How built spaces influence practices of educators’ work: an examination through a practice lens

In this era of the global pandemic of Covid 19, built spaces for educating have taken on a special significance. As this special issue was underway in 2021, much of our home country of Australia was living under conditions of hard lockdown as the Delta variant spread. Internationally, we saw similar conditions. Schools and universities operated virtually or at skeletal levels. Learning and teaching were undertaken in the home and the conditions that enabled and/or constrained teaching and learning practices changed markedly in a short space of time. There was a wistfulness for old certainties – buildings such as schools and universities took on special significance for their apparent reassuring solidity, shape and form which spoke of traditions of educating practices that had to be hastily remade. In this historical moment the arrangements that rendered possible these educating practices rather than those educating practices were laid bare. Nowhere was this more the case than in the relationship between built spaces and practices of educating. It is this relationship that this special issue explores.

When we proposed this special issue of Studies in Continuing Education, it was pre-Covid. Our intended focus had been to dedicate this special edition to the relationships between changing workspaces and changing patterns of educators’ work and the subsequent implications for educators’ workplace learning. However, as our authors’ contributions reveal, the pandemic has not rendered such a focus obsolete. Instead, it has highlighted the importance of such an exploration and of different conceptual tools with which to carry out this analysis.

Previous research into the built environment of universities in the Global North has examined a range of trends characterised by an increasing corporatisation of academia. For instance, under the purported rationale of a greater cross-fertilisation of ideas, there has been a shift from academics occupying a single office to open plan [OP] and alternative workspaces (Baldry and Barnes 2012; Van Marrewijk and Van Den Ende 2018; Wilhoit Larson 2018). Yet there has been scant research into how such new, open and flexible workspaces enable and/or constrain practices of academic work, identity and relationships, and what may be the subsequent implications for academics’ learning and professional freedoms. Our special issue attends to these important concerns. What is clear from existing studies is that changes to academic workspaces instigate changes to the social, labour, identity, and learning practices of faculty. In turn, these transformations represent significant departures from traditional academic workspaces and the practices that they support (Van Marrewijk and Van Den Ende 2018; Wilhoit Larson 2018). Furthermore, they raise broader questions such as whether the move from a ‘room of one’s own’ has indeed facilitated a breakdown in academic silos and greater cross-fertilisation of ideas or instead led to a form of ‘call centre academia’ (Wolff 2015, para. 4).

In contrast to the small number of studies on built space and professional learning in universities, there has been a sustained scholarly focus on the relationship between space, built environment and student learning in schools. Blackmore et al. (2011) suggest that place attachment and spatial identity is crucial in creating successful learning environments in new flexible spaces, and therefore the focus needs to be on the people in those spaces, not the spaces themselves (Blackmore et al. 2011). However, what is less clear from research in schools is how innovations in built spaces may impact on the work, identity and relationships of educators in schools, and what the subsequent implications may be for educators’ learning. Moreover, the insights from research on schools may or may not be applicable to universities and academia, as these sites have very different practice traditions of labour, workplace identities and learning for both tertiary students and educators. In this special issue, the authors examine how built spaces and the educating and/or researching practices that they engender unfold in the ‘happeningness’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, 29) of diverse sites of universities and schools. This adds to the research on how practices of educating and spatial arrangements interact in schools and universities, while attending to what is distinctive about these different education sites.

In our call for papers for this special issue of Studies in Continuing Education, we invited contributors to examine university or school workplaces that had experienced recent transitions into new built environments, away from previously established workplace environments. We specifically requested that papers employ a site ontological lens (Schatzki 2003) to render visible the changing cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al. 2014) of these built spaces and the subsequent prefiguring of new work practices, relationships and identities for educators. Through the lens of practice architectures theory (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008) or related practice theories such as site ontologies (e.g. Schatzki, 2003), this special issue addresses a need for research on the specific ways in which transformations in educational workspaces intersect with evolving educator work patterns and the implications for educators’ workplace learning. Theoretical resources such as these practice approaches were felt to be particularly apt in capturing these transformations in all their granularity, and in understanding how such transformations are enabled and/or constrained by the site-specific arrangements in which they unfold.

