An Art of Orientation: The Possibilities of Learning Spaces

Abstract

Most research on learning spaces in universities considers the influence that spaces have on learners (Boys in Towards creative learning spaces: re-thinking the architecture of post-compulsory education, Routledge, London, 2010; Markus in Buildings and power: Freedom and control in the origin of modern building types, Routledge, London, 1993; Temple in London Review of Education 6(3):229–241, 2008). As such, it can contribute to the pervasive ‘probabilism’ of strategic planning in universities that is dominated by ‘learning management’. But what about the influence that learners can have on spaces: how spaces can learn from them and they can shape spaces? In this chapter, I traverse a range of concepts of learning spaces in universities, all of which construct different ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of how best to construct learning spaces, given the way in which learners relate to the spaces in which they learn. Ultimately, I aim to map critical-creative practices that generate new intensities in, and relations between, bodies, that is to say, new possibilities for learning. From these practices can emerge the contours of a participatory pedagogy that enables teachers and learners to see the university as a place given over to the free play of possibilities, a place of ‘possibilism’ (Hirschman in The essential Hirschman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, p 22, 2003).