ABSTRACT
An important emerging line of research in recent years incorporates considerations of space and spatiality into analyses of power and learning in education (e.g. Gulson and Symes 2007), borrowing from cultural geography. This follows what is often referred to as the spatial turn in social sciences in the 1990s, which has found expression in research in a range of domains (e.g. Hearn and Michelson 2006). In such approaches, space is considered not as a static container into which teachers and students are poured, or a backcloth against which they act, but as a dynamic multiplicity that is constantly being produced by simultaneous practices-so-far. Space is not to be considered simply an object of study, as, for instance, in examining how classroom spaces are designed and used. Space is not the equivalent of ‘place’, which may represent a sedimented region or meaning. Spatiality, the sociomaterial effects and relations of space– time, is, more critically, a tool for analysis. Issues for education and work include how spaces become specifically educational or learning spaces; how they are constituted in ways that enable or inhibit learning, create inequities or exclusions, open or limit possibilities for new practices and knowledge;and how space is represented in the artefacts we use in educational practices, such as maps and pictures. Particularly in new educational arrangements incorporating media and communication technologies, distance and online learning, the ordering of space–time has become a critical influence on learning and working. Spatial theories raise questions about what knowledge counts, where and how it emerges in different time–spaces, how subjectivities are negotiated through movements and locations, and how learning is enmeshed in the making of spaces. They open up new approaches through which to explore educational issues, moving the focus of research from individuals or individual interactions to the ordering of the human and non-human in space–time, where particular spatial practices are enacted as teaching and learning. Thus, in relation to changing spaces of education such as online learning, we can begin to examine both the spatial distancing and distributing that occur, and the new proximities that become possible.
