Fluid Space and Transformational Learning

Kyriaki Tsoukala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351810081
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Fluid Space and Transformational Learning presents a critique of the interlocking questions of 'school architecture' and education and attempts to establish a field of questioning that aspectualises and intersects concepts, theories and practices connected with the contemporary school building and the deschooling of learning and of the space within and through which it takes place.

Tying together the historicity of architectural theory, criticism and practice and the plural dynamic of social fields and sciences, this book outlines the qualities and modalities of experiential fields of transformational learning.

The three qualities of space that are highlighted along the way – activated, polyphonic and playful space – as they emerge (without being instrumentalised) through architecturalised spatial modalities – flexibility, variability, interactivity, taut fluid polyphony, multiplicity, transcendence of boundaries – tend to construct and establish a school environment rich in heretical socio-spatial codes.

Meshing cooperative, participatory, intrapsychic and interpsychic dimensions, they invite the factors of learning to a creative, imponderable, transformational disorder and deconstruct dominant conditioned reflexes of a disciplinary, methodical and productive order.

1
Stimulative learning

Like all other built environments, schools are places whose lines, organ-isation and spatial form bear values and meanings forged by the cultural making of our societies. The architecture of educational spaces correlates directly with the institutional framework of the educational system, and by extension with the attendant educational theory and practice. In order, therefore, to understand the architectural idiom that refers to these specific places, we shall turn to the science of education, drawing from that field the concepts that engage, communicate and interact with architecture. In this study our interest focuses on contemporary pedagogy, with its necessary links and references to older currents of educational thought and practice.

Contemporary pedagogy preserves principles of the new education, and at the same time incorporates concepts drawn from other fields, such as communication theory, systems theory, the theories of involvement and emotional experience. The difference between the new education and traditional pedagogy lies in the shift in focus to the dyadic relation between teacher and pupil. The perception behind the teaching and education offered in the institutional framework of the school system is no longer teacher-centred but child-centred. With the developments in the domain of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially with the theories of Piaget, Binet and Bruner, pedagogy evolved into a science of psychopedagogy, absorbing (and transforming) the findings of developmental psychology. The child/pupil is recognised as an active member of the school community – not a passive one – (a Herbartian view later adopted by Alain), an enterprising individual with particular needs (different from those of adults and differentiated from those of his contemporaries). The interest shifts to the child, but remains on the dyadic relation between child and teacher (Ulmann 1982; Fragos 1983). This can be considered as the first radical change in the science of education. The shift in focus to the communication or relation that the child develops with the environment marks the second great moment in the science of education. If the constituents of education theory in the first half of the twentieth century are concentrated in the concept of ‘child-centredness’, what characterises contemporary pedagogy is the concept of communication, even though this is not new, having appeared in the work of Vygotsky (1934/1993, 1997) and Lewin (1959). It is not by accident that the two theorists were acquainted, worked together and met in Moscow, or that Lewin monitored the experimental research work of some of Vygotsky’s associates in Berlin (Bakirtzis 2004). The field theory that Lewin introduced concerns the dynamic of human relations, the interactions and correlations between the members of social groups, the role of communication in the processes of construction of the self. Within the climate of his time, which was marked by extreme cultural and political phenomena, he turned his interest to communication between social groups, to the processes that generate changes and shifts in people’s perceptions and attitudes, and to the mechanisms of resistance to change. His field theory dialectically links the individual with the collective, the psychological with the social, the intrapsychic with the interpsy-chic. The terms ‘non-guidance’ or ‘absence’ of the animator/teacher (whose involvement on the level of both form of communication and content is restricted to the minimum) are linked to the research activity of Lewin and his associates. He studied this dynamic co-existence and its effects on the development and constitution of the individual and blazed new research trails in the socio-psychological sciences.

In Vygotsky’s theory the role of communication in the constitution of the individual is designated by the term ‘zone of proximal development’ and the terms ‘external/internal speech’ and ‘psychological tool’. In his book Thought and Language (1934/1993) he points out that language is not only a means of representing human experience but also the mental tool that is used to construct, organise and re-construct thought. The emphasis is on the concept of tool, something we use to intervene in and modify nature. Studying human evolution, Vygotsky ascribes the beginning of thought to the twofold tool: the technical means of intervention in nature and the symbol which intervenes in functions of the mind. These two levels and kinds of functions of the tool cannot be separated. On the contrary, he stresses the single two-way dynamic coupling of transformations of man’s internal and external nature through and within these tools, and argues against dualism and polarising schemas and against linear dialectics.

Language is considered as an intensely powerful symbolic system which is vigorous throughout life, and especially so in the early stages of a person’s development. Thinking matures through speech, a process which follows the contradictory function that characterises the nature of things in general. That is language releases the child from many of the limitations imposed by his immediate object environment, but at the same time binds him to the system of models and meanings that he ‘speaks’. The use of speech signs from infancy and early childhood creates a robust field of ‘controlled potential’ of the higher psychological processes on the level of internalised speech. Speech mediates the construction of perception, the intervention of memory, and other aspects of an individual’s behaviour. The category of tools of the mind is held to include all products of culture (among them the built space, which marks its own rules of grammar and syntax).

