SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT: THEORETICAL ARCHITECTURES TO RELEARN SCHOOLS AS EMPLACED DISCOURSE By Michael C. McLane A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2023 ABSTRACT 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. Copyright by MICHAEL C. MCLANE 2023 For Willow iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS en tim en gu in fu co pa er c i sp n di m tie e ou da ira m gy nc n g nc ra tio un e ge e n i ty m en t The Mary Louise Donnell Dr. S. Barros E1 Finkbiners A3 E3 Gephard Fellowship Dr. A. Beymer C1 The Graduate School D3 McLanes A3 Dr. K. Burke F2 Dr. K. Greenwalt E1 Participants & Pilots A1 GRMS Students & Dr. K. Creps E2 A2 SCA Students & Faculty A2 Faculty The College of E3 Heits A3 Dr. P. Schneider F2 Education CITE Faculty & MSU Students & Teacher D2 Dr. S. Jarvie D1 B2 Staff Candidates EHS Students & C3 Dr. L. Johnson C1 Dr. J. VanDerHeide C2 Faculty Dr. L. Fendler F1 D. Kalil & W. Kalil B3 v TABLE OF CONTENTS PROLOGUE ...................................................................................................................................................... 1 I. CON-TEXTS ................................................................................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER 1. COMING TO TERMS ........................................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 2. PARADIGMATIC DISCOURSES IN THE AMERICAN SECONDARY SCHOOL ............................................................................................................................................. 31 II. PRE-TEXTS ................................................................................................................................................ 51 CHAPTER 3. HARD TARGETS, A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS ................................................. 53 CHAPTER 4. LEARNING SPACE, A PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTION ........ 86 CHAPTER 5. SORTED CLASSROOMS, A PHENOMENOLOGICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ........................................................................................................................................ 105 III. ARCHI-TEXTS....................................................................................................................................... 150 CHAPTER 6. LAPIERRE-CRUZ SANCTUARY .................................................................... 152 CHAPTER 7. DESCENT PARK ................................................................................................. 164 CHAPTER 8. JUAN DIEGO MIDDLE SCHOOL................................................................. 179 IV. SUB-TEXTS ............................................................................................................................................ 193 CHAPTER 9. THE UNDERBELLY .......................................................................................... 195 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................. 204 vi PROLOGUE Te Kore The Void Te Kore-tua-tahi The First Void Te Kore-tua-rua The Second Void Te Kore-nui The Great Void Te Kore-roa The Far-Extending Void Te Kore-para The Withered Void Te Kore-whiwhia The Unpossessing Void Te Kore-rawea The Delightful Void Te Kore-te-tamaua The Void Fast Bound Te Po The Night Te Po-teki The Hanging Night Te Po-terea The Drifting Night Te Po-whawha The Moaning Night Hine make-moe Daughter of Troubled Sleep Te Ata The Dawn Te Au-tu-roa The Abiding Day Te Ao-marama The Bright Day Whai-tua Space - Māori Creation Chant 1 ORIGINS When I was just three years old, my parents took out a bank loan and began to construct the outbuildings and border fences of an imagined place called Paradise Ranch. Visits were seldom at first, but as I grew, we spent more and more weekends on this little plateau of Colorado’s eastern plains. Each Saturday would conclude in our family pickup truck, my father indicating the theoretical sites of orchards, a barn, and a house – our future home. My parents showed me the composition book filled with sketches of their vision. We were to become pioneers of a parchment fantasy, settlers of a place scrawled in ballpoint. My parents’ decision to lead us into that ongoing act of imagination set the course of my life. Over the next fifteen years, the ranch materialized (orchards excluded). The toil of growing up was mirrored in the formation of my home, the narrative of my upbringing magicked into the surrounding structures as sketches begot substance. FIGURE 1. PARADISE RANCH I cannot pinpoint precisely when I began to formally understand the discourses inscribed in my schools. I recall a moment in my junior or senior year, during an activity in Spanish class, when I glanced out the window to notice how the eaves of the roof extended far beyond the walls beneath. This canopy, its edge reaching toward the horizon, pulled my attention outward, yet in the same moment was interrupted by a row of trees and the sloping expanse of the parking lot—beyond which I knew Rocky peaks reached into the sky. The very design of the place was meant to draw the eye out upon the world—that which we were preparing 2 to inherit—but only so far as our immediate surroundings, the small, conservative town that sheltered us from the rest; the distant horizon obscured. FIGURE 2. KIOWA HIGH SCHOOL, ROOM 3 – SECTION Perhaps it was sooner than this, when I noticed that our classrooms were particularly clustered around the circuitous hallway; 9th and 10th years’ lockers grouped among the classrooms designated for mathematics and sciences, 11th near the humanities, and 12th isolated near the study hall room—a less than subtle assertion of timed curricula, that which our school hoped to impart before students stopped attending. Or earlier even still, when the geometric corridors of the middle school all seemed to stretch toward egress and fill the building with light; aesthetically pleasing, certainly, but also rendering each student highly visible to the cameras above. Perhaps these practices, these literacies of place, were present all along, but I can say for certain that they were not identified as such or taken up with any sort of curricular purpose. Mountain View Elementary, Northeast Elementary, and Kiowa Elementary, Middle, and High Schools—these places did not function as content in the expressed curricula of my life, but were relegated to the role of container, mere planes upon which the explicit could take shape. How strange then to consider the bounty there before us students and teachers, some designed, some unintended, all unexamined. When I eventually did leave Kiowa, I made quickly for FIGURE 3. KIOWA MIDDLE SCHOOL – PLAN those Rocky Mountains. I enrolled at the University of Colorado, in the School of Environmental Design, with the hope of composing place myself. There I was asked to think back about the many places that I had experienced, and to trace out the stories that they told, stories that manifested in my very 3 being, and stories also that I had in some way contributed to. My professors teased my memory back into those first places that I created as a child—a snow cave beneath a pine tree—to the most significant set of steps I'd ever ascended and descended—the Denver capital, for a news crew, with a bad, self-made haircut—to a corner that held special meaning—a retaining wall near a track in Pueblo. They sent me out to weave labyrinths between trees using nothing but colored yarn, to define tiny spaces with cardboard boxes and then look at the choreography of light and wind as the day passed them by. They tasked me with recreating ancient geometries with stick and string upon the grasses of the library quad. For the first time, I was being asked to look at the world and tug upon the stories that it told through its physical presence. I relocated, leaving that university and my training in design, but never forgetting what I learned there. I moved through schooled spaces feeling as though I had a sixth sense. But also, that everyone had this sense, and that I had only been made aware of its existence. Buildings and classrooms spoke their assumptions about me and my peers, about the things they valued in education, and I whispered back my own thoughts. Years later, as I began my training as a teacher, I set foot in yet another one of these schools, expecting the space to go unnoticed. It was there that I watched my first teacher educators fold space and discourse and spatial literacies into notions of the English curriculum. They sent us out in pairs to get to know a classmate, to wander the campus and read it to one another. What meaning and memory did we find in a particular clock, or lake, or scent, or shadow between buildings? Even in our university classroom, they implored us to cover the walls with our own signs and materials. The Post-it, in all shapes and sizes, was our tool of choice, and in a matter of a few weeks we had transformed the room from a rather barren box into a living annotation of our practice, much to the confusion (and chagrin) of the others who shared the room that summer. As a teacher, I have always sought to teach to this same sensitivity. My first two schools facilitated this work. I started in a little blue school on the U.S.-Mexico border, its walls lined with 4 windows that barely kept out the South Texas sun. The second, a brand-new building in the suburbs of Detroit, designed to be an almost mirror image of a thriving school just down the street. The hope for similar results and tradition were evident in the very bricks. I was restless in my classrooms, and constantly took my students out beyond their walls—the basketball court, the flower beds next to the parking lot, different hallways, abandoned classrooms, and entry sequences. I was always looking for new perspectives, differences in the way voices echoed off the walls. I wanted my students to pay close attention to the spaces they inhabited, to perhaps better understand what those spaces expected of them. My third classroom provided something else entirely. An interior room of cinder blocks and a drop ceiling, without windows, packed to the limit with desks, all under row after row of fluorescent bulbs. For security, we were urged to remain in the room between the bells. No impromptu trips to an empty courtyard were allowed. More than any place I had ever learned or taught this classroom embodied the curricular container. I did my best to cover the walls with students’ work and art (a tall task considering nothing would stick to whatever paint was used, not even the hot glue that I attempted in desperation). This room seemed resistant to being read, to being used as a text, to doing more than just keeping FIGURE 4. THE LITTLE BLUE SCHOOL, ROOM 2 us there from 8:00a to 3:00p. It seemed designed to hide us away, to keep us separate until the designated moment of release. In quiet moments I would 5 pose that old question, ‘what does this place say about all of us?’ But now, another inquiry, ‘who is so intent on it saying these things?’ Of course the built world of a school is not the principal of such a restrictive agenda (Fairclough, 2003). Schools as designed spaces are effectively materialized discourse—as much a medium for cultural dialogue as is any other text. Considering the literariness of an architect’s work— how social myth and self-storying are composed through the experiential language of a planned environment—and the inherently tactical position assumed by users of the designed world, we implicitly develop literacies to make meaning of the constructed environments that we inhabit, much in the same way that we make meaning of a bit of fiction, a poem, a graph, a map, or a clip of film. A good deal of my curiosity in the field of education centers around these literacies of place—and therefore between the interaction of abstract discourse and its physical manifestations in the designed world. This project aims to examine this relationship to better understand the ways that discourses have, do, and might otherwise shape the built worlds of learning. The work is driven by four questions: 1. How have prevalent discourses shaped the material grammars of American secondary schools to the point of becoming paradigmatic to their existence? 2. How might qualitative inquiry guide the examination of other, less prevalent discourses? 3. How might these discourses, both the paradigmatic and the local, be otherwise emplaced? 4. How, as a result of the act of emplacing discourses, might we otherwise understand the place of schools, reconceptualize their built environments, and retell their stories? THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME I suppose it's not unreasonable to say that this dissertation finds its form in the 16th century Netherlands. Then and there, two master craftspeople, a stonemason and a bricklayer, stood amidst a lawsuit to determine who could rightfully design and set out a new building. The mason alleged that 6 the bricklayer had no right to engage in the act of design, as medieval conceptions of architecture asserted that architects required the perfect mastery of artisanal stone carving or sculpting. The bricklayer collected testimony from artisans across his town, posing five questions to each. The artisans were unanimous in the spirit of their responses (Muller, 1882; Schneider, 2000). Are you a perfect master of the craft of masonry and relief carving? No. Is the knowledge required for the design and setting out of buildings restricted to the craft and guild of the masons and relief carvers? No. Are the masons and the relief carvers the only perfect masters of the art and science of design? No. Have you ever designed buildings? Of course. If that is so, where did you come by the knowledge that allowed you to do so? That knowledge is ordinary and common knowledge of long standing and is freely available to all who seek it. This lawsuit empowered the act of design, not as the proprietary knowledge of particular craftspeople and guilds, but as one that is fundamentally human. As a result, the work of architects became theoretical, grounded firmly in a mastery of imagination, conception, and the representation of possibilities (Schneider, 2000). It is a shift toward the abstraction of place that allows this piece to exist. This dissertation fundamentally and continuously returns to the work of design. In it I strive to parse the discourses that shape, and frankly, limit, the visual grammars of sites of learning, to then imagine schools as they might otherwise exist, and to represent these possibilities with what limited artistry I do possess. The act of research, as much as it occurs in writing, is present through the act of drawing, as both the mode and the site of my study (Banham, 1999). 7 All thanks to that Dutch bricklayer, I can engage in this act of imagination as a piece of research, moving in measure between attention to the experiences of deepened understanding, aesthetics, and methodological process (Eisner, 2006). And while I wade into this work far from a master in design, I attend to the process with, as Paulo Knill (2005) describes, complimentary levels of skill and sensitivity. Those aspects of design work in which I lack technical prowess I make up for with my ear for the literary, my engagement with the research processes and participants, and my appreciation for the possibilities of the expression at hand. Considering the built world as an ecosystem of signifiers and signals, an ecosystem that has been carefully composed from cultural discourse through a singular vantage into a physical manifestation, we can effectively view design as the crucial moment of distillation between discourse and the world. As such, it makes particular sense that the method and form of this piece be greatly influenced by someone who did a great deal of theorization around discourse and design. Enter American architect Douglas Darden. Darden is most often termed a theoretical architect, due to the fact that none of the structures composed during his career have yet been built. They exist only on paper. Darden was immensely influenced by the concept of architecture as the material analog of literature, as a means of maintaining the presence of story and myth in everyday life. Darden was immensely interested in narratives as the central structure for his own design work, insistent that architecture was inseparable from discourse. His published works, Condemned Building (Darden, 1993), trace a series of ten theoretical architectures, each influenced by an act of storytelling. Take for example his most famous piece, titled Oxygen House. The home is a piece of fiction, designed for a man named Burnden Abraham, an allegorical recasting of Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying (Faulkner, 1990), who himself takes form from scraps of literature and folk-tale, as well as client briefs and letters composed by Darden himself (1993, p. 145). 8 In the early spring of 1979, after torrential rains, FIGURE 5. OXYGEN HOUSE - PLAN the railroad tracks on which Abraham worked were flooded. They were never fully repaired. That following summer during a routine operation, Abraham suffered a collapsed lung when a train jumped the track and sent metal debris puncturing his right lung. Three years later the railroad company put the property up for sale. Abraham purchased the plot where he had once worked. He requested that his house be built over the scene of his near-fatal accident. Abraham also requested that he finally be entombed in the house. In creating his narrative structures, Darden relies on a design feature which he terms dis/continuous genealogies. For any given project he begins with a series of four scaled component sketches. In composing Oxygen House, Darden used a Civil War era engraving of a steam engine, a drawing of a water cooler that would have been found in a typical caboose, the schematic diagram of a Westinghouse train FIGURE 6. OXYGEN HOUSE, (DIS)CONTINUOUS GENEALOGIES & COMPOSITE IDEAGRAM brake, and a sectional view of the Hindenburg zeppelin. These four images trace the narrative of Mr. Abraham, some explicitly (the steam engine and its failed 9 brake), some experientially (the respite offered at the water cooler), some metaphorically (the Hindenburg as an analog for a devastatingly collapsed lung). When superimposed on onionskin, these four images suggest the elevational plan of a structure uniquely suited to Mr. Abraham’s final days and ultimate interment. Sitting at the intersection of two railroad tracks, both abandoned but in different degrees of disuse, nearby a towering Willow tree, Oxygen House exists in two forms. While Mr. Abraham lives, the house is a three-story structure, similar in appearance to an Apollo-era LEM, composed of an elevator shaft, a small live-in nurse’s apartment, and an oxygen tent in which Mr. Abraham resides. Darden reimagines the home following Burnden’s death, as the tent is to be dismantled and used to wrap Mr. Abraham’s body before it is sealed into the elevator, descends beneath the ground-level, and is buried. The Willow is to be replanted in the now vacant base of the oxygen tent, marking a memorial. Oxygen House, in its allegory and dialogue with the understood grammars and canons of the built world, offers a house in which to die. Darden notes that this subversion, just like a plow, is not FIGURE 7. OXYGEN HOUSE, IN LIFE AND DEATH intended to obliterate our ways of understanding the built world, but to cut through hardened notions of form, loosen and surface new ways of seeing, and to ultimately cultivate our understanding to the fullest (1993, p. 9). With this dissertation I hope to do something similar. Namely, I hope to explore the possibilities of reconceptualizing schools as emplaced discourse, from the lens of theoretical architecture. Using Darden’s (1993) Condemned Building as a model, this project attempts to historicize, metaphorize, 10 and reimagine the words of partisan organizations, learners, and teachers as compositional models for potentially unfamiliar places of learning. I seek to turn over ideas of what form a school might take by translating and transforming the findings of three qualitative studies into designs for theoretical architectures. This arts-based approach relies upon the act of design as one of both thought process and the communication of thought. As described by Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund (2008), the structures that I compose are not meant merely as tools of recording, analyzing, or interpreting data rendered by the studies, they are themselves data created. Nick Sousanis defends the importance of drawing as a mode of research, arguing that drawing is a “means of orchestrating a conversation with yourself…We draw not to transcribe ideas from our heads but to generate them in search of greater understanding” (2015, p. 79). Darden describes the buildings that he composes as tools meant to overturn that which we think we know. He composes these unsettling structures using four distinct texts: con-text, pre-text, archi-text, and sub-text (Schneider, 2001). Building from a Dardenian design methodology, the structure of this piece also leans heavily on Darden’s four texts. Part One is guided by the notion of con-texts, the interwoven discourses and conditions that surround and illuminate something to influence its potential meanings. They arise from the world around a site, calling for the presence of a design in the first place. In Chapter One I explore notions of place and space, varying modes and intensities of discourse, and the concept of geosemiotics as an analytical process turned on its head to inform the work of design. Chapter Two surveys a brief history of secondary schools as built environments in the United States and those discourse paradigms that have influenced their design over time. Pre-texts, then, are the particular discourses that mark the origin or emergence of a project— the stories told and events memorialized that begin to suggest a form, a purpose, and narrative to a given design. Part Two, emphatic of these pre-texts, consists of three distinct studies, all of which 11 delve into the discursive origins and possibilities present in the built world of schools. Chapter Three centers schools as places of safety and security through a textual analysis of the National Rifle Association's National School Shield (NSS) Report and its recommendations to makes schools into highly territorial, hard targets. The document has been parroted by GOP executives and legislators to cast blame for traumatic violence in schools back upon the schools themselves. Chapter Four details a study of ten disconnected participants through a series of phenomenological interviews about significant moments of learning and, particularly, the places that these moments occurred. In conceptualizing places of learning broadly, this study shifts emphasis from the school as a container of curriculum to break down well-understood grammars of paced and measured and finite tenancy as learners. Chapter Five, emphatic of schools as the places of teachers, examines a series of mixed sorting tasks, a method used often in commercial architecture, by which five participating teachers sort images to construct a phenomenological discourse of place. These sorting activities elicit experiential understandings of classroom spaces and how they are made legible by those who use them. Part Three, drawing from Darden’s archi-text, builds upon the findings of the previous three chapters to distill particular discourses of place and render them in newly imagined architectures. Archi-texts are those experiential and material elements, most clearly rooted in the con-texts and pre- texts, but signature to the designer, breathing life into a design. Considering the layered isolationism and territoriality apparent in the discourse put forth by the NSS, Chapter Six details the composition of a school arranged around external practices of holding ground and casting individuals as potential threats or victims. Chapter Seven illustrates a school oriented around the strange and shabby backstage1 so often described in participants’ recollections of significant learning. This space upends 1 Not only the literal backstage, but the figurative as well. 12 much of what we might imagine in a school building to emphasize, itself a highly literary composition of practice over performance. Chapter Eight renders a school designed from the bottom up, emphatic of the classroom-level interaction of users and spaces as they constitute the larger whole of a learning environment. Part Four, finally arriving to Darden’s sub-text, explores the underbelly of what schools are, the ways that discourses have and will continue to shape them, and how a moment of reimagination has potential to see the place of school anew. In its lone Chapter Nine, I seek to make connections between the various discourses examined in Parts One and Two and the theoretical architectures that emerge throughout Part Three. Unearthing these sub-texts extends the possibility of better knowing the schools that shaped us, better attending to the places that we, as teacher educators, send future teachers to inhabit, and better attuning our own environments to the sorts of discourses that we believe most valuable. Architect Donlyn Lyndon describes public spaces as fragments of a covenant with the future (1987), but as we recapitulate schools and learning spaces of the past, we agree likewise to a very familiar future—we all but guarantee the continuation of a curriculum exemplified by delayed gratification and repetition, preparing students for lives lived in tedium (Jackson, 1968). Far more than empty containers for our chosen curricula and theory, schools are themselves pedagogies and pedagogues. They hold immense power over sense of self, identity, and subjectivities—not only for students and teachers, but surrounding communities. As Calvino prescribes, in this work, I seek to change my approach, to look at the place of schools from a new perspective, using methods unusual in my own practice thus far, and in my field. 