic fashion, disruptive children are publicly isolated from the group in an exercise of teacher power and authority. In the more successful instances, a teacher will send a disruptive child away from the group. More creatively, the teacher will take the child and sit with him or her in a caring and respectful intimacy. Thus, the continually disruptive child is set upon a course in which education becomes a continuing experience of isolation, alienation and resistance. One can predict that, fifteen years down the road, social and/or cultural conflicts will result. In this instance, the problem is not so much the child's. but the institution's and the teacher's, where exercise of imposed power and authority contrasts starkly with its possible alternatives - dialogue, equality and mutual respect. The imposition of or easing into the education system is designed to gradually instill in the child an awareness and respect for the authority of the teacher. The imposition of authority becomes more apparent as time goes by. and as the child "progresses" through the system. If such authority were to be exercised in its most apparent form in the first instance, the child would be distressed and probaly refuse to return. At Primary School, the role and authority of the teacher is strengthened. Children are allocated (individual) desks, all neatly arranged in rows and all facing the same way - towards the teacher. The symbolic message here is clear. The teacherʻs voice is dominant, and his or her authority prevails. In addition, the spatial clustering of the traditional classroom reinforces a set of values that are linked directly to the social and economic system of capitalism but which are taken to be "normal" or part of "human nature". Such values as individualism, competition, hierarchy, (intellectual) property rights, and so on are part of the cultural learning that children absorb and internalise from infancy. 
Infants exhorted onwards by their competitive parents in a Baby Derby These values underlie prohibitions against "cheating", "copying" and collective creativity, all despite the fact that from the earliest moments of the child's awareness, imitation and modeling are the primary forms of learning.  Exam time is competitive, private and individualistic This symbolic pattern is repeated throughout Primary and Secondary schooling and to the early undergraqduate years of tertiary ecucation, where the directionality of the pedagogical space is reinforced by the elevation and raking of seating, bringing even stronger attention to the symbolic role of the teacher. It is only in the move to Postgraduate education that the formality and directionality becomes more relaxed - in the Semnar situation. Here, students who have already learned and internalised the unwritten rules and codes of educational behaviour in the school culture can be trusted to exercise any real degree of spatial freedom. The young adult, who has, for fifteen to twenty years been told to keep his or her mouth shut until spoken to, who has been prevented from real dialogue or any sense of experiential integrity is expected to expound creatively on matters of public importance. Little surprise then, that that by this time, "thinking outside the square" has become just a matter of thinking inside the slightly bigger rectangle! The most significant among the unspoken rules and codes of academic behaviour is the necessity to listen to and obey the voice of ultimate authority - that of the teacher - who controls and directs all forms of communication in the learning experience, who always has the last word and who functions as the symbolic representative of the State. Hence do we have establish a society and a culture that is afraid to "speak truth to power", and in so doing do we prevent the emergence of true democracy. To see this in its broader context, let's examine another possible pedagogial spatiality. All of this spatial conditioning we have been discussing contrasts significantly with another pedagogical space - the talking circle. The talking circle is a traditional spatiality used by many indgenous peoples. In the circle, there is no one voice of authhority. Learning is accretive and learners take mutual responsibility for the creation of knowledge. Whereas other pedagogies presume the existence of an abstract and objective body of knowledge "out there" which requires to be imparted to the students by the teacher (the knowledge authority), the talking circle recognises that knowledge is always personal and always suituational - that is, always viewed from a personal position that is influenced and shaped by personal experience. Furthermore, there is no one voice of ultimate authority within the talking circle. There are, however rules of behaviour which must be agreed before the circle commences its work. - The direction of communication is always circular and always flows in the same direction.
- Each person is free to speak or remain silent when their turn comes around
- Members of the circle may speak for as long as they like without interruption
- There can be no interrupting another speaker. Participants must wait until their turn to speak comes around again.
- The dialogue may go around the circle as many times as participants wish. Some indigenous groups have specific rules regarding how many "circles" are appropriate. The Lakota, for instance, recommend four.