The experiments carried out by Vygotsky and his associates substantiate the arguments he develops in his substantial – despite his short life – body of work. Technical tools-and-symbols involve the social environment in the construction of the higher mental functions. In his study Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes he writes that

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

(Vygotsky 1934/1997: 104)

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural tool that constructs and is constructed in the subject in the process of a dynamic dialectical condition which is also the generative vehicle of forms and transformations.

The concept of the ‘psychological tool’ is solidly linked with that of the ‘activity’ that ruptures the subject’s relation of reproductive automatism with the symbolic condition and detaches him from his alienating relation with the Word. Vygotsky argues through a Marxist point of view that the motives and objectives of external activity set by society regulate the relation of the subject with the other and with his environment. When these motives and objectives ignore the subject’s mental, social and emotional needs and do not involve him in the whole process of the activity by stimulating him with critical questions, then they turn it into a pseudo-activity – a pseudo-activity to the degree that its object and objective and the means for achieving it remain, for the subject, ‘alien’, incongruous and unfamiliar. They are shaped by others, and the subject is used as an engine for the reconstitution of a sterile symbolic order. The motives and objectives of the activities are not social and participatory, but private and operational.

Pseudo-activity results in alienation. Wittgenstein’s term ‘use’, which replaced the term ‘pseudo-activity’ (Newman & Holzman 1996), could be used in this context. The use of language is not the same as language activity. Through simple use language is neutralised and leads to a fetishism, an arid symbolisation that thwarts the very nature of language as a cultural communicational tool that is transformed depending on the conditions in which it functions and takes shape. The use of language makes it a tool alienated from the person, whom it empowers through its symbolisation, reinforcing the symbolic order as shaped at other times and in other conditions which do not correspond to the needs of the individual. This is where the role of the form of the social construct enters, the characteristics that underlie its operation and are a function of the nature of the activity: activity or pseudo-activity/use.

One corollary of such a perception of the nature of activity is Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The ZPD is defined as activity-in-collaboration-with-others and differs from activity with others and individualised solitary activity. This concept – ZPD – denotes the inter-subjective process of an activity during which the child is not required to learn something outside himself, external as regards his existence, but on the contrary makes him not a passive but a dialogical subject who contributes to the approach to knowledge (of the landscape of self-other-and-objects within societal limitary meanings). This complexity, reposing on the participatory, active and communicational form of the activity, constitutes the core of Vygotsky’s thinking and his insistence on the role of learning in the shaping of awareness and radical practice. Indeed, ZPD itself is considered a revolutionary educational practice when it conduces, with other practices, to the non-alienated subject.

Working at the same time as Vygotsky, in the same place but in a different environment, was Bakhtin (Emerson 1983; Pesic & Baucal 1996). Freudian theory aroused opposition in the scientific and academic environment of the young, newly created socialist society. The work of Marx in this early period was an open theoretical system that admitted new facts and redefined itself within the new conditions so as to return to and reshape them. But in accordance with the new world view, which refused determinism and dualism, the relation of the individual with his environment is perceived as a single, open process. The perception of individual and environment is out, replaced by that of the individual-within-the-environment. There is no longer an interaction between two separate elements, but a single ‘interactive/dialectical interchange’ of elements within the same single situation.

Bakhtin attacks the dualism – as he understands it – of the conscious and the unconscious posited by Freud. He argues that conscious-and-unconscious both function and are shaped within the social context. By contrast, the reduction of the unconscious to the Id, to the individual’s instincts and impulses, is what declassifies him socially (isolating him in family triangles). Elements of Bakhtin’s critique of Freudian theory can be identified in Lacan, who seats division and conflict in the Word and not in impulses, with the difference that here, in Lacan’s working proposition, the Word is oppressive as coming from the Other. It is what creates the gulf, the void, the absence, the abstraction of enjoyment. It is what imprisons the subject systemically in alienation. Bakhtin seats the Word in a dialogical environment and charges it with counteracting difference. The dialogical relation is a social-psychological concept proposed by the Marxist anti-psychology (anti-psychology in the sense of the rejection of the psychology that examines the individual as a phenomenon cut off from his social environment). The object of Bakhtin’s ‘hyperlinguistics’ is not formulation but utterance – that is lectical interaction. Language is not reduced to a code (cf. structural linguistics and formalistic poetry), but is seen as a bridge linking persons. By emphasising dialogical lectical activity, Vygotsky and Bakhtin inscribe the Word/communication in historical-social space-time with its characteristic potential dynamic. Human morality is rooted in this sociability: in the recognition of the component element of the inter-human (Todorov 1994).