13 I. CON-TEXTS2 Still, the reality of these places in individual minds lack stability. City3 people are constantly ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ places by talking about them. —Yi-Fu Tuan 2 How have prevalent discourses shaped the material grammars of American secondary schools to the point of becoming paradigmatic to their existence? 3 Strikethrough my own. 14 CHAPTER 1. COMING TO TERMS Attempting something of a Dardenian methodology, we begin with the notion of con-text, conceptualized as the interrelated conditions within which a built environment occurs and finds its validity (Schneider, 2001). Beyond the physical location, orientation, and relation of a project, one must also consider its historical, political, and economic significances. These physical, social, and cultural surroundings and understandings teach, guide, test, and direct the designer toward the ultimate purpose and meaning of a built environment. In the following chapters, I look to discourses present across broad social, geographic, and political reckonings, those that function to shape the institutions of schooling at a national level, to better understand the conceptual foundations of American secondary schools as they were and have come to be. Certainly I will refer a great number of concepts over the course of this project, but several terms will surface more than others. Before we venture too far along the path of this piece, I seek to work through a few of these terms at length. Harris (2006) conceptualizes this next section as a coming to terms, a negotiation between myself, the author, and you, the reader, such that we can collectively understand, as much as possible, the language of which I intend to make most frequent use, while also giving a bit of additional attention to those who taught me the ideas so formative to the project itself. This coming to terms will begin with an exploration of space and place. I will consider the difference between these notions and outline my intentional use of each. I will then examine the theoretical basis of this work as it has occurred in the ongoing spatial turn. Turning attention to the other key notion of this project I will examine the idea of discourse, consider it through Foucauldian definitions, and parse, once again, different modes of examined discourse as outlined by Gee (2007). As this project is located at the intersect of discourse and place, I will finally examine geosemiotics as the foundation upon which the work rests. This consideration will take up notions of the built world 15 as a semiotic system, methods of reading and analyzing the built world, and what such an explicit attention to emplaced material discourses might yield in the work of design. SPACE & PLACE Perhaps the single most used terms throughout the course of this project are place and space. I use each intentionally, drawing from a long lineage of literatures in environmental study, ranging from geography to architecture. For the sake of clarity, space is used as a marker of temporal-geographic location to distinguish bounds of a particular area in a particular moment. For example, when describing a school at large, examining perhaps the built structures and designed environment, while bracketing its shaping discourses, I refer to the space of the site. This reference, for the moment, is analytical and separate from the experiences, perceptions, and memories that cue the different (d/)Discourses and identities within. Place, then, is used to indicate a move toward examination of sites as reflections of co-constructed meaning within a particular space. Place recognizes the agency of the material space, not only as a site that is shaped by its inhabitants, but one that likewise affects its inhabitants’ trajectories of becoming. These terms are especially influenced by the ongoing spatial turn across the intellectual arts and sciences. Framed by Cosgrove as a movement born of “post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanations and about single-voiced historical narratives, and the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge” (2002, p. 7), the spatial turn seeks to reorient notions of space and place as essential in understanding human experience. Particularly, the turn reacts to long-fostered association of the spatial realm as the static, closed, immobile counter to the temporal, and insists that social theory should rest on the triangular foundations of time, space, and social structure, each of which influences and is influenced by the others (Massey, 2005; Soja, 1996, 2010). 16 As such, geo-scholars have worked to reconceptualize space and place by normalizing the concept of the spaciotemporal. Soja writes at length about the ways that historicist thought seeks to linearize time and to clarify social life through temporal stages of change. He demonstrates this with a sort of archetypal narrative of the assent of human progress over time from primitive to civilized (1989). Such narratives are often penned with a tone of inevitability. Massey takes up the project re-spatializing history, extending Foucauldian notions (1984) to consider spacetimes as bundles of relational trajectories (2005, p. 119). Mirroring the notion of structuration (Giddens, 1986), Massey outlines the ways that individuals moving through time and space in their everyday routines transform their physical, temporal, and social worlds. A simple daily commute is not mere movement across the surface of a plane, but rather the tracing of one trajectory as it departs and rejoins series of others throughout their own paths. Each trajectory in its movement makes sometimes subtle, sometimes massive shifts to those around it, all simultaneously changed and changing. Given this conceptualization, space cannot be so simply abstracted as a container for social interactions that unfold in sequence, but rather, must be considered together as formational of lived experience. As such, recognizing space and place requires a complex, if unnoticed, examination of prior understandings, noticings, (d/)Discourses, and meanings. Sense of place has been theorized in multiple different ways but is often represented as an intersection of a spacetime’s social, symbolic, and physical meanings carried in the emotional, physical, and affective evocations of the form. Participation in the discourse of place relies then on the comingling of each (Dovey, 2008; Lyndon, 1987; Montgomery, 1998; K. D. Moore, 1997; Punter, 1991). SPACE In the subject of human geography, space has often been theorized as a scalable geographic point on an abstract plane, a set of coordinates—a simple and general demarcation of where (Agnew, 17 1989). From the Latin spatium, our modern sense of the term still carries with it notions of extent, distance between/from, and openness.4 To better understand space, imagine for me, if you will, a bit of land on Earth’s surface, about 3.5 acres in area, located at 42º16’38” N 83º46’04” W, FIGURE 8. 42º16’38” N 83º46’04” W about 3,370 feet above sea level. These coordinates may help to position a particular place at a particular intersect of axes. Doubtless, a talented geographer or way finder could estimate the location in question, recognizing the particular parallels and meridians bounding North America, perhaps even those of the greater Midwest or the Michigan Peninsula. Perhaps with a bit more information, moving FIGURE 9. SPACE BOUND past space as a directly expressed point on a plane to consider the locally defining relations of borders, bounds and adjacencies, space will begin to take shape. Our 3.5 acres is just a little over a mile (by roadway) from a town center. Bound to the east by a two-lane collector road called Virginia Avenue, and to the north by a two-lane local road called Fair Street. To the west and south the area is bound by private property lines. 4 This echoes the ancient concept of chaos/chasm, as a sort of primordial, formless and timeless (lack of) matter from which all else originated. 18 For many of us, though, a point on a plane, even one as specific as this, holds little meaning at all.5 In the tradition of most environmental studies, Space does not carry meaning in and of itself, it is a sort of blank canvas upon which experience might occur (Cresswell, 2008). It is in this simplicity, this lack of meaning, that Tuan theorizes space as freedom, within which one is not attached to another (1977). With each of these definitions, we clarify space, but also cut away the abstraction that fundamentally defines it. In bounding space, we begin the process of place-making. PLACE A birthday party gathers. Some sunshades have been propped up next to the softball backstop. The smell of charring hot dogs pervades the air. Children are having a water balloon fight and their screams echo around the neighborhood. My dog is waiting in queue to drink from the water fountain. Currently David, an Irish wolfhound whose forehead falls in line with my own navel, is drinking not from the dog’s bowl, at ground level, but from the fountain designed for children, about 30 inches up. The basketball court is abandoned, a surprise on such a day. Typically, you can hear the pwongggg of the metal backboard between the hunched man’s three-pointers or find a class of martial artists slowly rehearsing the careful movements of their daito. The soccer goal, as usual, is unused but I can hear teens being chased out of the greenway. They will doubtlessly emerge from one of those inlets in the back boundary that leads to the woods, their moment of rebellion temporarily rescheduled – they will return tonight to claim the swing set in the post-curfew dusk. The smallest toddlers are paying no attention to the shrieks or neon-rubber flak exploding just a short way from the sculpted tortoise and the plastic hippopotamus of their playground, from the water table with which they are so enamored. Some of their parents look on uncomfortably as a man moves audibly between exercises on an adjacent pull-up bar, push-ups with his feet elevated on a picnic table, and periods of rest in his fold-out camp-chair. It isn't here yet, but a few streets away ring the ditties of an ice cream truck. 5 Even the terms that used to this point, such as North America and Midwest are terms associated with place more than space. While they designate particular geographic areas, they are also constructs upheld by particular institutions, cultures, and individuals. These terms work to imbue organization and meaning to particular spaces. 19 If space is abstracted as the empty plane, place has been portrayed as the subjective human encounter therewith. Simply imagined, place is space given meaning through natural, personal, and cultural experience (Coates & Seamon, 1984; Cresswell, 2004). This meaning can be individual or collective, but it is constantly changing, contested, transgressed, and productive of perceived bounds. The word “place” derives from plateia (πλατεία), the ancient Greek word for town square. Even now across varying social transepts and cultures, plazas, markets, and squares, the modern plateies, are where community life unfolds and where people come together. Bakhtin describes the ways that these places were inextricable from their communities, iteratively shaping one another as “The whole of science, the whole of art, the entire people participated” in them (1975, p. 132). It is not the particular space of these plateies that makes them significant, neither their openness nor planar position, but rather the events and interactions that take place there. However, place is not simply a location definable through one person’s experience. Individuals each construct their own sense of place through “a complicated, ecological system that includes physical, biological, social, cultural, and political factors with history and psychological state of the persons who share the location” (Lim & Barton, 2006, p. 107). This ecosystem of intersecting identities, intensities, and experiences, multiplied across the many users of a space, result in countless subjective narratives that then compose place. Building from his concept of heteroglossia, Bakhtin surmises place as a culmination of these many voices, all expressing their own unique position and point of view at a particular moment in time (1984). This theorization might posture place as a passive vessel to be defined by the experience of users. Conceptualizing place still as a sociocultural construct, but beginning with the idea that an intersecting series of connections made between the occupants of a space and the primordially understood actions suggested by the equipment therein, thus the relationship between people and place shapes the experiences expected to occur therewith (Certeau, 1984; Heidegger et al., 2008). A 20 school is a place in which curriculum occurs; a hospital, healing; a park, play—as though these experiences and functions somehow cease immediately beyond the bounds that delimit the spaces, yet they are reinforced through social reification of a particular sense of place. This concept is exemplified, again with the 3.5 acres of Virginia Park. Despite the possibilities of gathering elsewhere in the neighborhood, locals congregate for celebration, exercise, and recreation in this particular place. Scholars of place extend these definitions, arguing that place is a complex construct that is endlessly reproduced through the FIGURE 10. VIRGINIA PARK 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 character of their origin and cultural use, but also the mental associations that they evoke, both collectively and individually. These constructs and their use are then reiterated through amendments in material discourses and emplaced semiotics of the designed world (Canter, 1977; Massey, 2005; van Eijck & Roth, 2010; Wortham-Galvin, 2008). DISCOURSE & (D)ISCOURSE If we are to examine space and place with a close eye on the idea of meaning, I think it's important to conceptualize meaning in the built world as an emplaced discourse. Beyond space and place, this project concerns itself greatly with notions of discourse. Discourse itself and, by extension, methodological conceptions of discourse analysis, is a nebulous and long debated concept, continuously forking and evolving in use. From a linguistic practice, in which language is a tool used to convey meaning and establish social relationships, to a social practice, in which language is used to 21 reinforce norms and power relations, to cultural artifact, by which language shapes and maintains cultural identity and continuity, notions of discourse and the ways of being that they imply are central to this project. DISCOURSE At its most fundamental level, discourse might be considered language in use, in the world, to do things (Gee, 2011). Essential, I think, to Gee’s conceptualization here are three points, 1) the broad understanding of what constitutes language, 2) the particularity of spacetimes, and 3) the notion of usefulness. Echoing Cope and Kalantzis’ (2001) notion of critical framing, the language acts that constitute discourse ought to be recognized in a near-endless accumulation of practices, artifacts, and texts (Foucault, 1971). For the purposes of this project, these language accumulations include the more commonplace, such as dialogue and written texts, but also the built world as an emplaced discourse—composed as a functional narrative and inscribed not upon the page or vocalized, but made material in brick and stone, tile and two-by-four. Considering emplacement, the notion of discourse as language used in a particular space and time becomes all the more important. Drawing upon a Foucauldian perspective, discourse can be taken up as a series of domineering social narratives created in the relationship of power and knowledge in a specific time and site (1971), whereby discourses “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, p 54). Discourse is more than mere description, as it categorizes, illuminates, and normalizes, phenomena, thereby composing the very world in which we live (Hardy & Phillips, 2004). In all of this, Foucault approaches discourse as anti-humanist (without a singular establishing subject), anti-reductionist (without a singular underlying cause), and anti-essentialist (without a static set of defining traits). As such, he defies the idea of trying to uncover the roots of discourse and, instead, argues that we should consider “the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse” (Foucault, 1972, p. 52-53). This necessarily includes the built world, as discourse 22 both forms and functions where the material and linguistic worlds intersect, arguing that our knowledge of the world, our judgement of truth, and our conception of reason is all influenced by discursive formations emplaced in the surrounding materiality (Hook, 2007, p. 125). Gee’s final point, emphatic of discourse as doing something, I think, invites examination. The purposefulness of language opens consideration of origin, effect, affect, character, alternative, etc. Were we to examine language as a purposeless happenstance, powerless in itself and disconnected from the contexts of time or space, we would encounter a world anaesthetized, absent the knowledges, truths, and reason set out by Foucault. Such an adiscursive existence is difficult even to imagine. Perhaps the closest we can approximate is some sort of rambling, disconnected talk, composed of statements that have no relevance to one another or to any larger context; but even this type of communication would suggest something of a relationship between speakers or entice the judgement of an outsider attempting to make meaning. Human communication is inherently meaningful, as language serves as a means of conveying information, expressing emotions, and establishing social connections. Furthermore, even apparently random or disconnected statements can be interpreted in a meaningful way by the listener, as the context of the conversation and the understood cultural backgrounds of the participants provide a framework for interpreting the meaning of the discourse. (D)ISCOURSE Many of the examples provided thus far illustrate discourse as language and narratives used by individuals and institutions to cooperate and obfuscate, to help others and help themselves, to build up and tear apart. Discourse, though, is not something wielded and set aside. Composed of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, practices and habits, discourses completely constitute the nature of the body, mind, subconscious, and emotional lives of all people (Foucault, 1971; Weedon, 1997). As such, their use in particular spacetimes recapitulate as “distinctive ways of speaking, listening, reading, writing, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, and believing, in coordination with other people, 23 objects, tools, and technologies, so to enact specific, socially recognizable identities” with particular conventions in the use and interpretation of language (Gee, 2000, 2011). Gee calls these identities, these different ways of being and engaging in social language, big D Discourses, or as I will refer to them (D)iscourses (2011, p. 183). Gee demonstrates the ways that various discourses employed across interactions superimpose, nest, and obscure to comprise complex formations of identity. This interplay is the coalescence of natural, institutional, discursive, and affective discourses (Gee, 2000). I’ll offer myself as an illustration. Born in the state of Colorado (a natural (D)iscourse that I have no power to influence), I now facilitate courses for teacher candidates at Michigan State University (a positional (D)iscourse authorized by an institution). Many people tell me that I am soft-spoken (a discursive (D)iscourse that is recognized by others in interaction). I’m a hockey fan and have supported the Colorado Avalanche since they moved from Quebec when I was six years old (an affinity (D)iscourse, learned and shared in a set of common experiences with an affinity group). Even in the very limited scope provided by these four (D)iscourses, one can imagine the nearly endless overlap of language practices and identity plays therein. Further, the countless other aspects of my experience as a person conglomerate to make these (D)iscourses all the more complex. Building from the Foucauldian notion of discourse as domineering narratives of power relations, (D)iscourses provide a lens to consider the sorts of people that institutions and communities, in conjunction with their places, both invite and function to create. According to Foucault, discourse creates and reinforces social norms and power relations by defining what is considered acceptable or deviant, and who has the authority to enforce these norms. This means that the language we use to talk about ourselves and others, as well as the social practices and institutions that we participate in, have a powerful impact on our identities. 24 Foucault argued that discourse operates as a form of power that can be used to marginalize or exclude certain groups of people based on their identities or behaviors that are deemed unacceptable by society. Furthermore, Foucault contended that our identities are not fixed or innate, but rather are socially constructed through the discourses and power relations that we encounter in our lives. This means that our identities are constantly being shaped and reshaped by language and those social practices that we participate in. One means of discursive participation is that of the built world, whereby discourse is given material form and emplaced. Throughout this piece, then, I rely on both discourse and (D)iscourse to make sense of the ways that the built worlds of schools impact their communities and their users. For the most part I refer to discourse, attempting to understand the particular narratives that compose the identities of schools and their inhabitants. As a result of these discourses, some examination of the particular ways of being ((D)iscourse) is taken up, examining not only the human users of schools, but the schools themselves. In emplacing large scale social narratives, schools recapitulate particular ways of being, built (D)iscourses, which then imply and enforce a further set of (D)iscourses upon their users and inhabitants, as well as their surrounding, if distant, communities. THEORETICAL ARCHITECTURES AS COMPOSITIONAL GEOSEMIOTICS To make sense of the interaction between discourse and place, I rely largely on the framework of geosemiotics, the study of how language and discourse appears in the material world (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). The frame is imagined by its authors as a means of theorizing the ways that space has been designed to reflect systems of control—typically through the control of the discourses in those spaces. The work ties closely with scholarship in other fields around the idea of place-making and sense of place, but with a heightened emphasis on the methodological decisions in examining the iterative discourse at play between maker, sign, user, and place. 