Overview of the papers

We asked each of the contributors to consider these questions in their papers:

• How might we render visible the changing arrangements (cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political) of built spaces in which educators work?

• How can we theorise the effects of these changes on educators’ work practices, relationships, and identities?

• What are the subsequent implications of these changes for educators’ continuing/professional and/or lifelong learning?

Each paper has brought their own unique perspective to the key questions raised above. Broadly speaking however, we have grouped the papers into those which focus on transitions in the school workplace and those in universities.

Beginning with schools, Charteris, Kemmis and Smardon’s qualitative case study examines the implementation of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in Aotearoa New Zealand. These ILEs are ‘designed to foster flexibility in pedagogical approach, deprivatised practice, professional collaboration, and visibility’ (Charteris, Kemmis and Smardon, this issue) and are government mandated. Thus, the authors contend, they represent a hegemonic twenty-first century learning imaginary. Using the theory of practice architectures, the authors explore the power and politics of leading as a practice, examining the orchestration of new work and learning practices for educators in ILEs, as these sites transition from so-called 20th to twenty-first century learning and teaching. Charteris et al. draw on the concept of reflexive modernity to identify contradictions in the work practices of principals leading this pedagogical change linked to the mandated shift in the built environment. They analyse how these practices are in turn entangled with a notionally progressive twenty-first century imaginary. The paper illustrates how practices are shaped through discourses, labour and power relations and contributes to understandings of the implications of changes in built space. Key to their contribution is their observation that ILEs constitute an ideology that reshapes both teaching practices and teacher identity within a ‘velvet cage’ where ‘learners and teachers engage in new forms of pastoral control that comply with market logic’ (Charteris, Kemmis and Smardon, this issue)

Like the previous study, Blackmore and O’Mara’s paper also focuses on how the redesign of built spaces in schools is underpinned by assumptions that such changes will ‘improve’ teaching and learning practices and therefore learning outcomes. However, as their paper argues, although significant research has focused on the design phase of schools, less research has been conducted on transitioning into new buildings, and even less on the pedagogical practices once in the new spaces. Their case studies of ILEs in Australia conclude that for schools to fully benefit from the affordances of the built space and connectivity of mobile technologies, the focus has to be on pedagogical practices and putting the professional learning of teachers first. Their study indicates the importance of the conjuncture of material-economic arrangements such as resources, cultural-discursive arrangements regarding discourses such as twenty-first century ‘learner-earners’, and social-political arrangements such as enabling policies which focus on public school renewal and action-oriented teacher-research professional development. Together, the authors conclude, these conditions shape the conduct of practice, that is, the ‘sayings’, ‘doings’ and ‘relatings’ of teacher professional learning both within each school and across the particular public system.

In the third paper, the international school landscape provides an alternative setting for a consideration of educators’ identity, relationships and work practices. Kostogriz, Adams and Bonar examine how international schools, which are positioned as diverse and separate from the state, bring together expatriate teachers and local hire teachers to negotiate and navigate the socio-material site of work. The authors utilise the term, ‘affective practice architectures’ to explore relational tensions in the two case study schools in China and the Middle East, focusing on the practice-oriented professional becoming of teachers. Through their interrogation of these tensions, which emerge from schooling sites that are characterised by precariousness, culture and power in a globalised and neoliberal world, the authors centre the relational as pivotal in the practice-based and experiential learning of teachers.

The next grouping of papers turns the spotlight on built spaces and professional learning practices in universities. The paper by MacDonald, Diamond, Wilkinson, Sum, Longmuir and Kaukko explores the impact of a faculty move from a modernist 1970s office space to a new building with open plan and alternative workspaces. Using the theory of practice architectures, the authors examine how the professional learning practices of six academics at a range of career stages were enabled and constrained by these new physical arrangements. They analyse the disruption to existing ecologies of academic practice when it comes to learning how to go on in academia as early career researchers. The authors recount how the changed built environment presented challenges in supporting informal professional learning practices and the praxis of ‘becoming an academic’. The paper suggests that new niches for professional learning can be nurtured by working with, around, and against the pre-figuring arrangements of built environments. The paper makes visible the often taken-for-granted ways in which academic practices are shaped by and shape new arrangements for professional learning in response to built environments.

