Scholars of place argue that the world around us is a complex construct that is endlessly reproduced through the interaction of not only physical form and behavior, but also human cognition, and affect (Canter, 1977). Places, then, are simultaneously both real and imagined - formed by the physical shape and manner of their use, but also by the many discourses that circulate across and through them. The built world of schools is, of course, no different. Social, cultural, and political discourses have always had massive influence over the form and feeling of our nation's schools. Often these discourses lay hidden beneath the constancy and ubiquity of the structures themselves, camouflaged by the very standardization of the grammars of schools as we know them (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).Yet, these discourses can be parsed from the built world-read as a narrative of power and possibility. Approaching schools with a geosemiotic lens, this project seeks to examine the relationship of discourse and design to better understand the ways that discourses have, do, and might otherwise shape the built worlds of learning. Building from three distinct, qualitative studies taken up in the traditions of discourse analysis and phenomenological interview, this project first examines the ways that prevalent social discourses have shaped the material grammars of American school design, and further, the ways that this design conceptualizes the users, purposes, and experiences of learning environments. Extending this analysis, I then turn to an arts-based approach, modelled upon the theoretical architectures of Douglas Darden (1993), to take up a sort of compositional geosemiotics that imagine new means of emplacing these discourses within the lived-world.
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