25 Critically important in understanding this framework is clarification of the idea of a sign. For our purposes, a sign is any material object that indicates or refers to something other than itself. In consideration of the built world, signs are everywhere. Building from a Hideggerian notion of place, the built world is effectively equipment for a particular way of living, inviting certain actions through the understanding of this equipment. Take for example a road. A particular kind of space, generally made empty and level and smooth, often treated with some sort of finishing surface be it asphalt or gravel, roads do not merely exist for the pleasure of looking at a paved stretch of land, but as an invitation to move between points, typically by vehicle. Extending this idea, geosemiotics allow us to effectively read intended social interactions through such signs. Beyond the very literal signs that communicate speed limits and expectations of drivers, most people come to understand that a wide road devoid of intersections invites faster travel, while narrow, interupted roads are meant to be traversed more slowly. The qualities legible in a given sign are termed indexes. At its core, the process of geosemiotics is learning to analyze the presence of relationships and discourses in the material world by questioning the indexicality of the sign—Who created you? Who are you intended for? To what end? Why here?— as well as the dispositions and performances that it commands. In its simplest terms, indexicality is a quality in a semiotic sign that draws a reference to place, time, or social relationship to construct meaning. FIGURE 11. EMPLACED DISCOURSE Take for example the simple sign of a price tag. The tag affixed to the citrus is a collection of indexes, the most immediate and obvious being a spatial indication that the fruit to which it is stuck is the object of a price discourse. The tag is not meant to indicate that somewhere out there, an unknown object costs 19 pence, it is immediately functioning to label the price of this 26 particular fruit. Still further, indexes of time and social relationships can also be found in this tag. The words ‘REDUCED’ and ‘NOW’, in addition to the add-on tag indicate that the price of this particular fruit has changed, but at the moment of encounter is meant to cost $0.25. This temporal index can be translated into a symbolic semiotic that indicates lowered quality or a surplus of stock. Finally, the presence of the bar code and SKEW suggest that the tag and fruit have different social uses for different people. While a customer is more likely to ignore these aspects of the tag, someone tasked with stocking the shelves or ringing up the customer’s total is more likely to engage with these signs. For one the fruit and the numerical price may represent an experiential phenomenon of budgeting a meal, while for another this same object may represent a unit of efficiency and profit. Indexicality, then, represents a relationship between a sign and the world, our task being the complex analysis of that relationship. To approach this analytical FIGURE 12. LEGIBLE SCHOOLS (EQUALLY SCALED) process, the Scollons recommend a selection of spatial literacies that interrogate the ways that place organizes bodies, time, senses, language, and vectors of movement and attention (2003). With close consideration, one can come to better understand how meaning is composed and constituted in its particular location. Many of these tools are drawn from the world of visual 27 semiotics, relating to the composition and meaning of created signs, as opposed to language or gesture. Architecture and environmental design fit into the pattern of visual semiotics as they fundamentally relate to the human interaction with a visually designed signifier (Kress & Leeuwen, 1996). To demonstrate this, consider the site plans of two school campuses, both public high schools within a five mile radius. Even a cursury geosemiotic reading of each reveals a discourse about the function of schooling and the persona of their students. School A occupies a massive footprint, both in terms of the school buildings themselves, and the campus as a whole. The structure is distinct from its residential surroundings due to its massing, even while only rising three stories. The campus is sprawling and and includes forested paths, multiple large parking lots, and facilities for football, baseball, softball, athletics, soccer, lacrosse, and tennis. Additionally a large portion of the school structure is dedicated to gymnasiums, and facilities for the performing arts. The campus is surrounded by residential areas, but the public is largely kept to the perimeter. School B is much more compact. While also rising three stories, the linear perspectives and proportions largely mirror local homes and businesses. A small faculty parking lot off the back and an entry sequence off the street are all bound closely by residential and commercial areas. The school has almost no athletic or performing arts venues save for a small outdoor basketball court (notably without established areas for spectators). Without taking too much of a leap, both schools can be geosemiotically read to demonstrate a cultural discourse regarding the importance of experience beyond the academic curriculum. School A gives massive spatial emphasis to participation in athletics and the performing arts. These structures may be emphatic, also, of the value of competition and performance. Furthermore, the sprawling campus opens up space for more interaction beyond the classroom. The parking lots, forested paths, and long stretches of sidewalk that buffer the school from the surrounding community offer spaces for students to gather and interact beyond the surveillance of the curricular day. On the other hand, 28 School B seems to emphasize the importance of close community, both within the school itself and with the town as a whole. As it is far more integrated into its surroundings, School B’s students might be perceived as locally engaged and participatory in community affairs. Without parking lots, students are likely to move to and from school by foot, allowing a high degree of interaction with their surroundings. While School A opens a great deal of space for students to compete, School B may, with its close knit environs and near-absense of athletic and performance venues, emphasize collaboration over competition. Beyond this conceptual analysis, geosemiotics allow for the consideration of other implaced meanings. For example one might read the sequences of organization throughout the school conceptualizing the types of facilities that are near entrance and exit, Subject areas that are made more or less focal, the ways that maintenance and material seem to designate importance, aspects of permanence and temporality, etc. Notable across these analyses is the dependence on the reading of place. Geosemiotics, at least as they are imagined by the Scollons, are a wholly analytic exercise, deciphering emplaced discourses through the act of dissembly. Building from this concept, but using a compositional approach, I conceptualize a great deal of the work in this dissertation through the lens of theoretical architectures. As I see it, theoretical architectures, which have existed throughout history under many different guises, from allegorical design, to modern paper and fantastical architectures, are essentially the next step in this geosemiotic analysis. If geosemiotics create an argument for what a given place might communicate through the evidence of its material circumstance, theoretical architectures then continuous course, inviting the designer to extend these interpretations and their means, or reimagine them. The interaction between discourse, space and place, and geosemiotics is constant and close at hand, if often unexamined for its ubiquity. Nonetheless, this work relies upon such interactions, 29 holding in mind the power of talk, signs, and symbols to shape how we think about and interact with and within particular places. It considers the ways that the physical layout and design of a place can shape the discourse that takes place therein—creating or reinforcing certain social hierarchies or power dynamics among its inhabitants—but also the ways that place has been wrought of discourses. Each of these concepts influences and shapes the others, creating a complex web of meaning and interpretation that is constantly evolving and changing over time. Understanding these interactions can help us better understand the world around us and the ways in which we interact with it. 30 CHAPTER 2. PARADIGMATIC DISCOURSES IN THE AMERICAN SECONDARY SCHOOL Built learning environments around the world have, of course, existed in many different arrangements and structures. Beginning always from the assumption that built worlds are carefully composed systems of interacting discourses represented through material design, one can say that this variety of arrangements and structures is then demonstrative of a vast array of discourses, particularly imagined by communities and designers. Working across this variety, however, there is a particular conception of the recapitulated secondary school. The design of this type of school is incredibly legible, familiar across many different geographic and cultural contexts. Suggested in this is the idea that prevalent social discourses have come to shape the material grammars of American secondary schools at such a level that their design, while differentiated in ornamentation and detail, is ubiquitous. This review brings to attention the conceptual discursive evolution of the American school, particularly the secondary school, and the ways that schools as built worlds have changed to meet these discourses over the past 375 years or so. As notions of schooling and education have shifted over time, so have ideas of what the place of the school itself should do, as have paradigms relating to the study of schools as educative spaces. To organize this review I attempt to tell the story of schools as a unit of space in the United States, beginning with those constituted by one room schoolhouses in early colonial settlements. I continue through the factory schools of the 19th century and the behavior-bending schools that they inspired well into the early 1980’s. I examine how schools were opened up to their communities throughout the progressive reforms of the 20th century, before pivoting to the 21st century school of today—a global hub with emphasis on learning effect. With each of these movements and moments in history I will trace a particular discursive paradigm, made evident in the work of literature, historiography, legislation, or scholarly research, as it originated in the mindset of that time. Schools 31 have been used as variables in the quantification of students; notions of management, discipline, and power; ideas about attention and distraction; and now all too often, factors in the quest toward higher standardized test scores. I should note that this summary condenses a great deal of time, space, and people into very few words. With so much expressed in so little, the shades of change are lost. Needless to say, this review does not fully encapsulate or represent (nor could it ever) the totality of experiences and iterations of schools as lived spaces. Rather, it seeks to orient this project in the formation of those paradigmatic discourses, to deepen a sensitivity to the stories being told in the halls, walls, and doors of a local school as well as the undercurrent of ideas that prop up modern grammars of curriculum and school design. SITES OF BELIEF Despite this examination of schools focusing primarily on the United States, I will begin with a look back to the early 1600s, through the days of the early colonies and the establishment of the United States as a nation. It is important to remember that places of education and learning were essential in the ways of indigenous peoples long before this entry point, but for the sake of examining the school’s trajectory as it has come to exist in the current moment, the early 1600s seem a good place to begin. The earliest school rooms were spaces separated out in private homes for the tutoring of the wealthiest children, often in preparation for boarding away in Europe. Organized education simply was withheld from all but a rare few. Rather, vocational training was the norm, meted out through apprenticeships and lifelong practice of responsibilities within one’s community. But as colonial settlements began to expand, education was largely taken up by religious leaders who wielded great political power in their localities. With this shift, an individual child’s learning was split between the manual tasks and training that they practiced in and around their home, and nominal literacies that 32 were most often studied in places of worship, sometimes adapted for use as the first publicly located schoolrooms (Cremin, 1970). With the passage of the Old Deluder Satan Laws in Massachusetts, communities of at least 50 families were obligated to establish dedicated schools, which led to the rapid construction of one room schoolhouses across the Northeast (Rury, 2016). Apparent in the design of many early schoolhouses is a reimagination of the community church, mirroring prominent architectural features, and often topped with a small gable, a steeple in miniature. Externally, these schoolhouses varied greatly, but not infrequently mirrored other aspects of colonial church architecture (cruciform choreography, collected eyelines) signaling the inseparable relation between the institutions. These single rooms housed all attending students regardless of age. An immediately implied curriculum of these schoolhouses was one of collective dependence. Students were tasked with bringing water, as well as fuel for the room’s stove or hearth. Food for those who had none was often provided by community members or by the school’s attending teacher. Considering the curriculum of the time, these schoolrooms were spare, dark, and cramped. Windows were a luxury that allowed daylight, but also varied temperatures in the room. Desks were uncommon, as students typically took seats along benches, reminiscent of the pews that preceded them. In their earliest forms, these seats did not accommodate student writing, as composition was not important to the literacy goals of the time (Applebee, 1993). Slates would have been a luxury in the earliest schools, and as such, visual pedagogies were uncommon, as teachers guided recitations and lectures. As the schools developed, along with their curricula, these features shifted. Writing surfaces were incorporated, the long benches were segmented and eventually came to resemble the desks we know now. Perhaps the most marked characteristic of these schoolhouses or schoolrooms, then, is their walls. At the time, these places would have been one of the few truly social spaces where children were collectively separated from their families. This was by design. Further paralleling the town 33 church, the schoolhouse would have been seen as a place oriented toward ultimate salvation. Central to this curriculum was instruction in basic received literacy, arising from the various colonial sects’ fundamentalist interpretations of the bible. Following a successful course of primer study, recitation, and rote memorization, students would be better able to access and engage specific readings in the New Testament, and eventually, the bible as a complete text—always with an emphasis on the salvific potential of these knowledges (Ford, 1962; Monaghan, 2005). With such a delicate and important purpose, schools were often meant to separate students from their families as a corrective measure. There, misinterpretations of sacred texts and unobserved doctrine could be rectified without the tampering of kin. The schoolhouse was fundamental in the establishment and maintenance of normative forms. While the school system was still very much secondary to the family structure, schools provided a base in which the community at large—and the particular religious sects—could orient the individual toward collective goals. In the early colonies this took the form of catechesis, while following the American Revolution this notion shifted to creating an educated public that could resist the charms of demagogues—the many knowing better than the one (Rury, 2016). For Black and Indigenous populations, this was a much more severe and nefarious curriculum of whiteness, by which students’ held knowledges, languages, identities, and cultural ways of being were made secondary to those of the educator. Schools founded by manumission societies, missionaries, and later the bureaucracy of the national government itself, set out with the purpose of educating Black and Indigenous populations toward morality, culture, and “the advantages of modern civilization” (Rury, 2016, p. 109). Such schooling, typically postured as charity and service to the populace, was, in truth, an act of paranoia and an attempt to subdue a perceived threat, best summarized by Richard Pratt’s “kill the Indian in him and save the man.” The schoolroom was an 34 isolating container in which students could be separated from their families, their cultures, and made anew in the image of their educators, all under the discourse of salvation and public good. CONTAINERS OF INDOCTRINATION Clearly emergent from this time were two discourses about educative spaces, the notion of schools as containers and as spaces designed for indoctrination. Numerous quantifications of students in early schools can be found as well as demographic examinations of those in attendance (Cremin, 1970; Moran & Vinovskis, 2008). This might be viewed as a better understanding of those who are contained within the setting of the schoolroom. This paradigm continues on today in the ways that schools consider students’ bodies, counted, contained, certified (or not), but is less often the central focus than it is context for the particularities of a study. A much more apparent discourse is that which positions schools as spaces of indoctrination. As noted, American schoolrooms were founded as sites of indoctrination, instructing religious belief and, later, democratic values to some, while functioning to instill whiteness and silence upon others (Au et al., 2016; Watkins, 2001). Since their inception, American schools have functioned as a separate space in which matters of belief and culture have been instructed. Studies of literature have evolved from memorization of religious texts, to familiarization with texts that were a worthy use of leisure, to analysis of an imposed canon of literary heritage that lauds some texts and fights to keep others out of the hands of students on moral grounds (Applebee, 1993). The very act of reading in schools has consistently been an indoctrination of texts. Controversy over such instruction has grown in the modern era with notions of separation of church and state, limiting the use of religious texts and language in the school, various forms of sex education, and textual censorship. At the moment of composition, conservative families and politicians have positioned themselves against orientations of Critical Race Theory and open discussions of sexual orientation in schools, arguing that their children are being indoctrinated toward disdain for their own racial history, 35 or persuaded toward particular sexual orientations. In the past year alone, several thousand news articles6 have been published arguing that schools have been transformed by liberal educators into places where their children can be indoctrinated behind closed doors. They are patently incorrect— schools have always been places of indoctrination, they were founded as such, and have maintained this role. SITES OF ORDER As the 19th century rolled around, schools began to mirror societal discourses of capitalism, industrialization, and vastly increased investment in infrastructure. In cities, massive schools—gems of their communities—were built with tax dollars, incentivizing children to attend rather than work. The exteriors and interiors reflected this lure in their design, often utilizing valuable materials and high degrees of ornamentation. Furthermore this message of FIGURE 13. PHILADELPHIA CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL community value was reinforced in the preferred sites (Saxton, 1839) of new school construction, generally centrally located and focal. 7 But schools transformed beyond these aesthetic attempts for community embrace. Emphatic of the newly humming economy’s constant need for workers, the factory school was born. One and two room schoolhouses multiplied into long hallways of individualized classrooms—assembly lines for row after row of pupil. Students were sorted by grade into multiple classes, across lower and upper schools, with curriculum separating different subjects into blocked times across the day, with graded units 6 3,230 as of 24 March 2022 7 So focal were these schools that the first photograph taken in the United States features Philadelphia Central High School (Saxton, 1839). 