The fifth paper by Langelotz and Mahon explores how changing built environments enable or constrain the everyday professional practices of six academics working in a Swedish university. This contribution examines a shift to virtual environments after Covid-19 forced the closure of workplaces, affording the authors the opportunity to consider the long-term effects of such separations. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, their qualitative study identifies the significance of spontaneity, authentic relationships and embodied interactions in enabling educators’ unplanned continuing professional learning practices in the physical environment, specifically classrooms, staff rooms and transitional spaces like hallways. Langelotz and Mahon argue that the rapid shift to virtual environments, and the uncertainty of how the pandemic will affect academic work in the longer term, raises important questions about the impact of disconnection on academic work practices and unplanned continuing professional learning.

Practice philosopher Ted Schatzki’s paper continues the theme of disruption to educational workplaces and learning environments wrought by Covid 19. In this sixth paper, Schatzki examines the spatial challenges faced by academics in the USA as they negotiated a rapid shift to online teaching from home. Schatzki extends his previous conceptualisation of social life as transpiring as part of bundles of practices and material arrangements (Schatzki, 2002) to encompass spaces of social life as the ‘spaces of these bundles of practices and material arrangements’ (Schatzki, this issue). He argues that built spaces for academic teaching and learning provide a crucial underpinning to educating as a ‘social affair’ and hence, the disruption of education bundles reveals the multiplicity of spatial features on which teaching relies. (Schatzki, this issue) The first part of the paper provides a practice theory account of the spaces of social life. This section provides a crucial conceptual springboard for the second section of the paper, which analyses the spatial aspects of the challenges faced by educators. He examines a range of spatial troubles encountered by educators during the shift to online learning, such as inadequate physical arrangements, which, he contends, collectively prevented the nurturing of an ‘encompassing space’ of educating for academics teaching from home. The paper concludes that an implication for professional learning is that educators’ tacit knowledge of education bundles be more explicitly surfaced, appreciated and acted upon.

Like the previous papers, which focus on the unprecedented impact of Covid on academia, the paper by Variyan and Reimer examines the changed practices and professional learning of academics during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when academic labour was abruptly shifted to virtual and domestic spaces. The authors note that these locations demanded changed practices and new interpretations of what it means to work and learn as an academic. Drawing on survey data and photographs from 20 academics primarily in Australia, the authors explore the implications for academic praxis, understood as morally informed action that ‘people are engaged in when they think about what their action will mean in the world’ (Kemmis and Smith 2008, 4). They contend that the disruption compelled academics to practice differently; however, this was not from a ‘blank slate’ or a ‘fresh start’ but was a process of reworking practices developed within the practice architectures that existed previously within universities, as well as developing new practices in the spaces of online teaching and learning and working from home. Data revealed that academic agency was shaped by factors such as family situations, spaces that could be repurposed for work in the home, and the relative privilege evident in the employment conditions of some academics. Variyan and Reimer found traces of collective responses and collegial practice memories that mitigated the uncertainty of the pandemic. They conclude that such collective adaptations hold out hope for ‘a move beyond reflex towards a bolder reflexivity and more collective imagination around academic labour’ (Variyan and Reimer, this issue).

The special issue concludes with a commentary and reflection by Gert Biesta, whose work on the ongoing ‘learnification’ of education is world renowned (Biesta 2010). He stresses that places are not only physical but are ‘imbued with meaning’ for those who participate within them. Moreover, they happen ‘in and through relationships … of meaning and interpretation … and of power, empowerment and constraint’ (Biesta, this issue). In relation to the practice theory lenses employed in the special issue, he argues for the need to pay attention to how and why language matters when it comes to understanding how sayings circulate, both in educational practice and in the research that we undertake to study such practices. Biesta contends that ‘if practices consist of ways in which we speak, make sense, and try to make a difference, then such sayings really matter’. This is particularly the case in contemporary education, where a current ‘obsession’ with the ‘language of learning’ serves to ‘distract’ from crucial questions about ‘what matters and should matter educationally’ (Biesta, this issue). It is with this salutary reminder to educational scholars and practitioners alike that we commend this issue.