Re/assembling spaces of learning in Victorian government schools: policy enactments, pedagogic encounters and micropolitics

Abstract

The significant public investment that has been made over the past decade in the educational infrastructure of universities, colleges and schools has prompted increasing interest in the re-consideration of learning and the spaces in which learning takes place. Set within policy interest in Australia in how spaces can contribute to the broader policy agenda of achieving an ‘Education Revolution’, this article takes as its context the Building the Education Revolution (BER) infrastructure programme. Promoting the idea of twenty-first century learning in open, flexible learning spaces, this programme embeds a particular view of pedagogic practice and the spaces in which it is performed. Deploying data from video case studies of how government schools within the state of Victoria are utilising these spaces to improve teaching and students' learning, I trace education policy in action utilising an analytic of assemblage. In the empirical complexity of the passage of BER policy in schools, learning spaces emerge as open and closed, flexible and contained, heterogeneous and homogeneous; pedagogic practices are similarly seemingly paradoxical – learner-centred and teacher-centred, individualised and directly instructional or whole-group. The argument is made that this ontological variability is a site of micropolitics through which the predilections of BER policy are substantially challenged.

Keywords:

• education policy
• learning spaces
• pedagogic practice
• assemblage
• ontological variability
• micropolitics

Notes

1. Reference is also made in policy material to terms like constructivist learning, active learning, inquiry project based learning and individualised learning each of which can be considered to also sit under this broad umbrella.

2. Science studies runs under a number of labels including ‘science and technology studies’, ‘the sociology of scientific knowledge’, ‘science, technology and society’ and ‘social studies of science and technology’.

3. Social constructivism is a theory of knowing and knowledge premised on the idea of human sense-making. It is a broad church and takes in cultural, sociological and psychological perspectives.

4. This programme was controversially scrapped in July 2010, two months after the general election in the UK.

5. In contrast, a fully performative (or enactments) idiom would provide the idea that policy has ‘no ontological status apart from its various acts which constitute its reality’ (Butler, 1990, p. 337).

6. In Victorian Primary schools, ‘seniors’ comprises children at the top-end of Primary school – years 5/6. These children are commonly aged ten and eleven.