36 broken down into individual lessons. Students were under the surveillance of their teachers, supervised that they might learn their way through adolescence rather than picking up “bad habits” out in the world. This learning, departing catechesis and democratic participation, revolved around capitalistic preparation for the workforce—largely bolstered by the idea that educated workers were more productive (Vinovskis, 1970). Overtaking the schoolhouse and schoolroom that had reigned for the better part of early American history, the advent of classrooms fragmented schools into a series of smaller, more manageable relations and interactions. Beginning etymologically, the western classroom assumes a certain set of values and organizing principles in its very name. Class, as indicative of a group of students, was used for the first time circa 1560, tracing its history backward to the Latin classis, a term used to denote different levels of Roman taxation. (“Class, n. and Adj. (II.9.a),” 2021) Thus, at its essence, the classroom is a place fit for division, carrying with it a suggestion of rank, hierarchy, and obligation. This divisive mindset was incredibly evident in the factory schools, where various hierarchal methods of management were implemented. One such organization was the Lancastrian System, by which relatively few teachers would give lessons to a few students who were deemed ready to teach others, who would then oversee the vast majority of instruction. The schoolroom shifted from a close-quartered, intimate site of instruction, to a panoptic cog in which adults were primarily present as administrators and overseers (Foucault, 1975). Lessons were largely managerial, recitations and repetitions emphasizing students’ rigidity of attention, self-control, and obedience above any mastery of content (Kliebard, 2004; Rury, 2016). As the 20th century neared, and the high school became a more and more popular site of education, attitudes shifted. The factory model, ruled by hierarchies and docility, could not account for the variation required of the always-modernizing workplace. This shift was effectuated by the Report of the Committee of Ten (1894) wherein the now-common curriculum of schools was largely 37 established, building out divisions of English, history, mathematics, science, and language courses. Vocational education was set aside in the interest of focus on concentration, memory, and communication skills. This curricular emphasis created a need, especially in secondary schools, for instructional specialization dividing the subjects and therefore dividing space among different modes of thought. Such a division in space was evident in the ways that schools began to create wings or hallways oriented toward particular subject matter. As a student moved throughout their day they would experience direct transitions between content mirrored in the built world of their school. Students literally had to migrate from one set of concepts to another. The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918) emphasized differentiated learning, which brought together people of varying backgrounds to pursue the earlier established courses of study. A number of different tracks were recognized—pre-collegiate, vocational, and general education—with secondary schools hosting all three as a site of intermingling (Cremin, 1970; Rury, 2016). The school as a built environment facilitated this structure in the expansion of even further segmented campuses where course loads could be divided efficiently between various tracks and age groups, a model that is still largely familiar in secondary education even today (Labaree, 1997). Classrooms themselves continued to evolve in this span. As the English model of classical education gave way to the German research model, the standardized space that had grown from the literacy-oriented schoolroom began to vary. As Cardinal Principles reintroduced vocational and general tracks, specialization of the classroom space was necessary as well. Laboratories, kitchens, workshops, and auditoria, which would formally have been found in students’ broader communities, were established as curricular spaces within schools. With expanded access to printed texts, classrooms increasingly held their own small libraries, outside the possession of the teacher. Yet, even in the face of all of this change and evolution, the DNA of the colonial schoolroom persisted alongside notions of hierarchal control, resulting in a model of the school, and particularly the classroom, that persisted 38 into the early 1980s. Simple layouts with limited views of the outside world. Desks seating no more than two students, organized in neat, front-facing rows. A blackboard, later perhaps other means of visual instruction. Such spaces, evolving clearly from the one-room model and disseminated rapidly with westward expansion, came to stereotypically define the environment of schools. MECHANISMS OF BEHAVIORAL CONTROL With so much attention given to the discipline of students, the discursive paradigm of management was established. This discourse has demonstrated an incredible resiliency, rearing its head to this day in various studies and organizing texts. The mission of preparing docile, focused laborers, who could devote their attention to sometimes menial tasks for hours on end, led to an examination of the school as a space free of distraction or behavioral disruption—never wasting company time. Studies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries have examined schools’ environmental variables, such as the position of various furniture, the design of plan, student density, privacy, noise, and light (Weinstein, 1979). Classroom management texts ranging many decades often begin by highlighting the importance of classroom layout, arguing that controlling setting is far more effective than attempting to effect an individual’s behavior in the moment (Doyle et al., 2013; Emmer, 1994; Gump, 1982). Studies of furniture arrangement and density, especially regarding student seating, have been a consistent presence in the study of the design of schools as built worlds. While some examine the correspondence of behavior across location in a grid of desks, testing the time-honored stereotype of talkative students at the back of the room (Adams, 1969), many others have attempted to settle on a single, ideal seating arrangement (Hastings & Schwieso, 1995; Simmons et al., 2015; Wannarka & Ruhl, 2008) – most often with the conclusion that gridded rows promote compliance and normatively ideal behaviors (i.e. silence and attentiveness). Some recent inquiries argue that the ‘ideal’ arrangement of people is typically one that is dictated by the nature of the task at hand (Wannarka & Ruhl, 2008). 39 Regardless of layout, crowded schools that lack a sense of individual privacy have been associated with higher rates of distraction and off-task behaviors (Kantrowitz & Evans, 2004; Tanner, 2000). Overfilling, as was common throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries, create prime conditions for movement and distraction (Lackney, 1994). These studies are frequently framed as useful in that the arrangement of desks and other furniture is an aspect of classroom management that is almost wholly within the control of the teacher. School design, including both structural components (i.e. floor plan, ceiling height, materials) and more temporary décor and layout, have also been continuously investigated. Such studies do not offer much in the way of an ideal, but something of a goldilocks conundrum. It has been found that classrooms made attractive through the lack of graffiti and the presence of student work are associated with fewer behavioral problems (Kumar et al., 2008). Similarly, studies of wall color tend to suggest variety (without extreme contrast) as a means of promoting student cooperation (Read et al., 1999). Studies about the visual stimulation of décor, warn that simpler environments tend to aid student attention, while overstimulating visuals (resulting from busy décor and concentrations of intensely bright colors) distract (Fisher et al., 2014; Godwin & Fisher, 2011). A defined floor plan, either structural or suggested through arrangement, that clearly indicates behavioral expectations has been linked to more exploratory behaviors, social interaction, and cooperation (Abbas & Othman, 2010; G. T. Moore, 1986). Expanding outward, this paradigm has even included the ways that schools can manage the interactions between students and various external stimuli. Assessments of peripheral noise and its effect on student behavior have concluded that audible external sounds are distracting and generally cause disengagement from deep attention (Massonnié et al., 2022; Ramma, 2007; Woolner & Hall, 2010). Similarly, windows offer a wealth of distractions. Dynamic views of the world beyond the 40 school have potential to pull students’ attention from the task at hand (Heschong et al., 2003), and the glare of natural light across surfaces is interruptive to students’ input processes (Heschong et al., 2002). Theoretically we can trace the earliest roots of situated literacies, and nexus of practice to this time as students of a particular focus are grouped in thought, co-constructing knowledges through shared dialogue (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Scollon, 2001). Problematically, these theoretical concepts of learning depend on the intermingling so desired by the Cardinal Principles, intermingling that was often dissuaded by the obsession of behavioral control central to the factory schools. These ideas, however, are given more space for germination in the classrooms of the pedagogic progressives. SITES OF COMMUNITY As schools conceived around the tenants of economic predetermination pushed ever westward and deeply normalized the industrial form of design, a group of progressive educators around the turn of the 20th century grew discontent in the ubiquity and, as they saw it, misguided ideals of the schools. These so-called pedagogic progressives advocated for schools that were integrated with their communities, breaking open the containers established in colonial schoolhouses, to create continuity and flow between learners and their localities (Rury, 2016). Furthermore these reformers sought to reconceptualize learning itself, shattering aspects of the discourse of indoctrination. The school was not meant to be a corrective space beyond its community, but rather an extension of its community. In order to learn about democratic values, students needed to participate in democratic practices, not be isolated from them. Notions of movement from inside the school to the outside were common, with educators advocating for real experiences in the world rather than textual and simulated learning. The classroom was an origin, a starting point for students to move out into the world and experience learning through firsthand efforts (Dewey, 1900, 1902; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). 41 At the same time, the surrounding community was intended to be invited into the classroom. In The School and Society, John Dewey sketches out a diagram for a unified school, one that conceptually integrates the work within and the community beyond (1900). Dewey outlined several “floors”, with various wings dedicated to different learning tasks—with space for the arts, FIGURE 14. SCHOOL OUT OF ISOLATION (Dewey, 1900) laboratory research, and social interaction, all intersecting across archives of cumulative human experience in libraries and the galleries of a school museum. The diagram shows sequences of interaction between the school and its surroundings and suggests particular curricula beyond its halls. Dewey maps the ways that local technical schools and research institutions, libraries and museums, businesses, gardens, parks, and agricultural spaces, as well as students’ own home lives might make their way into the school to contribute to their learning. Whereas the earliest schoolhouses were largely self-contained institutions, Dewey’s model adopts the mindset that schools need external participation to be truly complete. This discursive invitation for the school to intermingle with the world carried over into the very experience of its students. Spatially, the argument was made that learning about certain subjects, those that could be actually experienced by students, could never be engaged in the same way through 42 mere textual encounter (Dewey, 1900). For example if students were learning about agricultural practices, book learning could never compare to actually setting foot on a farm. Learning the history of one’s town through text, could not compare to the visitation of local archives, or conversation with a historian in situ. In this mindset, the school is incredibly incomplete as a space of learning, and necessarily requires external contexts for the success and happiness of its students. Underlying all of this is a connection to the community. Schools were often landmarks, both physical and symbolic, for the communities in which they were built. For the progressives this did not mean that schools should become ivory towers, but places in which the community was welcomed, a place in which to live, and learn as a result. As such, the design of the school for pedagogic progressives can best be summed up in the concept of openings. Whereas colonial school-builders walled off experience and interaction, and industrialists attempted to constrain inattention and distraction, the pedagogic progressives emphasized opening, going out, and experiencing the world beyond the school itself. While the core group of the pedagogic progressives is generally considered to have fizzled out by the outbreak of World War II, their reforms changed the design of schools, but also encouraged students and teachers to depart them entirely. Open-plan schools started to pop in the 1960s (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). These were built as large open areas, with access across many groups of students by multiple different teachers. Such schools alleviated some of the cramped, uncomfortable conditions propagated by the industrial schools and returned to the roots of the one room schoolhouse. As such they were studied frequently under the paradigm of management, and despite some results showing that students felt more positively about school (Wilson et al., 1972), general findings showed poor behavioral control, and thus, the designs largely fell out of fashion (Evans & Lovell, 1979; Shield et al., 2010). 43 Breaking down the limits of interior and exterior space, schools shaped by progressive pedagogic reforms often emphasize outdoor learning opportunities. This feature can still be found commonly in schools today. Aspects such as community gardens or dedicated outdoor space assigned to each individual classroom invites students and teachers to leave the rigidity of the school's interior architecture, emphasizing the importance of exterior and landscape design as an incorporated aspect of the built world. Furthermore, some schools have invested in outdoor classrooms. These range in development from composed amphitheaters in which a relatively traditional class format can be taken outside, sometimes including chalkboards or lab tables, to much simpler setups that merely suggest assembly of a group of students. WINDOWS TO THE WORLD More than a particular research paradigm, the progressive pedagogic reforms opened several lines of discourse. These lines frequently rely on the notion of learning alongside others, rejecting previous ideas that learning was somehow the unlocking of innate proclivities through isolated focus. Learning became an act of communication and participation. Schools were reimagined as spaces of mobility through and across which students, teachers, and community members could move and intersect with one another. Content areas did not require segmentation and separation, as ideas from various fields were meant to find their way into others. Building from the concept of intersection and experiential practice, the theorization of situated learning found fertile ground. As conceptualized by Lave and Wenger (1991), situated learning describes a co-construction of knowledge established amid community of practice. This community is specific to a particular context, and social and physical environments. They conceptualize learning as the process of becoming part of a community, a process that can only ever be artificial when performed outside of an authentic context for such participation. Breaking from the panoptic model of the industrial schools, situated learning also relies upon students’ interests guiding their inquiry, 44 allowing them to gravitate toward others who share their interests, then learning together in a self- formed community. Often this learning includes an instructor but does not depend upon them. Different from the Lancastrian model of the industrial schools, students are able to choose the communities in which they participate and more fully engage in learning. As such, the classroom becomes a jumping off point. A space in which students can encounter one another, establish communities of practice, and prepare to go out into more suitable and authentic sites of education. Perhaps the most direct discursive and pedagogical successor from the reforms of the pedagogic progressives is the practice of place-based education (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008). Extending notions of situated learning, namely the importance of authentic contexts and problem solving (Hung, 2002), the community becomes the classroom as students venture out beyond the physical bonds of the school to learn about (and in) the real context of their surroundings. Often students move into their communities with desire-centered goals, rather than deficit-oriented problems (Tuck, 2009). These desires guide particular projects, lines of communication, or community involvement that they, as a class and a community of practice, desire to engage in. Place-based practices have been shown to increase academic achievement, develop stronger ties to community, enhance appreciation for the natural world, and create a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens (Sobel, 2004). Due to the rapid advancement of technology, virtual learning spaces have only exaggerated this concept. Students and teachers can now occupy virtual classrooms, sharing discourse, practice, and community, without sharing literal space. For the sake of this piece, one that relies on the physical environments of learning, I will not delve into virtual classrooms. SITES OF EXCELLENCE Following the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983), and later the passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation, discourse around schools shifted largely from a paradigm of management to 45 one of normative success. With the notion that American schools were failing compared to their counterparts around the world, globalist and capitalist discourses now required schools to prepare a different sort of graduate, sometimes referred to as the symbolic analyst (Labaree, 1997). As economic demand for higher degrees made college a more and more appealing option, the demand for measurable success crept earlier and earlier in the American curriculum. Reimagination of what students were being prepared to do led to the ultimate consumption of schools and classrooms as tools, each of which must be finely honed toward optimized effect. In large part this effect, and its measure of success relied on college admissions and standardized test scores. As a result, much of the spatial self-concept developed from the discourses of the industrial schools was built upon as a foundation. The idea that inattention and behavioral issues could be limited was segued into the concept of maximizing test scores. If a student could be aided in their quest for attention, they could be better taught, and the scores could be raised. With rapid increases in the availability of technology, schools began to take on new appearances. Libraries transformed into more technologically oriented media centers. Subject oriented classroom pods became commonplace to spatially theme the experience of daily interaction and conversation. Old familiar features, such as the chalkboard or whiteboard were often replaced with screens. Students were given access to various digital input and output devices, making multimodal production of texts more and more familiar, and less a specialized skill. Across these various devices was the formation of networks easing the ability for students to become producers of curricular content rather than mere consumers. Following in the mode of the industrial schools, many began to mirror particular sites of the workforce. Just as assembly lines made way for cubicle farms and then open concept workspaces, the rank-and-file desks of the industrial schools have been replaced with mobile furniture that allowed flexible rearrangement of the school at a moment's notice. Some schools 46 began to mimic large Silicon Valley headquarters, whereby fixed classrooms were left behind in the interest of a variety of possible spaces which could be used according to the needs of an activity. CATALYSTS OF OPTIMIZED EFFECT Again, the industrialization-era concept of schools as mechanisms of behavioral control was frequently revisited as a part of this discourse of imposing effect; building from the idea that an orderly and well-managed classroom, one with normatively valued behavioral habits, might be one in which success could easily follow. That is not to say however, that significant revision did not take place. A distinction was drawn between environmental aspects that annoy or distract, and those that actively impact student test scores. A number of studies have concluded that inadequate school facilities are related to worse test scores, even when statistically controlling for the socioeconomic status and racial makeup of students (Crampton, 2009; Durán-Narucki, 2008; Tanner, 2008).8 Barrett et al. (2015) examined some these inadequacies, theorizing a framework for successful school spaces that includes naturalness, individualization, and stimulation. Consideration of naturalness largely accounts for light, noise, air quality, and students’ connection to nature. It has been found that students exposed to more natural light perform better than students exposed to less natural light (Edwards & Torcellini, 2002; Heschong et al., 2002; Tanner, 2008, 2009). Moreover, avoiding the goldilocks scenario of the behavioralists, the upper limit on natural light’s benefit is the presence of glare, a question of orientation more than window area (Barrett et al., 2015). When natural light is difficult to come by, higher quality and lower quantity of artificial light similarly benefits students, promoting the use of fewer fluorescents (Winterbottom & Wilkins, 8 I feel it is important to note that many of these studies rely on different standardized tests as their measure, some widespread and common to lots of different students, others composed by the researchers. With that, I report their findings somewhat tongue-in-cheek. As with any data based on standardized test results, the notion of ideal performance is very often just that – a performance of attention, memory, and test-taking techniques that may be disconnected from the variables in question. In effect, these measurements of ideal performance may be little more than a repackaging of those familiar to the paradigm of order, bound with the unexamined variable of test-taking skill. 47 2009). Studies show that high levels of noise, both external and internal, coincide with lower test scores (Evans & Maxwell, 1997; Klatte et al., 2010; Ramma, 2007; Shield & Dockrell, 2008). Even moderate fluctuations in temperature and air quality have shown significant impacts on student performance (Allen & Fischer, 1978; Wargocki & Wyon, 2007). That is not to imply that classrooms ought to be fixed at one ideal temperature, but rather that careful design to limit rapid fluctuation due to sun heat, as well as users’ ability to control temperature at a local level benefits performance (Barrett et al., 2015; Nicol & Humphreys, 2002). Air circulation is evidenced as beneficial, as students in rooms with mechanical ventilation, large volume, or egress seem to perform best (Bakó- Biró et al., 2012; Wargocki & Wyon, 2007). Students’ performance also benefits from feeling connected to nature in the course of the school day. Even something as small as the presence of wooden surfaces, textures, and finishes, showed improved scores among students (Barrett et al., 2015). Despite moments of distraction, those who have access to views of nature, opposed to something like a retaining wall, demonstrate higher course scores and more positive evaluations of courses as a whole (Benfield et al., 2015). Moreover, those with access to dedicated outdoor spaces throughout the course of the day outperformed those who were confined to their schools (Mårtensson et al., 2009). In this we begin to see significant moment of shift between discourses of control and effect, as what was once seen as a distraction is revealed as an aspect that ultimately improves performance. Individualization works very much in opposition to the design of the factory schools, wherein classrooms were essentially identical throughout the entirety of the school. Barrett emphasizes various notions of ownership that allow students to feel a degree of agency and belonging in their classrooms (2015). Students who occupy schools with unique architectural design elements, such as distinctive locations, plan shape (L shape; T shape), embedded furniture or facilities, or unique ornamentation demonstrate a stronger sense of ownership and, with it, performance (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). The 48 consistent presence of student-provided décor has even demonstrated increases in students’ self- esteem and performance (Killeen et al., 2003; Maxwell & Chmielewski, 2008). Even the inclusion of ergonomic and adjustable furniture, granting the feeling that one can augment the space, rather than mold to its rigidity, increases ownership and performance (Leung & Fung, 2005). This augmentation also applies to classrooms as whole units. Spaces that students felt could be reoriented in both layout and density to best suit their current purpose yielded better performance than sites of rigidity (Maxwell, 2003). Barrett et al’s examination of stimulation directly hails back to the research of the school as a mechanism of control particularly in thinking about the visual displays present (2015). With regard to design complexity, color schemes, and contrast, much of the same conclusions were reached, seeking an intermediate level of stimulus. A completely blank, neutral wall can be as deflating as a crowded, polychromatic display is distracting. They link an array of varied displays, as well as balance between light walls and colorful accents with optimal performance. Considering more symbolic stimuli, schools that present images of often marginalized populations in positions of success and authority foster better performance in skills such as comprehension among members of those populations (Good et al., 2010). In tracing these discourses across the landscape of American secondary schools there emerges a particular set of stories told about educative spaces and places, as well as the people that inhabit them. Originating as sites of containment and doctrine, control and community, and emerging more recently as strange amalgams, tools designed to slingshot students’ evidence of learning ever forward, the built world of schools, the curricula that they contain, the research they inspire, composes a narrative con-text as familiarly legible as the words on this page. Yet so often we imply the grammars and syntaxes of design without remembering that the massing, egress, materials chosen, and furniture arranged all means something, says something about the intended users, uses, and experiences of the 49 places themselves. Alongside these massively branching, historic and institutionalized paradigmatic discourses others may seem but mere shadows. Still, it's worth remembering that the lesser told stories of schools are still of great importance in the conceptualization and materialization of the built world itself. Each individual school is composed not only of these grand discourses but of the individual strands of communication and thought exhibited by their users. 