In recent decades, very interesting views have been expressed by teachers working in this direction within the new framework of environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD), known as a framework of holistic school development (Bakirtzis 2004). Tony Shall-cross’s particularly perceptive view links change in education (and in ways of thinking and acting) with moral commitment, participatory and democratic functioning and co-operativeness in schools (given that the several groups share a common moral commitment for the general good). He compares this last element to the collectivity of the community and consequently to the influence that can be exerted on the school by an external factor. Shallcross links change with the concepts of self-regulation and interrelation. In his words,

In educational contexts this conception of change is concerned with design and aspiration rather than planning and targets. Design and aspiration are open, organic, participative and iterative while planning and targeting are specific, mechanistic, controlling and time bound. In self-regulating systems change requires a trust in the processes of collaborative learning that may be incomplete but is informed by visions that have a few key priorities and structures. There are no single solutions. Pathways to success are virtually unknowable in advance of doing something, so schools have to craft their own actions by being critically reflective producers of change. This transformative, collaborative view of change shuns both individualism and collectivism in favour of interrelationalism. Individualism is inappropriate in school development because of its inherent self-interest and its implicit isolation of people as decision-makers. Collectivism is also irrelevant because it implies that individuals have no power, a view that sits uneasily with liberal notions of freedom. Interrelationalism is not a wet, reformatory compromise because unlike individualism and collectivism it is less concerned with outcomes than with the processes behind them, which is consistent with a whole school process-focused concept of EE/ESD. While the value of individualism and collectivism lies respectively with the individual or the collective, the value in interrelationalism is in the relationships between people.

(Shallcross, Robinson, Pace, Wals & Bezzina 2006: 66–67)

This relation with others, this mutual coordination, articulates the intra-psychic with the interpsychic through affective response – that is through the emotional experience it provokes. In earlier periods, as we know, intellectuals like John Dewey, Francis Parker and Helen Parkhurst (Dalton Plan/projects) stressed the role of life experience in learning (Tsoukala 2000). In the context of those views, however, life experience referred exclusively to the individual functions of the pupil beyond any plane of communication and collaboration with other people. Later, the appearance of social psychology and the sciences of communication influenced educational research, orienting it towards the phenomena of group dynamics. This term became associated with the names of Kurt Lewin and later Karl Rogers (Bakirtzis 1996). Relational-centred education pushed aside discussions of pupil-centred and teacher-centred education, shifting the centre of gravity of educational practice to the communicational and interactive function of the members of the school community. The contribution of educational pioneers in the application of this model, and in the rethinking of the theoreticians who introduced the model, has been decisive. I shall mention in this regard the politicised educational science of Celestin Freinet (with Marxist influences) and the institutional education movement (more complex in its objectives, with influences from Marxism, psychoanalysis and self-management) (Bakirtzis 2004: 164).

In Greece, Christos Fragos, who played an essential and pioneering role in contemporary education theory, creating in the universities of Ioan-nina and Thessaloniki a laboratory environment which fostered some very important researchers into the educational topics we are concerned with, has proposed an interesting dialectical teaching model. Fragos focuses on communication and dynamic interaction among the members of the school community. His Marxist approach incorporates elements of the Socratic method and underlines the role of collaboration and clash in the processes of learning and education.

This relational-centred current in education approaches the interpersonal dynamic from the aspect of the emotional involvement of the developing individual with his natural and cultural environment. Bakirtzis writes in his book Communication and Education that the concept of involvement refers to those conditions in which an individual, voluntarily or otherwise, concentrates emotionally, intellectually and/or bodily on a thought, idea, plan, action, activity, situation, person, group, object, phenomenon (Bakirtzis 2004: 309), and goes on to say that this concept of involvement refers to the interior experience that is characterised by self-concentration, intense experience, internal stimuli, energy flow, a high degree of satisfaction, contact with the emergence of a creative impulse leading to the integral engagement of the person and full activation of his abilities (Bakirtzis 2004: 312). In some earlier research of mine in France, one thing that emerged from analysis of the material garnered from the study of pupils of Freinet elementary schools was the importance of the involvement of place in the objectives of the school activities. This experiential relation between child and place contributes to the cultivation of a sense of responsibility for the action environment. At that time I had called this involvement strategic spatial activity so as to demonstrate the integration/inclusion of the space in the objects of the child’s activity in a school environment (Tsoukala 2006, 2009). And I differentiated it from passive spatial activity, a term that rendered the limiting role of space to a form of life-container. With strategic spatial activity Freinet’s educational system got children involved with their spatial environment, resulting in the emotional involvement and life experience that are essential conditions for the development of responsibility towards the child’s material action environment, knowledge and assimilation. Consequently, the involvement of space in the child’s activities – that is his involvement in its organisation, operation and aesthetic – led to his active engagement in matters of responsibility for the environment and the development of cognitive processes, especially in cases where the school space was itself a source of information about material (textures, materials, colour, light), science and technology (green schools, passive energy design, construction) and culture (syntax and grammar of the space). Today, when education is intensifying its research into the role of the environment in learning and education processes, the question of life experience and the emotional experience of space brings together specialists from many different disciplines involved with educational matters – teaching, psychology, social psycholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Stimulative learning
• 2 The architecture of educational modality: qualities of space
• 3 From qualities to modalities
• A few final words: fluid space and transformational learning
• Bibliography
• Index