All of this highlights what Paulo Freire and other educational theorists have called the hidden curriculum - the formal and informal organisation of educational time and sace to instill in the learner the sennse of order that conforms to dominant culture expectations - in this case, the expectations of the teacher who represents and embodies the expectations of "society" and, ultimately the State. What is at stake here, is the question of how much these expecations confine, limit and inhibit the expression and realisation of the childʻs innnate potential. Some educators and theorists like the late A. S. Neill in Britain and the philsopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey in the United States believed that the imposition of this culture of order and authority upon the learner (at every level) has a very significant and effect indeed. Contrasted with the talking circle, this effect becomes clear - partiicularly in the educational outcomes. The Issue of Culture All of this takes on an even more complex layering with the introduction of cultural difference - where the teacher and the child or student come from different cultural backgrounds. Here, the opportunity for misunderstanding and offence becomes magnified. Listen to the experience of sociologist Jules Henry whose experiences of Lakota children in primary school tell a profound story, of those who are shamed into silence by the competitive individualism of their Anglo peers:
“Boris (a Lakota) had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he “think”. Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other students, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralysed. The teacher quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. After a minute or two, she turns to the class and says, “Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appears, and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator... Boris’ failure made it possible for Peggy to succeed; his misery is the occasion for her rejoicing. It is a standard condition of the contemporary American elementary school. To a Zuni, Hopi or D(L)Lakota Indian, Peggy’s performance would seem cruel beyond belief, for competition, the wringing out of success from somebody's failure, is a form of torture foreign to those non-competitive cultures. Looked at from Boris’ point of view, the nightmare at the blackboard was, perhaps, a lesson in controlling himself so that he would not fly shrieking from the room under enormous public pressure. Such experiences force every man reared in our culture, over and over again, night in and night out, even at the pinnacle of success, to dream not of success, but of failure. At school, the external nightmare is internalized for life. Boris was not learning arithmetic only; he was learning the essential nightmare also. To be successful in our culture, one must learn to dream of failure.”
Here we witness in embryonic form the entire panoply of the social relations of production. Boris must accept the authority of the teacher as extrinsic. She tell him to "think", as though thinking were something he does not know how to do. She has the authority, in other words, to prescribe the manner of his thinking. She is, after all, the teacher. She has the power to turn the attention of the whole class elsewhere. Or not. She waits a few minutes, imposing her own temporality on his own, but doing so in an environment of shame in which time will never be his own again. We see the implicit hierarchy in this as well as explicitly in the emerging differentiation between the "bright" children with their hands waving, and the unfortunate and lowly Boris. There is also the intense individualism, inscribed and reinforced by and upon a pervasive ethos of humiliation brewed in the context of no-win public competition and shame. Hand in hand with punishment (and competition) we see by extension of this control-internalisation the development of an increased tendency to conformity, to remaining silent, not wanting to "stand out from the crowd". Few citizens, I am sure, remember a point in their lives when they said to themselves, "I don't agree with having to sell my labour for less than I need to really advance my personal economic circumstances or for what I feel I'm really worth, but I guess I'd better do it because that's what's expected of me", because by then, the preconditioned circumstances of acceptance were largely forgotten historical events. They occurred, most probably, in circumstances such as these experienced by Boris. They happened in one's primary and secondary stages of socialisation, in the home and/or in school, and they occurred not in the form of a rational analysis of the ethos of the labour market, but in the barely-remembered painful acceptance of deep structural principles upon which capitalism depends for its own existence, and which are programmed into social life as normativities, so that their inculcation occurs more or less unproblematically at the surface level of awareness. The ethic of competition is one of these principles, and along with the inculcation of extrinsic authority and an acceptance of hierarchy, and a belief in an individualised self, all calculated to create a sense of conformity to a social norm or an overarching State authority, it represents one of the four cornerstones of the social relations of production by which capitalism reproduces itself. The system of education is the place where each generation is conditioned to accept these social relations and to learn the process and the state of alienation to which they are related as normalised social reality. Layer this over a New Zealand context, in which Maori and Pacific Island children and students exhibit seriously disproportianate "failure" and truancy rates and we may begin to understand the significance of takanga, and the success of the Kohanga Reo, Kura Kaupapa and Wananga learning environments. Theissue, then, is not siomply theprovision and organisation of educational space according to National or International Space Standards or guidelines. but about the quality of space, and its ability to support a democratic pedagogy.
All of this conditioning and "socialisation" has a spatial component. Authority is exercised in space, through space and by space. The authority to determine the space of learning is one of the most fundamental forms in which authority is expressed, determined, reinforced and internalised in the school environment. The "rules of behaviour" always have a spatial component that is exceedingly powerful in direct contrast to its inappearance. Much of this argument is taken from my PhD Dissertation, The Social Construction of an Architectural Reality in Design Education. To download an Abstract, Index and Content list click here.
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