50 II. PRE-TEXTS9 The curriculum will be brought to bear not in some archetypical classroom but in a particular locus in time and space with smells, shadows, seats, and conditions outside its walls which may have much to do with what is achieved inside. (Schwab, 1969, p. 12) 9 How might qualitative inquiry guide the examination of other, less prevalent discourses? 51 Alongside con-text, the pre-text of the Dardenian method refers to the conceptual or narrative framework that informs the design of a building. This framework includes the narratives, themes, and metaphors that the architect uses to give meaning and purpose to the design—as I read it, the local discourses that define a given place. Pre-text is often derived from the con-text, but it can also be independent of it. For example, one might conceptualize design around a historical event or a mythological story, even if the site has no direct connection to that event or story. The three pre-texts that follow detail differing stories about schools, each composed in the course of qualitative inquiry. In Chapter 3, I examine a story told by the NRA regarding schools as sites of security, shields behind which young people can pass safely into adulthood. Chapter 3 departs the school proper, retelling the tales of ten learners and the places in which they most remember engaging in the act of learning. Finally, Chapter 5 returns to the building block of the school, the classroom, as five teachers narrate their interpretation of classrooms to build out a sort of idealized space for teaching. 52 CHAPTER 3. HARD TARGETS, A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS10 One Tuesday in the spring of 1999, my third-grade class was suddenly rushed into the library, where we were told to sit against the walls, not to worry, but to stay quiet, and that our parents had been called to pick us up one by one. We had no idea what was going on. This was a strange and scary interruption, but it was incomparable to the events happening just about 30 miles away at Columbine High School. I think we've all heard those stories of paradigmatic shift, almost always relayed by memory of where one was during some significant moment. Sometimes awe-inspiring, more often tragic—the afternoon of JFK's assassination, the evening of the Apollo 11 landing, the morning of September 11th, 2001, the 6th of January 2021. As an educator, the hours that I sat in that library on April 20th, 1999, mark one of these paradigm shifts. Schools changed almost immediately, physically sure, but also as the sorts of places that they hoped to be. I was at school when I heard about Virginia Tech and Platte Canyon and countless other occasions of tragedy that likewise occurred in schools. As I was preparing to become a teacher, accounts of gun violence in and against schools arrived seemingly daily, and in my first semester behind the desk came news of Sandy Hook. My students, understanding this world, but fearing it no less, would glance at the massive windows that encapsulated our classroom, at the city sidewalk just a few feet beyond them, or the open courtyard on the other side. They asked me how I would handle a situation like the ones they saw in the news. Alongside drills for fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and all other manner of natural disaster, we practiced huddling against the walls, keeping quiet until given the all- 10 This chapter discusses school violence, most commonly enacted in the form of school shootings. In talking to folks about the content of this particular pre-text I've gotten a lot of questions about the trauma that it carries with it. This one is a trauma that is particularly commonplace for people who grew up around and ever since my graded cohorts. I've described it as the water of the educational ecosystem in which we have long swam. That water changed with a series of e-mail alerts of an active shooter on campus in East Lansing. Even having experienced Columbine from what I would consider a rather close second hand, nothing compares to the feeling of your own campus and peers turned to targets. I write this to forecast the potentially upsetting following, a pre-text that, I believe, mistakes such tragedy as an opening for the arming of schools, for a distinct militancy of the educational built world. 53 clear, just as I had been instructed so many years earlier. My experience as a secondary educator spanned these many tragedies and traumas, and just days after receiving an acceptance letter to study at Michigan State, we all learned the name of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This chapter, as much as anything, revolves around the discourse of guns in schools, and the expectation that people and schools change for those guns. But beyond this highly specific discourse of schools as places of security and safe-keeping, I wanted to examine the emplacement of textual discourses. Most every school that I’ve encountered in years of attendance, teaching, and observing as a teacher educator has been rife with guiding discourses in the form of mission, vision, and values statements, strategic plans, manuals and handbooks of all kinds, bylaws, constitutions, and charters. These discourses, fixed in type, exist to shape the built worlds of their institutions, and (for the mere fact of being in print, themselves made material) seem to command a strong presence in this shaping. I began with a curiosity regarding the ways that these discursive texts function to position and present the environments, ideals, and inhabitants of schools. The story of this pre-text originated with one such tragedy and the particular political discourse that followed—the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. After 21 people were killed and 17 others wounded in May of 2022, Texas Senator, Ted Cruz took to the airwaves to lament the loss of life in his state, as well as the predatory Democratic agenda to use the event as impetus for gun control legislation. He exclaimed in a clip that dominated news cycles: You wanna talk about how we could have prevented the horror that played out across the street? Look, the killer entered here the same way the killer entered in Santa Fe11, through a back door, an unlocked back door. I sat down at roundtables with the families from Santa Fe - we talked about what we need to do to harden schools, including not having unlocked back 11 Referring to the Santa Fe High School shooting in May 2018. 54 doors, including not having unlocked doors to classrooms, having one door that goes in and out of the school, having armed police officers at that one door12 (“Senator Ted Cruz Reacts to Uvalde School Shooting,” 2022). At a convention for the National Rifle Association (NRA) just three days later, Cruz reiterated: We also know that there are best practices at federal buildings and courthouses, where for security reasons they limit the means of entry to one entrance. Schools, likewise, should have a single point of entry. Fire exits should only open out. At that single point of entry, we should have multiple armed police officers. Or if need be, military veterans trained to provide security and keep our children safe (Senator Ted Cruz Speaks at 2022 NRA Convention in Houston, 2022). Then, Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, mirrored this discourse, saying, “We have to do more. We have to harden these targets, so no one can get in ever except through one entrance. Maybe that would help, maybe that would stop someone” (“Horrific Shooting at Texas Elementary School,” 2022). With the occurrence of gun-violence in schools as common as it has been in my lifetime, this discourse of hardening schools has crossed my desk before. It's a curious one. The idea of shifting the experience of the many to defend against the few. It values freedom above well-being. It seeks fortification rather than revision. Initially, I set out to explore this discourse of hardening public spaces, notably schools, to explore whether it was simply an ideological means of maintaining Second Amendment rights, or if this was really the best we could do to protect the public. More interesting than the roots of this discourse, I think, I stumbled upon one particular reinforcement and reiteration of it. Ted Cruz and Dan Patrick’s talking points about singular doors ultimately refer to a design concept called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). CPTED is rooted in 12 Emphasis mine. 55 1960’s criminology as a mindset to reinvigorate urban centers. Aspects of CPTED are familiar in publicly hostile architecture and policy decisions, most recognizably broken windows policing. But considering that environmental design is not often under the purview or expertise of state senators and lieutenant governors, it is hypothesized that these two officials likely learned of the concept from one particular NRA-funded project, the National School Shield13 (NSS), and its publication, the Report of the National School Shield Task Force (the Report). The Report is authored by former Secret Service agents and consultants, members of the Department of Homeland Security, a private munitions- training and force-on-force combat consultant called Phoenix RBT Solutions, as well as police and SWAT officers. The Report argues that school violence is normal, and has been a part of American life for over 300 years, citing the murder of 11 people in a one-room schoolhouse in 1764, but that schools fail in preventing such violence (Hutchinson, 2013, p. 6). The authors ultimately make ten recommendations regarding site assessment, the presence, funding, and training of armed school resource officers (SROs), legislation allowing other school personnel to be armed and trained, and the establishment of the NSS as the official umbrella organization for school safety advocacy in the United States. Buried in the 206 pages of appendices, the Report details preparedness recommendations based on CPTED, citing responsibilities to establish territoriality, natural surveillance, and access control through the built environment of schools themselves. This pre-text seeks to examine the Report as a piece of discourse guiding the establishment of schools as hard targets. Considering the Report as a foundational document, as it has been taken up by politicians such as Patrick and Cruz, even in moments of the most unimaginable tragedy, I will seek to better understand what a school-as-hard target looks like, how the NSS conceptualizes schools as built environments, and the sorts of design concepts that are communicated through its composition. 13 Now the NRA School Shield. 56 Considering this document as one with power to arrange space, as we have already clearly seen the movement of (ultimately, very little) money and (considerably more) political clout following its lead, this study takes steps toward imagining what kinds of spaces and experiences might result. METHODOLOGY & METHOD Thinking with Fairclough and Gee, this pre-text relies on the assumption that we as humans use language to affect the world around us (Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2011). We know that texts have causal effects on both people and the material world, bringing about changes in our knowledges, beliefs, attitudes, identities, interactions, and values, as well as urban design and architecture (Fairclough, 2003). In the case of the Report, there is an evident attempt to use language to prescribe and influence the design, construction, and inhabitation of schools, according to a very specific ideologic frame. The Report “builds pictures” in the minds of its readers through a particular set of discourses and grammars (Fairclough, 2003), painting schools as tragedies waiting to happen, but for the presence of a good guy with a gun (preferably many). In this act of textual worldbuilding, the intent is not fictional, but to impress real influence on the material place of schools. Through the use of textual discourse analysis, this pre-text examines the ways that language is used to establish, enact, and maintain such influence. To piece together the power of this asserted text, I relied on three rounds of analysis, each taking up a particular lens of examination prescribed by Gee (2011). Rather than utilizing software to make connections between particular textual structures, I examined the Report almost as a sort of monologic proclamation, extracting and coding utterances. THE TEXT AS DATA A week after the events at Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre announced the formation of the National School Shield Program, describing an emergency response program covering topics from “armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training,” all made available to every school in America, free of charge (LaPierre, 2012). He 57 tapped former Arkansas Governor, U.S. Attorney, and Congressman Asa Hutchinson to head the program, and promised a blank check to hire the most “knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere”, that their work might “erect a cordon of protection around our kids” (LaPierre, 2012). In his introduction as program head, even before a staff was hired, Hutchinson stated the need for armed security as a foregone conclusion. Thusly, the program, the task force, and the Report were commissioned. Four months later the 19-page Report and accompanying 206 pages of appendices were published. The document consists of four primary parts: (i) the report14, (ii) the best practice manual, (iii) the school assessment presentation, and (iv) resources. The report itself offers an introduction to school violence in the United States and establishes the School Resource Officer as an almost salvific figure. It outlines a research methodology for the examination of six schools, details ten key findings of the examination, and at its crux, offers eight resultant recommendations. Appendix A, titled Best Practices Guidelines and self-referenced as “The Manual”, functions as part literature review and part analytical examination of the six assessed schools. Command Consulting Group and Phoenix RBT Solutions are given focal authorship. The body of literature examined includes works by the Departments of Homeland Security and Education, the United States Secret Service, as well as non- profit, academic, and commercial sources. The text outlines three layers of essential security posturing: prevention and mitigation, preparedness, and response. Appendix B offers a summary of school assessments, formatted as a series of presentation slides. Each sequence of slides progresses through evidence of findings, in the form of plans and photographs, followed by best-practice recommendations offered as bulleted lists or uncaptioned product images (Hutchinson, 2013, p. B32). Finally, Appendices C-I are comprised of shorter documents. Included are justification for a subsidiary 14 Consisting of authorial and conceptual introductions, findings, recommendations. 58 training program, outlines of two training guides, descriptions of the NSS’ web-based school assessment tool, security plan guidelines, pre-incident indicators, and a template for legislation to allow firearms into schools. ANALYSIS & FINDINGS15 Understanding the Report itself as a piece of discursive data, I took up the text across three distinct analytical readings, utilizing different tools and lenses in each. My initial reading encompassed the entirety of the document, taking in the discourse as a whole and utilizing an approach termed Making Strange to better examine the ways that the document takes certain assumptions and worldviews for granted (Gee, 2011, p. 19). Within this approach, I examined the vocabularies present and absent within the text, as well as the broad narrative arcs expected of schools compared to what is actually present. With continued analysis I focused my examination on Appendix A, especially the subsection about prevention and mitigation, as it contained the most detailed communication surrounding notions of space and place. In this second reading, I attempted to build out a sense of emplaced social identities as a means of populating the schools imagined within the document. To build out such an analysis I considered the sorts of roles defined and the ways that they were given agency within schools, as well as how they were grouped and institutionally authorized. My third and final reading attempted to understand the Report as part of larger discourses by examining the intertextuality of the piece. I did so by cataloging citations and in-text hyperlinks, spatial references, and metaphors used by the text to bridge to other ideas. 15 Keeping in mind this pre-text as one of textual analysis, and therefore one in which data generation and analysis often ran together, I chose, in this section, rather than separating the analysis and findings to two separate sections, and thus creating an experience of reading back and forth across a “how” and a “what”, I've layered the two processes together, hoping to close the proximity between process and product. 59 MAKING STRANGE I arrived at the NSS knowing that it was a document that I would likely find disagreeable, certainly strange. I had heard of it a few years after its publication, when a think piece in Mother Jones described the Report as a disturbing effort to eliminate things like landscaping from school campuses rather than address the prevalence of guns in the United States. Entering the document with such a predisposition, it then made sense to attempt to delve into my own prejudice, to consider exactly what it was that I found so strange, so upsetting about the Report. Gee describes an analytical task which he terms the Making Strange Tool, through which one imagines themselves as an outsider such that they might consider the aspects of a text or discourse that are strange, unclear, and/or confusing without particular underlying knowledge or assumptions (2011). This process, when used to examine discourses, situations, or spaces that might otherwise be taken for granted in their familiarity, allows for a better understanding of exactly what the speaker is inferring as opposed to stating overtly, it allows for an examination of the underbelly of any given communication. To conduct analysis with this tool I relied on a series of memos and notes that I wrote while reading the NSS, closely, as a whole, for the first time. In its opening sentence the Report asks “what more can we do as a nation to improve the safety of our children at school?” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. 2). Taken aback, I wasn't sure if this was an inquiry to guide composition or an admission of surrender. The piece begins then deeply interested in the concept of safety, which I see as a human oriented notion, before making a hard pivot into the realm of security, one that is far more objectifying. The authors delve into careful and close (almost excited) detail about the types of firearms used in attacks on schools over the past 30 years, On March 5, 2001, Charles Williams, a freshman at Santana High School in Santee, CA, used a .22-caliber revolver to shoot fifteen people at his school… [Jeff] Weise killed his grandfather 60 and his grandfather’s girlfriend using a .22-caliber gun… Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others at his high school before the school’s assistant principal, Joel Myrick, disarmed him using a .45-caliber semi- automatic pistol that he retrieved from his truck. (Hutchinson, 2013, p. 5) With a clear villain for their narrative the Report posits school resource officers as the equally apparent solution. The SROs roam the Report’s recommendations like western cowboys; security officials that somehow also managed to forge the strongest relationships with students, trustworthy even to the point of being able to teach, though they'll never be asked to (Hutchinson, 2013, p. 7). The Report defines the roles of administrators and teachers in an afterthought. The authors, experts in security and homeland defense all, lay out their findings, the unpreparedness of faculties and facilities as they are, the massive importance of SROs in the defense of schools. They make recommendations of how to train armed personnel, the sorts of laws that might allow those personnel into the schools in the first place. They seek to self-promote to a national authority on school security. And after laying out these recommendations, they pray that the NRA looks favorably upon them and “commits its enormous political will and energy behind the effort” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. 