ABSTRACT
Schools are contested spaces where social, material, physical, and emotional forces shape how well students belong and flourish. This chapter explores three concepts—encounter, belonging, and environment. Drawing from curriculum studies, critical space-place and material pedagogies, literacy studies, and art/design, these concepts raise important questions related to space, bodies, literacy practices, and pedagogies. The chapter explores these concepts through narratives and examples, with a vision for pedagogical change. It offers possible themes and considerations for actualizing installation pop-ups in schools. The concept of curriculum encounter as pedagogy reorients the nature of the relationship with curriculum. Belonging as pedagogy moves literacy educators to cultivate in students a strong sense of connection, purpose, inclusion, and respect in the spaces/places of the classrooms and schools. In thinking with environments as pedagogy, it becomes more critical about how the school environments may be limiting the students’ access to rich and meaningful curriculum encounters.
