Relationships between learning opportunities, arena, activity, setting, and socially produced space. Adapted from Ma & Munter, 2014.
“In tracing physical or embodied practices, student pathways from door to desk to door suggest how schooling is produced as a constrained space. The negotiation of physical location for activity is often predetermined; being ‘on task’ is highly associated with a location in a particular classroom space. Vocabulary study is a tightly ordered space, in which the signs on the page and in the lesson plan (second space) constrain or perhaps collapse onto embodied daily routines (first space). The representation of known word facts on the page and in the dictionary are well aligned with the arrangement of student bodies in rows of desks, embodied positions that are themselves represented and regulated by seating and testing charts. The material scale of vocabulary study is indexed not only in the classroom, but also at a more microlevel in the activity and artifacts related to the desktop (paper, textbook, pen, and individual person). Student work does not simply occur ‘on’ the individual desktop; rather, deskwork contributes to a spatialized meaning of schooled activity and schooled identity.”
References
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