19). In a sudden change from the Report to the appendices, the text turns to a meta-analysis of all things school security. All-important layers. Layers of defense stop perpetrators from reaching the asset. Layer one is all about the environment, first encountered in the community of the school itself, then the built world. The community, though, has a responsibility for surveillance above all else. Threat assessment teams should be founded and should meet weekly to assess existing threats within the community, always seeking the earliest signs of potential crisis-turned-threat. The document then terms successful plans such as disability support, treatment requirements, and academic assistance. These supports are conceptualized not as humanizing or even the essential duty of a school, but as threat mitigation. Further, the “facility” itself has immense power in the way of prevention. The 61 idealized school is something akin to a fortress, a castle, some strangely impenetrable, yet incredibly easy to escape, structure of public imposition, designed to “remove the excuses as to why people do not comply with the rules or behave inappropriately” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A24). TABLE 1. STRIKING VOCABULARY DISTINCT USES PAGES Security/Secure/Securely 478 149 Safe/Safety/Safely 303 108 Access 158 57 Prevent 119 63 Control 111 42 Violent/Violence 106 50 Potential 95 61 Vulnerabilities/Vulnerable 94 49 Evacuation 89 30 Surveillance 76 33 Authorization 39 25 Facility 31 22 Perimeter 26 14 Egress 20 11 Assets 18 13 Concealment 18 10 Intrusion/intruder/intrusive 13 13 Layers 11 7 Confront 11 11 Ballistic 11 7 Defense 10 6 Impediment 8 8 Weakness/weak 8 8 Restrict 8 8 Territoriality 7 5 Entrapment 7 6 Escape 7 5 Verify 5 5 Inspection 3 3 Demarcation 2 2 Hostile vegetation 1 1 Notable across these first readings were the authors’ striking choices in vocabulary. As I read, I began to keep a running list of words that were used with high frequency. The guiding themes of 62 security and safety were most prevalent, with consistent, clustered usage throughout the document. But the ways that this security was taken up became apparent in some of the other choices made. Frequent references to access (most notably in ways of limiting or restricting), prevention, and control (with regard to behavior), made evident the project to secure schools even at the cost of foreclosing other possibilities. I also took note of words that seemed out of place considering the topic of schools. Concepts of concealment and impediments rose up alongside territoriality, entrapment, verification, and inspection, and perhaps most notably the resounding mention of “hostile vegetation” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A28). For fear that I was just overlooking that which was already familiar and expected, I checked some of these terms against those that would seem more appropriate in such a text. While classrooms and children were present as the settings and inhabitants of schools, typical notions of school activity were conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the vocabulary of education often turned inward on lessons of security, framing the learning that was happening in schools as one that centered previous school shootings as a means of preparing for potential futures. TABLE 2. ANTICIPATED VOCABULARY DISTINCT USES PAGES Classroom 64 26 Child/Children/Kid(s) 44 22 Teach/Instruct 14 10 Learn/Learning 5 5 Education/Educate 4 4 Classes 4 3 Curriculum 0 0 Hugely apparent in this task of making strange was the way that firearms and their users were grammatically positioned against one another. Those who were perpetrating or intended to perpetrate violence in schools were labelled as assailant, shooter (particularly used 174 times across the entirety of the document), attacker, intruder, gunman, offender, or perpetrator. These individuals effectively become violence embodied, named for their actions. Fascinatingly though, the discourse seems 63 hesitant to describe weapons in the hands of these perpetrators. The adjective armed, used 129 times throughout the Report, is used only four times to describe perpetrators. The nouns gun and firearm fall into the hands of these wrongdoers just seven times. Even shooters and gunmen, whose identity is conflated with the very presence of a firearm, assume the violent act for themselves while the enabling object is veiled by the text. This is strikingly different than the ways that resource officers and law enforcement are described, as they tend to maintain the straightforward subjectivity of their position but are nearly always identified in their potential effectiveness through description of whether they are armed. Breaking free of the brackets through which I read the document at this point, I can't help but think of the slogan often attributed to the NRA, “guns don't kill people, people kill people” and the rhetorical gymnastics required to maintain such a concept throughout this document. Shooters, impossibly without guns, are portrayed as violent in and of themselves, an individual person that must be controlled. They are, in the grammatical estimation of the discourse, the sole killer. Meanwhile, the guns, suddenly present for those defending schools and their assets, are identified not objectively, but in their capacity to stop the killer. IDENTITY BUILDING Evident in the process of making strange was the cast of characters imagined to occupy schools. Unmistakable concepts of hierarchy built out the representation of these inhabitants, both as they are represented currently and as the Report imagines that they should be. Early in the manual, authors lay out a series of identities to be taken up by the members of a faculty (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A7): School commander [e.g., Principal, Vice-principal]; Liaison to emergency responders [e.g., school security officer]; Caregivers to students [e.g., teachers, counselors]; Security officers [e.g., School Resource Officer (SRO), private security personnel]; 64 Medical staff [e.g., school nurse]; Spokesperson [e.g., communications administrator]. Absent this casting are the school's students, though they along with the building itself, are at different points identified less as members of the community or the response team, and more as assets to be protected from assailants and intruders (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A24). Considering this representation of the inhabitants of schools, a second round of analysis utilized Gee’s identities building tool. In this tool, analysis is guided by exploration of socially recognizable identities that the authors are attempting to enact or establish, the ways the authors treat each identity and relate to these identities, and how the authors are attempting to move various identities (Gee, 2011, p. 116). Wanting to pay closer attention to the ways that the Report framed identity alongside the physical world of the school, I limited this particular examination to a smaller subsection of the overall document. Appendix A outlines best practice in operation and design of schools as sites of physical security, capable of prevention and mitigation in the event of an attack. Alongside attention and threat assessment, this section frames the physical environment of the school as the first layer of defense. Using this 31-page section as a dataset, I recorded each instance of a grammatical noun used to position a person as they relate to the built world of the school. After accumulating a complete list across the section, I searched for variations of each (i.e. plurals). For each use I recorded the sentence containing the identity as an utterance to create a sort of identity transcript across the document. Using this assemblage, I built out the authors’ conceptualizations of each identity using a series of four analytical passes. TABLE 3. SOCIAL IDENTITIES IN APPENDIX A Social Identities Distinct Uses Student 30 Student Official 17 Administration Administrator 6 65 Table 3 (cont’d) Staff 19 Teacher 7 Staff Faculty 3 Employee 2 Responder 8 Personnel 6 Emergency Personnel Officer 2 Provider 2 Visitor 17 Pedestrian 7 Parent 3 Community Outsider 2 Community Member 1 Guest 1 Individual 12 Unnamed People 7 Person 4 Assailant 14 Shooter 13 Attacker 5 Attacker Intruder 5 Gunman 4 Offender 3 Perpetrator 2 Author 14 Expert The first pass, borrowed from Fairclough, examined each social identity as either active or passive within the space. In any given utterance, an active identity is one who is doing something or making something happen; they carry out a process. Alternatively, a passive identity can be seen as the affected or beneficiary role; they are impacted by a process. Though they are perhaps necessary or implied in its occurrence, they do not participate in enacting the process itself (Fairclough, 2003, p. 145). Building from this, in a second analytic pass, I coded moments of active positioning according to the verbs used to describe the social identity at play. Together, these analyses demonstrated the degree to which the authors believe certain kinds of people, certain (D)iscursive selves should either be in control or controlled by the environment of a school, examining the sorts of actions different people are expected to perform. Take for example visitors. Again and again, visitors were considered 66 a commonplace participant in the built world of a school, but they were passivated in all but one instance. TABLE 4. DEMONSTRATION OF ACTIVATION/PASSIVATION OF VISITORS A(ctive) or P(assive) Utterance (about Visitor) Role Because it is necessary to provide efficient points of access for students, staff, visitors, and service providers via personal vehicles, buses, or by foot, gates or other exterior access points P must accompany exterior security features like fences. An access point is a designated area for authorized school building users, such as employees, P visitors, and service providers. Parking lots and vehicular access zones provide ready and reliable school access for students, P staff, parents, and other visitors. As such, school officials should be cognizant of their simultaneous goals of providing convenience for school visitors and occupants while maximizing security in areas accessible to P vehicles. Is visitor parking located near the main entrance to the school, with clear signs directing P visitors to the main office? To control access and limit intrusion, visitors should be guided to a single control point and required to pass directly through to administration reception areas when entering or leaving P the school. Because it is a commonly advised best practice to funnel visitors to a single, main entrance – and, indeed, to prevent their entry altogether through any other location – it is imperative that P schools carefully consider the physical security tools that will allow convenient access by visitors while preventing that of potential assailants at this location. The school was furthermore equipped with an intercom/camera system that assisted in P screening visitors prior to entry. Limited or no opportunity for pre-screening of visitors before entry P Direct visitors through this single control point at main entry P Consider escorting visitors (or delivery personnel) into the building P Can exterior doors be electronically locked to block visitors’ entry into the building? P When the main entry doors are unlocked, can securable internal doors oblige visitors to confer A with the receptionist to gain entry beyond the reception area? Establishing a single, controlled, clearly marked entry point that requires passage by/through P administrative reception areas for visitors at a school; Signs should be placed throughout the school campus, particularly around parking areas, P directing visitors to the main reception area, (see Figure 20) Placing administration areas adjacent to main entry areas, allowing for visual surveillance between administrators and students or visitors, and providing them with a lockable door, P working telephone and, ideally, two remote exits; Mass notification systems – these are critical for advising faculty, students, and visitors of impending danger, and ideally can provide notifications to the entire school or send message P to specific locations; 67 Syntax such as “To control access and limit intrusion, visitors should be guided to a single control point and required to pass directly through to administration reception areas when entering or leaving the school”16 consistently positions visitors as objects rather than subjects (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A34). They are to be controlled by the school and its built systems, their own agency curtailed by the design of the environment. They are given access, guided through the world. They do not control the environment in any way. In the single instance of partial activation, the visitor is still not the subject of their sentence, as they are made the object of the school’s internal doors: “When the main entry doors are unlocked, can securable internal doors oblige visitors to confer with the receptionist to gain entry beyond the reception area?” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A40). In this most active moment, given agency to confer and enter the site, they are obliged to do so in one particular way. Consideration of different actors’ assigned verbs also does a great deal to demonstrate abstractions of each social role as they interact with one another. For example, administrators and school officials, when active, are portrayed primarily using some form of the word “consider”, painting them as the primary planners within the school community. TABLE 5. ACTIONS OF ACTIVATED ADMINISTRATORS Utterance (about Activated Administrators) Actions CPTED is based on three strategies, each of which can be useful for school administrators in Considering, considering their goals in developing exterior physical security measures: Developing From there, it is apparent that the gunman had to overcome few if any obstacles – aside from Confronting heroic teachers and administrators who attempted to confront him – in his path of destruction. On the exterior of a school building, school administrators should consider the number, placement, Considering installment, and hardware quality of doors in efforts to maximize gains in security. Placing administration areas adjacent to main entry areas, allowing for visual surveillance between Surveilling, administrators and students or visitors, and providing them with a lockable door, working telephone Locking and, ideally, two remote exits 16 Emphasis added. 68 Table 5 (cont’d) Like other security technologies, there exist a wide array of options for school administrators Looking looking to install new or improve upon their current communications and alarm systems. For example, a new facility can incorporate electronic alarm and door locking systems that allow an administrator to remotely lock down all classrooms and doors in response to an approaching threat Locking with the push of a button; installing such a system in an older school may be impractical or prohibitively expensive. Alternatively, students, though hardly ever made active, are characterized with vocabulary of escape. They exit, they seek egress, they get out. This simple contrast in verbs is an evident demonstration of authority and responsibility, but also functions to set up expectation of one’s encounter with the spatial world. Considering these social roles and their expected actions beyond the context of the report we might find that administrators become distant and heady, taking up a role of stratification more often than relationship building and interaction. Meanwhile, students considered only for their ability to escape a school are made strange participants when they are expected to do otherwise, to sit and learn and be together. TABLE 6. ACTIONS OF ACTIVATED STUDENTS Utterance (about Activated Students) Actions CCTV deters outsiders who do not belong on campus and deters students from committing Committing malicious acts. (malicious acts) As described above, doing so properly can lead to significant results in keeping intruders on Exiting the outside while allowing students and staff to exit safely in the case of emergency. Windows should be as resistant as possible to an assailant like an active shooter, and allow Monitoring, students and staff to monitor events outside the building as well as communicate with outside Communicating responders in an emergency situation. At the same time students and staff might need to use them as secondary escape routes in the case of an emergency like a fire, or even active shooter (as the Virginia Tech shooting, in which Escaping, Exiting several students escaped the gunman by exiting through windows, proves). Effective access control will enable the central control station to restrict the movement of an Escaping assailant and direct the safe escape of students; Classroom communication systems – these can provide a rapid means for staff or students to alert the administration that a serious incident is taking place, and can consist of a push-to-talk Alerting button installed on a wall, an identifiable telephone system, or other means; 69 The third pass examined the actors as they were associated with one another, making sense of implied clusters of identities. To compose this analysis, I read each utterance for multiple social identities and suggested labels for these collected identities. For example, in describing the importance of a singular, primary access point, the Report groups employees, visitors, and service providers, identifying this particular collection of identities as “authorized school building users” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A27). Notably, students are absent from this group. This particular lens clarifies several aspects of the authorial decision making. For one, it helps to parse identities as they become distinct from one another across different social groups and temporal experiences. For example, when considering the responsibilities of different school employees, singular identities may move across different labels and groups, depending on the context. At times a teacher might be considered according to their part in a larger group (employee, faculty, staff) or named individually (teacher). This is vital in understanding the limits of a teacher’s responsibilities as opposed to other members of the faculty, as conceived by the authors. Further, certain active roles are called upon only in the presence of other actors. For example, the administrator, generally characterized as removed, calculating, manipulating the environment from afar, is tasked with confrontation when sharing space with a gunman (Table 5). In a fourth and final pass, I sought to better understand how the authors conceptualized the origins of and differentiated various social selves. This analysis largely stemmed from one particular group of social actors, the community, including visitors, parents, pedestrians, outsiders, and guests. Building out from this group I was curious if I might glean differences in the ways that the authors imagine institutions of schools to recognize various identities. Inspired by Gee's conception of NIDA identities, I read each utterance of social positioning as one that had been granted by the institution, and annotated the particular interactions that authorized such positioning (2000). This examination was mostly fruitless, as the text seems to assume particular identities to be verified in other ways, perhaps familiarity or worn credentials. Still, the pass illuminated certain features of the built world 70 especially with regard to pedestrians and outsiders. For example, visitors and guests are repeatedly characterized as authorized users, who are given convenient access so long as they submit to a particular entry sequence and sustained surveillance. Still, this authorization seems to be granted in a momentary interaction with the infrastructure of the school, not as a precondition. Pedestrians are deemed outsiders, unauthorized, yet the difference between a visitor and a pedestrian is wholly established in their moment of interaction with the institution. A visitor enters the orbit of the institution, allows its design to guide their way to a reception desk where they might be verified, given an authorized identity. Outsiders remain on the perimeter, where they interact with a different set of designed environments, the fences and wide-scale surveillance. INTERTEXTUALITY Moving beyond an examination of social roles, the final round of analysis hearkens back to Gee’s intertextuality tool (2011, p. 171). This tool questions the allusions and references that the Report makes to other discourses. Returning to the idea of a piece of text as ultimately seeking to effect change, intertextuality becomes a critical means of establishing dialogue within a community, building an ethos and voice both powerful and trustworthy, while also linking the document with other relevant discourses. All of this is done in the service, in this case, of changing notions of what schools as built worlds do and should do, and how we as users ought to make them so. To engage in this intertextual analysis I relied on three types of reference: formal citation and linkage to other textual documents, allusion to places other than schools, and the production of metaphor. CITATIONAL REFERENCE. Through the use of citation one can attempt to borrow the credibility and power of another document, or to empower another document by evoking its presence (Fairclough, 2003). Examination of citational reference is essentially an examination of this interplay. In thinking through the texts and documents cited by the authors of the Report, I hoped to glean a bit of the larger conversation in 71 which they were attempting to participate. Also notable is that which is not present. In examining the thinkers and literatures that go unused, I sought to build out a sense of discourses that the text (intentionally or otherwise) nullifies or overrides. Made available only in Appendix A, I aggregated a dataset of all citations and resource references offered by the document. Along with the formal citation, I took note of any repeated use across the three sections of the appendix, the type of source, and the means of reference (citation, in- text hyperlinks). In total, the Report cited 114 distinct texts from 39 different sources. Most frequently cited were government texts. These ranged from those produced by large federal agencies and cabinet departments to others authored by state and city-level governance. Second only to these governmental texts were pieces produced by nonprofits. These citations again ranged from large organizations to highly specific professional associations. Less frequently cited were university procedural documents of best practice, magazine articles, journalistic descriptions of school violence, and, in one instance, the features and functions of a particular set of security cameras, as advertised by the manufacturer and seller of said cameras. TABLE 7. CITATION SOURCES & DISTINCT TEXTS Source Type Source Texts Government Federal Emergency Management Agency 16 U.S. Department of Education 13 U.S. Department of Homeland Security 6 U.S. Secret Service 5 U.S. Department of Justice 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation 3 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 2 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department 2 Occupational Safety and Health Administration 1 Sandy Hook Advisory Commission 1 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1 Attorney General of North Carolina 1 City of Houston 1 Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services 1 Arizona School Facilities Board 1 Florida Department of Education 1 State of Pennsylvania 1 Michigan State Police 1 72 Table 7 (cont’d) 10 Non-Profit National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities 6 Safe Havens International 5 Kentucky Center for School Safety 4 New York State Center for School Safety 3 Texas School Safety Center 2 National School Safety and Security Services 1 Florida Association for Pupil Transportation 1 National Association of School Psychologists 1 National Association of School Resource Officers 1 National Behavior Intervention Team Association 1 National Center for Higher Education Risk Management Magazine School Planning & Management 5 Campus Safety Magazine 4 SchoolFacilities.com 1 Emergency Management 1 Texas State University 3 University Ohio University 1 Procedural 1 Journalism Business Insider 1 KARE 11 – Minneapolis-St. Paul 1 The Orlando Sentinel 1 Commercial D-Link Apparent in this text set is a preference for data authored and disseminated by governmental agencies or nonprofits that are often funded by government grants. This is not unsurprising as so many of the authors of the report, perhaps most notably Asa Hutchinson himself, come from backgrounds in the U.S. military, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, and the Secret Service. As power goes, this choice lends a degree of national authority to the document. If one did not know that the Report originated from a gun lobby a few blocks from the Capitol, they might mistake it for something leading toward legislation, perhaps originating from the Capitol floor itself. Wholly absent from the Report is the work of academics. Peer reviewed studies published in journals are not present in the document whatsoever. Only 15 times across the Report are studies made personal in their authorship, citing according to the names of those who composed the works rather than by institution, but even these were publications from non-profits and cabinet departments, 73 unrelated to the independent study of academia. Again, this seems to lend a sort of gravity to the argument made. The practices referenced and built upon are not the opinion or study of individuals, but the proven understanding of whole institutions, upheld (and ultimately paid for) by the nation at large. Fascinatingly, the Manual utilizes traditional citational references and in-text hyperlinks to resources in nearly equal measure. 59 of the 114 citations operate as formal allusions to other works, while the remaining 55 were offered as mediating resources to extend the practical use of the document. These were often provided as hyperlinks in the document’s PDF form, allowing the reader instant access and departure. SPATIAL REFERENCE. Just as a written text can reveal the beliefs, attitudes, and values of its author, a place can reveal the history, culture, and identity of the people who composed the site, or those who have inhabited it. In their physical features, historical context, cultural significance, and symbolic meaning, reference to other places initiates a rich dialogue of spatial shared meaning. When I began reading the Report, I fully anticipated consideration of multiple public spaces in the ways that schools might be made safer. After all, the mass shootings and acts of violence described by the NSS are not contained solely to the place of schools. In just the last few years there have been attacks on places of worship, markets, movie theaters, parades, and road races, among others. With this violence has come considerable thought and theorization about safe placemaking in public spaces. It goes unreferenced across the report. In my reading, only two oblique references are made to sites beyond the school. The first illuminates the conception of a school’s place within a larger community, one through which other places necessarily brush up against and therefore infringe upon the site of the school. The authors argue that schools are inscribed within their larger contexts in such a way that they cannot be separated. 74 To this end the community will share in a school's triumphs and joys, but they will also suffer its tragedies. In this shared experience the community assumes a certain responsibility for the security of a school. The authors describe ways that the immediate surroundings of a school should participate in evacuation plans and safekeeping, but they also offer a fairly clear message that communities ought to be carefully scrutinized and that some division is necessary for the safety of students. The second spatial reference is discreet, almost a mind rhyme, a metaphor as much as it is an explicit expression. The authors illustrate the report as a necessary response to the terrorism that is occurring within the nation's schools. Extending this evocation, the authors clarify their own approach as one that mirrors the United States’ response to terrorism following 9/11 (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A4). In this single turn of phrase are elicited resonances of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House. Perhaps more commonly experienced, it evokes places like airports. Regardless, each such place is one that, since late 2001, underscores a dramatic shift in the understanding of spatial memory, territoriality, surveillance, and access. Such spaces are not freely experienced, but rather tightly controlled. They require careful verification of identity, constant scrutiny, and, often, the presence of armed observers. Across all of them, there is a constant sense of being seen, though it is perhaps unclear who is doing the seeing. In this reference the authors make a case for a very different type of school. In likening them to the targets of the September 11th attacks, they urge schools to become barricades and their inhabitants fearful, despite their admission that such heavy fortification likely undermines the healthy functioning of the spaces’ intent. Experience of place becomes secondary to the protection that it offers. METAPHORICAL REFERENCE. Adding a layer of my own intertextual interpretation to the earlier analysis of making strange, I kept a list of metaphors used throughout the Report. Taking up metaphor as the intersection and/or 75 distancing between two reference points to make sense of each, I took great interest in the vehicles of those employed by the Report's authors as a type of intertextual exercise. For the most part, the Report was a straightforward and unembellished text, making the appearance of any sort of figurative language all the more impactful and conspicuous. Often, the metaphor that I came across did not seem to be composed with figurative intent but was used sincerely as a sort of decontextualized vernacular. As many of the text’s authors come from military and police backgrounds, the vocabulary of the piece sways toward that of combat and territory. In this, a sort of strangely unintended double meaning became apparent. The Report's namesake, the National School Shield program is in itself a metaphor. Language of shielding suggests that the work of this document is to shelter and protect. Despite the work done to describe prevention through knowledge and planning, the imagery of a shield is distinctly physical. This metaphor suggests the need for a tangible barrier to external violence. By invoking the shield the document implies enemies and hazards against which it must defend. However, on its own a shield does little, as it requires a strong arm upon which to take residence. Moreover, seldom are shields the sole armament of a warrior. Just as one who carries a shield will typically bear a weapon, the Report suggests the role of armed attendants with whom the school might fight back against attackers. Furthermore, as the shield might also be used to close openings, the Report relies on the metaphor of gaps a great deal. Etymologically, the authors suggest breaches, breaks, gashes, and wounds in the physical facilities. Schools, riddled with these gaps, need the shield to stem the tide of undesired movement into (and out of) their buildings. Without the shield, schools are incomplete and vulnerable. But in the presence of all of these gaps a single shield is not enough—layers of defense must be set out. Again and again, the Report returned to the language of layers, referring to the multiple tiers of protection necessary to their tactic. Layers bring with them a suggestion of a maker, in their own right, a layer. Such a craftsperson fits together strata of material with carefully designed 76 intention. Their layers are not slapdash or haphazardly strewn, but carefully placed, judiciously laid down. Tucked beyond these layers of defense, the school might be made safe, but the true assets in question are the innocent students and teachers within. The metaphor of assets was not exceedingly common but was all the more striking in its few instances of use. Originating as a term to describe wealth sufficient to pay one's debts, the notion of an asset has taken on other meanings, especially militarily. The term is one of objectification, equating a person with value according to their capacity for use or knowledge, or for the liability they suggest. The use of such a legalistic evocation of property alters notions of one’s belonging in a school community, swaying from affinity into possession. Overseeing all of this is the commander. Describing the many roles to be assumed in preparation and defense against attack, the Report casts the principal or headmaster instead as the school commander. Eschewing notions of mere authority, the commander is not the intellectual or administrative leader so suggested by these outmoded ranks; they are a metaphor of force. Beyond evoking military leaders instilled with the right of absolute compliance, the word carries with it archaic definitions of a mallet, a battering ram, a high tower from which one might spot intruders a long way off. I noted that my examination of these metaphors began in the process of making strange, and I think in demonstrating them as data it becomes clear just how strange a site they define. While many do encounter schools as places distrustful and litigious to their core, I believe this is learned, not expected. Only after layering on millennia of history, culture, economic and political expectations, do the grammars of school begin to imply the violence and liability that seemed so inescapable in the Report. 77 DISCUSSION Working through the guiding paradigms described in Chapter 2, the discourse put forward in the Report seems to settle somewhere between the realms of belief and control. Stemming from the scripture of Second Amendment rights, the report functions to orient space around the presence of firearms, deferring the human always to the material. As such, the humans present in the place of schools are cast as malleable beings; themselves objectified, passivated, controlled. Much like the colonial schools, the report advocates containment and isolation from community. This isolation is necessitated as a means of safety and security, preserving young people from the surrounding world and from one another. Rather than indoctrinating students toward a fastidious means of salvation or religious interpretation, the report inculcates school-aged children into the particularly American curriculum of surveillance and vigilance against attack. Through a tone of teleological inevitability of violence, the report presents this curriculum as an unavoidable norm, one that we must all move through as a part of life. Adapted largely from the principles of CPTED, the Report conceptualizes the entire spacetime of school as a means of behavioral control. Much like the grammars of school pioneered in the development of the factory schools, and utilized well into the present, the Report conceptualizes the routines, rules, and sites of schools as immensely powerful structures in limiting particular interactions toward a particular end, be they social, ontological, or epistemological. In the case of the Report, this end is one of security. Whereas the factory schools and those of the administrative progressives sought to sort workers into an array of varying economic levels and train particular docility and capacities in each, the discourse of the Report is one that altogether ignores an academic curriculum, seeking rather little more than preservation. As it lays them out, schools become something of vaults into which we might deposit children such that the world can pass them by, dangerously, beyond its walls. 78 Working across the analytical passes of making strange, identity building, and intertextuality, several themes become clear regarding the text of the Report. As is made evident from the introduction of the piece, the project of this discourse is, and always was, to persuade others of the need to arm schools. While a great deal of the text argues for physical preparations and augmentations to harden schools as targets, the extensive glamorization of SROs, the emphasis on armed resistance training, and the model legislation included in the appendices remove what little doubt there might have been that the document was ever attempting to do something else. In working towards this goal, the discourse establishes a few reliable themes: arresting potential, lessons of distrust, fear, and isolation, and the power of the material world. ARRESTED POTENTIAL From its stance of preparedness, the Report operates under the assumption that any school can become a target of violence and ought to do what can be done to mitigate risk. But working beyond this starting point there is a palpable sense of inevitability, as if violence will occur in any school that remains unprepared, unarmed. Early in the Report the authors trace a genealogy of school violence lasting over 300 years. Yet, this tradition of tragedy is used only to advocate a return volley, suggesting that the problem of violence in schools is somehow teleological, as if the gathering of young people guarantees the eventual occasion of deadly force. In the process of making strange I noted just how frequently the authors used the word potential—95 times across the Report. This latency, this yet-to-be, was used almost exclusively to describe students or pedestrians in their ability to enact violence. In the face of potential violence are potential victims, those students and teachers who are primarily defined by their abilities to lock, hide, notify, and escape, such that they might save themselves. And then there are potential saviors—armed SROs and built worlds that assert their own territoriality to save others. 79 In all of this potential is the assumed end of violence. It implores schools to become places that operate fundamentally against their students and against the outside world. They become sites made to limit one particular potential. Rather than liberate young people to their many possibilities, they foreclose the world in the name of safety. For example, the manual of best practices notes that exterior windows should be limited but for the purposes of egress and surveillance. Furthermore, vegetation around schools should be reduced to avoid places where a potential attacker might hide supplies or conceal themselves from law enforcement. In another layer of resistance, a tall fence should indicate territoriality, such that an attacker would doubt their ability to access the school in the first place, and surely would find themselves trapped should they indeed try something. Thus, the everyday and life-giving practice of looking out the window is largely foreclosed. Beyond layers of ballistic glass, the looker would be faced with an empty plane and a tall fence, far removed from the surroundings of community and the goings on of everyday life. From this vantage, I think Bachelard would weep. Such a place does not daydreamers make. To properly keep tabs on all of these potential threats the Report advocates for a strong program of surveillance. Beyond the all-seeing network of closed-circuit cameras, the authors note the importance of faculty teams tasked solely with threat assessment, ideally meeting once weekly to discuss threats within the school itself and present in the community at large. While much of the language used around these threat assessment teams is quite positive, demonstrating them as caring groups of faculty and staff who take an interest in students’ social, emotional, and even academic wellness, the descriptor also casts those who need additional support as threats. 80 To mitigate these potential threats, the Report is explicit that surveillance should be felt, as “Cameras also provide deterrent value by indicating that a school takes security seriously and that a would-be-assailant is under observation without knowing who is watching and when” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A31). The school’s inhabitants know FIGURE 15. JEREMY BENTHAM’S (1791) PANOPTICON they are being watched, that undesirable behavior will not go unnoticed. In this, I am reminded of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a theoretical model for prison design wherein the inmates are individuated and subjected to constant, anonymous surveillance (1791). In the place of schools, such surveillance adds an additional layer of performance to the already complex roles expected of young people. Beyond the pressures of explicit curriculum for constant growth and measurable excellence, social pressures in appearance and interest, students must also demonstrate themselves as docile, nonthreatening assets (some in the presence also of armed SROs). FEAR. DISTRUST. ISOLATION. Authored by a veritable regiment of former military and law enforcement personnel, it's of little surprise that the Report frequently adopts paths to the discourses of military and combat. To a great degree the authors conceptualize of schools in a state of continuous saber rattling. In the expectation of threat and the self-understanding as a tactical safeguard, the Report betrays an implied curriculum that traces a line from fear to distrust to social isolation. 81 Despite their recommendations, the authors make no guarantees. Protocols must be followed, lines of surveillance maintained, doors closed, plans rehearsed—a school can only remain as safe and secure as its users’ vigilance allows. The message is clear—stay afraid, stay safe. Under the intense gaze of the school's surveillance apparatus, understandings of trust are likely to erode, perhaps to extinction. Faculty are as likely to be monitored as students, communicating a hierarchy in which only a select few administrators and the armed SROs are positioned as watchers, not watched. To this point, there is no such thing as a vetted insider, there is no one who is trustworthy. Even authorized users of the school, those with no previous indications of violence, those who demonstrate no red flags, are carefully monitored as potential threats and victims. Herein everyone is a target, positioned as the desired mark for another in their school community. Language used throughout the Report seems to demonstrate how mindsets change in the absence of trust. Everyday interactions that we expect to occur in schools suddenly become more menacing, more combative. One passage in the manual asserts the use of landscape elements to “protect sensitive operations, gathering areas, and other activities from surveillance without creating concealment for covert activity” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A29). In this distrust comes a designed tension wherein the users of a school are meant to believe that they are being watched and targeted by someone beyond the school itself, that they must fortify their position without creating any advantage that their attacker might use. so long as the inhabitants of a space cannot trust those with whom they share it or the community in which it exists, neither can they trust the space itself. Stemming from these emphases on fear and distrust is a clear lesson about isolation. The authors of the Report most commonly referred to schools according to their obligation of security, but in a few key moments seem to identify that such an emphasis might perhaps have negative effects on learning and morale. They note that “schools are not fortresses nor should they be” (p. 4), that relying on overbearing physical measures “may have deleterious effects on school atmosphere, 82 ironically creating conditions prone to greater violence” (p. 23), and that schools “not only rely on a level of openness to promote a healthy learning environment for students but also are inherently public institutions in nature that must provide access for parents and the community at-large” (p. 43). In these few instances the authors demonstrate that they understand the ways that schools educate beyond the academic curriculum, and the need for openness, yet they continuously posture schools as domineering presences within their communities, operating spatially to keep distinct lines between insiders and outsiders. Building from the lessons of CPTED, most notably access control and territoriality, the authors reorient all schools as entirely private spaces protecting students and staff by distancing them from their surroundings. MATERIAL POWER TO CONTROL Much like the long-standing threads of thought in the research paradigm of schools as sites of order, the report functions with the understanding that the material world has immense power to control and influence human actors within it. Whereas much of the work within that paradigm amounts to a sort of streamlining, whereby the place of schools serves to encourage particular types of learning, even by sometimes standing in the way of undesirable behaviors, the Report more often takes the tone of obstruction. As tactical sites, schools impede the progress of the violent, both potential and actualized. Again and again, the report positions the school as a place that allows particular day-to-day behaviors. The movement and interaction of students and staff occurs at the pleasure of the built space, and those that command it. Movement occurs as intended or not at all, as the school is constructed with means of containing and isolating those who do not approach it with the correct intent. In this, entry to the school itself serves to label and distinguish the community as either inside or outside. One who approaches the school and is denied admission, for whatever reason, becomes 83 wholly outside of the establishment. Their exclusion is complete and their presence changes from suspicious to threatening. THE PRESCRIPTION In this discourse, often labeled best practice, the Report depends upon a hegemonic understanding of schools that creates an imagined ideal. This ideal strays from the qualities demonstrated in past paradigms as it sweeps the school from center stage, removing the site from population centers so as to mitigate the risk of outsiders and access. The ideal school is set apart from its surroundings by layers of barrier, and even its interiors function to segment students from one another such that they are easily individuated and surveilled. This ideal school can be read across its environment according to its imposing structure and massing. It relies not only on a conceptual hardening, but a material one, emphatic of surfaces and materials immune to the wear of human impact. This place is intentionally obscured to those without, impossible to read for the uninitiated, defying notions of architectural legibility. Those who would approach the school cannot conceal their coming. This place does not concern itself with the curricular or social growth of its students but serves to preserve them until they are matured enough to carry on out into the world, well learned in the lessons of vigilance and expectation of violence. For the supermarkets, churches, movie theaters, and public squares in which they live their lives will not be so well fortified. These students are to assume their surveillance and embrace the presence of safekeeping firearms. Recalling the words of Donlyn Lyndon of public spaces as covenants with the future, the students of such a school enter into a curriculum of understanding the futility of their own safety and the absolute necessity for the presence of firearms. Such a school makes the promise of other public space seem weak as their lack of defensive positioning is a failure to all who inhabit them. LaPierre-Cruz Sanctuary [see Ch. 6] then fulfills this covenant. It is a school set as a mausoleum, a structure inscribed with the very notions of territoriality, access control, and surveillance prescribed by the report. I cannot help but imagine the 84 misery of a student, teacher, or SRO assigned to such a school. But I can say that such a place would be secure, and as Ted Cruz so desires, there’s only one way in and out. 85 CHAPTER 4. LEARNING SPACE, A PHENOMENOLOGICAL REFLECTION Early in the appendices of the NSS Report, the authors lay out a thesis for the role of schools, positioning them as “the places in which our children learn and grow” (Hutchinson, 2013, p. A5). Despite this, the word learn17 is only used five times to communicate change, development, or growth across the entirety of the 225-page document. Far more commonly the authors rely upon the diction of education, referring to their territorial, surveilling spaces as educational facilities and environments. This conflation of education and learning is not altogether unexpected, but it is worth examination. After all, the process of education in the United States has primarily been one of closed doors, removing young people from the world around them to engage in the accumulation of skills and knowledges; then quantified, certified, credentialed, and matriculated into the work force to fulfill particular needs (Fallace & Fantozzi, 2013; Labaree, 1997). While the vast majority of formal education occurs in school buildings, learning is hardly bound by such environments. Yet, the discourses of learning are immensely impacted by schools and schooling. Consider for a moment two terms repeated ad nauseam since the summer of 2020: learning gaps and learning loss. Certainly these terms are not new, numerous (may I say ill-conceived?) studies have detailed the ways in which schools in particular communities are riddled by “gaps” in learning, have reckoned with a measurable “gap” that divides students of varied resources, and have considered the learning “loss” that occurs between academic semesters. Again, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, considerations of students’ time away from the built world of schools and the subsequent discussion of “gaps”, “losses”, and “slides” seems to have had fuel thrown on the fire (Donnelly & Patrinos, 2022; Engzell et al., 2021). Such discourses aptly demonstrate the strength of the flattening of education and learning, such that we imagine that any time the halls of a school go empty, learning 17 In any form (learning, learned). 86 must have ceased. This carries with it great implications for notions of lifelong learning, which for most of us occurs wholly outside the space of schools. For me this is a strange assumption to make, as I don't typically think of learning as beginning and ending, for one, at all, much less in particular spacetimes. Watching my young child happen to learn in the course of her everyday experience illustrates the stark difference possible from the process of deliberate, formal education. I think of breaks in the everyday, those moments of newness that surprise and compel, that encourage fascination and perhaps even connection. Ideally, the attunement to experience that marks such learning begins the moment we wake and ends the moment we go to sleep. If we are so fortunate, learning becomes constant and spans a lifetime, regardless of our presence in or around a school. In my search for these pre-texts of emplaced discourse, this disconnect struck me as strange. Certainly, I think if you asked most people about the role of a school within a community, some notion of learning would likely be a lodestar, even if that notion was similarly under the guise of a predetermined, standardized, highly measured education. The NSS Report took up schools as a sort of bunker in which learning might happen should their security be upheld. Curious, I turned my attention from schools to a more open-ended concept of learning spaces. In the initial formulation of this chapter, I spent some time exploring notions of communities of practice and situated learning, thinking that these theorizations would best guide me in inquiry. In my exploration I came across a bit of writing in which Etienne Wenger ultimately provides a more spontaneous view of learning, noting, “Learning cannot be designed. Ultimately it belongs to the realm of experience and practice. It follows the negotiation of meaning; it moves on its own terms. It slips through the cracks; it creates its own cracks. Learning happens, design or no design.” For a project oriented around conceptualizing and ultimately designing built worlds of education and learning, this was momentarily deflating. Thankfully, Wenger adds the stipulation that we do however need "to 87 design social infrastructures that foster learning” (Wenger-Trayner, 2008, p. 225). I concluded that the only appropriate pre-text would be found in those cracks, made, and inhabited, by learning itself. I thus set out to elicit a thematic discourse of the spatial experience of learning. If I could reconceptualize a school as one of these social infrastructures conceived around the held experiences of learners, rather than a set of slow-moving institutional paradigms and grammars, perhaps I could come to envision something that meets learners much more immediately and escapes the old notions of indoctrination. In the spring of 2022, I conducted a study regarding the notion of spatial resonance—that feeling of one particular place echoing through other experiences within the natural and built world. I had gone for a long walk, seeking daydreamers who, potentially lost in thought, were then residing, at least mentally, in another spacetime altogether. In conversations with these daydreamers I noticed a lot about the places that they remembered most immediately; the places that suddenly and frequently snapped them back from the here and now to some other there and then with the slightest environmental cue. Evident, unprompted, in their conversation, was the strong feeling that these resonant places were sites of deep learning and personal change. In experiences of agentive becoming, independence, and surprising revelations of the world as it is, described in the spaces of their childhood bedrooms and the trees just outside their windows, squelching lake beds and certain highway exits, each participant recognized the powerful connection between the particularity of place and becoming. All of this talk about learning was happenstance though. I had not sought it in my design or my intent. What then might arise if I were to seek to understand what places of learning held in common, the fibers of experience that unite such sites? METHOD So, once again, I went for a walk. This time, on a sweltering summer day. I set a course traversing a suburban neighborhood, a park, a swanky commercial district, the dense residential 88 outskirts of a university, the main pedestrian path across said university, and a local nature area. I meandered along this roughly 3.5-mile line of sidewalks and dirt paths, asking folks to tell me about places where they had learned something really important in life; ambling along with them as they shared their stories. FIGURE 16. A MAP OF THE WALK In our conversations I sought to elicit the sharing of individuals’ experiences with learning, as well as their personal geographies, such that they might be rendered thematically. Thus, in much the same way that the initial study was oriented, I took a phenomenological approach in my interactions with participants, and later data generation and analysis. As a research methodology, phenomenology takes its philosophical roots from the work of Edmund Husserl with later refinement by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, among others (Dibley et al., 2020). The method examines lived experience, describing and illuminating commonalities within a group of persons experiencing a certain human phenomenon, using demonstrative quotations and themes. Phenomenology employs subjective, first-hand knowledge as data to understand lived-experience, based on the assumption that experiences, objects, events, and places hold meaning only because we, as humans, assign them meaning (Dibley et al., 2020). It is this focus on seeing the full essence of experience that is at the heart of phenomenological inquiry. Moustakas suggests that research may be suited to the realm of phenomenology when it is important to understand complex, shared experiences of a given 89 phenomenon, often in order to develop practices or policies (or, in my case, design) surrounding them (1994). PARTICIPANTS Being that my focal experience, learning, is quite broad, to the point of universality, participants were largely self-selective. While walking, I remained attentive for those who looked as though they could engage in a conversation. I sought those who weren't already in conversations, who weren't tucked behind a book or a screen, who weren’t listening to music or taking a phone call. I sought those who weren't in too much of a hurry, not wanting to make myself an obstacle in the pursuit of my own project. With each potential participant, I described my interest in place, particularly the places where we remember the experience of learning, and I asked if they might be willing to let me accompany them for a brief while, if they might answer a few questions, recorded for later transcription, all anonymously of course. As is expected in such a solicitation, a good number of people were busy, on their way to meet someone else, or just weren’t interested. Then I met #2.18 She agreed to the interview, and we walked together for a while. Wielding my phone like a microphone to ensure the recording, others along the way gawked, but the strangeness of this sighting eventually led to other participants, curious what I was doing, then asking to be included themselves. With each, I would follow where they led, steering the interview only occasionally. PROCEDURE I ultimately interviewed ten individuals to compose narrative texts about the experience of place as an important aspect in memories of learning. After contextualizing my purpose and obtaining consent, I began each conversation asking the individual to recount a time in their life that they learned 18 All names are pseudonyms. 90 something really important. Following their initial response, I would ask that they give particular attention to the place that they most associate with the moment. I encouraged participants to narrate their experience, providing concrete details and contexts of their memory. To further encourage this narration, I asked follow-up questions such as “what happened next?” and “what was that like?” To build out a sense of place, I also followed up with questions meant to tug at the threads of lifeworld existentials, exploring sensory details, perceptions of time and movement, as well as recollections of others who were present either in the moment of learning or who were strongly associated with the place (Van Manen, 2016). In moments of talk that elicited a feeling of “being pulled up short,” the sensation of standing on the edge of confusion in the face of something new and different to my own experiences, I slowed the narration and asked for clarification and elaboration of individuals’ phrasing and feeling. This embraced the phenomenological practice of bracketing pre-understandings while still engaging in the interview context (Dahlberg, 2003). DATA & INTERPRETATION Opening the interpretive act, and keeping in mind that transcription is a representational process rife with researcher interpretation (Van Manen, 2016), I produced verbatim transcripts that centered the experience itself, rather than the speaker’s diction, intonation, or elaboration of their narrative. To achieve this, I focused my transcription process on talk, very limited non-verbal actions, and silences, without complex diacritics or self-emphasis as a dialogic participant. These transcripts read uninterrupted by stanza or line-by-line segmentation. They are meant to express a fullness of the story being told, without so much attention to how. TABLE 8. DEMONSTRATION OF TRANSCRIPTION Speaker Talk Non-Verbal Cues Looks up as if there is an It’s a theatre, so a place of performing onstage…. but also a lot of off-stage #2 image of the place across interactions, in green rooms, in rehearsals and dance studios. a cloud MM Could you describe it in some detail? 91 Table 8 (cont’d) Yeah…. it was a smaller theatre in downtown Grand Rapids, a college theatre, and I was the youngest person in the show…. Everyone else was college age Shows the smallness with #2 or above. It was half office, college building, half theatre, with dance studios her hands to rehearse in, um, comfortable. Further interpretation of the transcribed experiences occurred iteratively through two practices: reflection on the essential themes which characterize the phenomenon, and description of the phenomenon through the art of writing and rewriting (Van Manen, 2016, p. 32). Put simply, a great deal of the analytic work occurred in the deep reading and re-reading, memoing, and writing around individuals’ stories. The process of analysis was not one of coding or attempting to pick apart the decisions of language and storytelling engaged in by the individuals. To achieve the sort of sensitivity required, engaged as a listener, setting aside my expectations for places of learning, stretching myself to the stories offered, and attempting to reconcile them with one another. As described by Dibley et al., the phenomenological stance of analysis occurs as data is allowed to “simmer” en masse—a sort of slow, meditative dwelling in the experiences of others, such that themes, connections, and patterns “bubble up” in time (Dibley et al., 2020, p. 127). In these themes, connections, and patterns, I sought what Van Manen calls “the structures of experience,” those essential, and collectively recognizable aspects of emplaced learning (2016, p. 79): lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived human relation (Van Manen, 2016, p. 101). I explored essential themes through the descriptive act of writing, synthesizing disparate experiences to recapture and reawaken these places of learning anew. Just as time was given to the initial reading and re-reading of interview data, I dwelt in my own descriptions as well as narratives, poetry, and fiction about learning. In this continued reflection I sought a singular, potential common meaning—a “fusion of horizons” between my own understanding and that of the participating individuals—always hoping to understand perhaps the kinds of places in which the act of learning is most richly felt, remembered, and lived (Dibley et al., 2020, p. 128). 92 FINDINGS Jamie thinks about a class. Not the class though. The volunteer requirement. She crossed town —driving on ice for the first time— from reading about the thing in one place, one way, then driving somewhere else to see it breathing there in front of her. It was dark early in the Midwest winter. Dark and cold. The clinic was bright, but still cold. A crossroads. Doctors came from other jobs. Students came from school to work reception. Patients crossed town. Everyone sat on worn plastic chairs. The kind with no friction left. Marlin wore black shoes. A yellow shirt. Blue shorts. All of them wore this, sitting two by two. The room smelled of the vegetation outside, and of fifth graders fresh in from the Ghanian sun, where every season feels like summer. The call to prayer floats past the suburbs but cannot penetrate their discussion, their chatter. Everyone knew that the boy in front understood. Marlin knew as much as him. So he must understand as well. Under the permacloud, unremarkably, in far west Chicago, Scott’s classroom —gargantuan, a crowded, shivering nave of cinder blocks, echoing even whispers to the point of deafening— emptied at 9:58a. Putting out fires. Wearing thin. But a blank mind 93 was suddenly clear. Suddenly clicking. Seeking the rabbit hole made by time or solitude, Burton carves little nooks, etches hidden nests into the face of the world. A hammock, high sides. The window seat of a long flight. Close the shutter, turn away the other two. Under a pile of blankets —late— after everyone else has gone asleep. Down a long stretch of beach, far past the point that walking feels welcome. Here resides focus. Then catch glimpses of the next idea to chase, the next companion in these quiet retreats. Angel’s parents were fighting. Yelling. She looked down, but they yelled at her to close the door. She and her sister pulled the handle together, until they felt the click of the latch. They are there for each other despite their difference in age. Younger and older doesn’t seem to matter in moments like those. Yellow light flickered through the fan blades. Dead leaves on the ground and fully sleeved, for perhaps his first real adventure, Charles went away for the week, to a camp somewhere else, not that far but out in the wild, with all the trimmings. Cabins. Lake. Dining Hall. Before his best friend moved away they smashed geodes together, 94 scattering glimmering crumbs across the floor. Building names, snack spots, best routes, necessary gear. Shap sat in the fishbowl of the library —every university library has one— but they and their new friends were in the back, past the periodicals and the showcase, where the lights were less bright, even if the dust lay thicker. A new school year meant new arrivals from Korea, and slow re-orientation through long conversation. Needing sleep, Theresa stared past the book, straight into a knot in the waxy, narrow floorboard. Dust bunnies and general disarray signaled the nearing of the end. Near the window it was cold, but further in the room warmed. Chemistry was heavy, but the professor handwrites her notes, so neatly, how interesting. The professor has diabetes, to her chemistry is palpable, personal, how interesting. #2 Defense. Innocent, unlucky, kind, skinny. Sixteen. A show rehearsed. A character played. The stage is granted. But the green rooms, the rehearsal rooms and dance studios, tucked in next to offices. They feel bigger than they are, saturated with mirrors and babbling echo; all these older —but still young— women 95 tucked in, running lines. Only always in the middle of the night, abandoned by sunup, as if allergic to those who study by day, Morgan sets up shop in the main reading room. Air circulation is different at these hours. The fans are loud and they suck the moisture from the shelves, —to slow the apparent book rot— but also from contact lenses. Preparation is essential. Contact solution. The wall stares back at some point. Then, quite concerned, friends bring coffee. Sometimes pastry. THEMES Walking, talking, writing, thinking, again and again across their transcripts, memos, and my own poetic renderings at a simmer, three essential themes regarding spaces of learning have bubbled to the top, now skimmed, strained, and served. 1: WORN-IN. Places of learning, at their best, are worn-in like a well-loved item of clothing. Stiff seams and rigid materials have loosened and stretched and disintegrated with use and time. In the same way that a particular piece of vintage clothing might lend a sense of history and tradition, the inheritance of these places creates a sense of participation, like slipping into a community of cultures and countercultures stretching back and back merely by occupying a particular place in the world. Still, these places hardly offer a perfect fit and most often make clear that they were not necessarily designed for this particular here and now—a spacetime that might only ever have been guessed at—that we are merely sharing them in a moment of brief encounter. They leave somehow, strangely, too much 96 space—prompting us to wonder how we might fill them out—and too little—urging us to shave down our own corners. Their patterns of wear are well established, and they often do not match our own. They rub uncomfortably and cause blisters that turn to callus. As such, these places prompt us to see ourselves as part of something much larger. They remind us that the world was not necessarily designed for us as individuals, but, as spaces for the public as a whole.19 The discomforts and awkwardness of these places reveal the ways in which we are other. They reveal how we mesh with society at large, how we are dismissed, and where we push away.20 These places carry with them stains and snags. They wear thin in parts, to the point that we can see right through them, until they are patched over with some too-new mismatched repair. This sense of history calls to a desire to participate not only in our own story, but in a collective narrative with our chosen communities and those who reinforced that which we most desire to become. 21 Again and again, participants detailed this sort of beloved shabbiness. They described general states of uncleanliness. Dirty, disorganized spaces with various species of dust infringing upon the human experience, be it the domesticated house-dust, or sawdust, or tracked through scraps of crumbling leaves, mulch, peat, and mud. These places are smelly and loud, filled with the must that comes with humidity and heat, body odor, paint fumes, and book rot. Echoing with many voices, loud fans, calls to prayer and wind in the trees, muted by and muting in turn the roar of traffic. Their 19 Morgan found herself and her people waiting for her in the broken in reading room of her coastal university, strange in its ability to foster both solitude and togetherness. “I could go there and not see another person for 12 hours, or I might run into people from the [nearby] writing center and shoot the shit over coffee, get lost in conversation for almost as many. ” 20 Jamie went so far as to contrast the location of her seminar course about systemic poverty and the clinic in which she took up the volunteer requirement. While the seminar, notably the space of orientation, was held in “a newer building, a small, cozy building, without many classrooms [and] lots of in-between spaces with couches and comfy chairs,” it was the space of disorientation, the clinic, its floors marked by the constant scuffle of waiting chairs, where she learned the most, found herself set on a path. 21 Shap described one dusty corner of their undergraduate library as a place used by cohort-after-cohort of international students to sit and undo many of the western conceptions of what the university was, should be called, and how it ought to be used. “Every semester it was like reorientation, and from this one window we could see enough of the campus to point out and rename everything for new people.” 97 surfaces are not plush, but unyielding and hard, often uninviting. They described flickering fluorescence and dimly lit rooms setting the scene for nearby windows. All of this seems to suggest a desire to share in the world. Not foreclose it. Places of learning are not those that isolate us in sterile and dissociated realms meant for ideal measurement, but those that connect us with the vibrancy of life around us. Learning happens not in a timeless vacuum wherein the learner is removed from community and culture and their fellows, but right in the midst of it. And because of all of this, spaces of learning are worn out, they are well used. They have been walked over and sat upon until they are made smooth. 2: THE THRESHOLD OF THE UNKNOWN. When I was about 10 years old my parents were building a house at Paradise Ranch. During the last stages of construction we lived in our barn, bunking around a small wood-burning stove. As I was generally the first to bed, there was a moment each night that I would leave the construction, orient myself to the floodlight hung from the roofline of the barn, and choose one of two routes. I could cross one of those unplanted, never-to-materialize orchards, a smooth brown patch of dry Colorado topsoil, a straight shot from door to door. Or I could take the curve, a gravel path beside the fence line of a pasture. This way was slightly longer, but slingshot me through the intermittent light of an irrigation shed about halfway. Evidently afraid of the dark with its imagined unknowns lurking just beyond light’s reach, I sprinted no matter my choice. When at last I plunged into the pool of that flickering halogen bulb, my sneakers smacking onto the concrete pad in front of the barn, I could look back at how far I had come, imagine all that surely filled up the darkness, and consider the two homes that I was existing between. In the dark, the fields and paths that I knew so well became somehow meaningless, totally unfamiliar, and terrifying. Thinking with Anzaldúa, the grating of two worlds against one another creates a raw hemorrhaging by which they bleed into a newly conceived space (1987). This friction is discomforting, 98 and can feel dangerous at times, due to the strangeness and newness of such a space. Here also is a site ripe with the conditions of learning. A variety of spacetimes are marked at these borders, dividing and shedding light on transitions between childhood and adulthood, naivete and understanding22, the designed world and nature, old and new. 23 Ringed with darkness, icy roads, unfamiliar forests, and the personal space of others, places of learning bound with these many thresholds feel distinctly of the other. Perhaps this is the result of a bit of place making within the unfamiliar. Carving out a small island of one's own in a vast ocean of alterity, we learn something. So too is there learning in the crossing. Traversing the unknown to this pocket of familiarity, we come to better understand both where we came from and where we have ended up, as well as ourselves in the process. Participants noted the distances between, recognizing just how far they came, how far removed they were to stand in this new place. Much in the same way, spaces of learning hold great power to illuminate comfortable, meaningful places in our lives, removed from these crossings. While they are themselves, generally places of some familiarity and comfort, they invite us to step across the unknown and then look back upon a novel world from their safety.24 Attending this otherness is a feeling of risk and intense exceptionality. Arrival in a place of learning is much the same as the coming to a haven somewhere along the hero's journey. In looking back across the tortuous trails leading to this point, one might truly understand just how far from home they've come, able, from a safe vantage, to consider the twists and turns of their own becoming, and imagine, perhaps, the roads still to travel. 22 Marlin’s newfound understanding was more than just one of mathematics, but of self-confidence and possibility. He recalls this spacetime as one in which he stopped thinking of himself as “always behind everyone else.” 23 Charles marks his time away at camp as memorable largely because it is the last memory he has of his best friend, who moved shortly after. “It was one of the last experiences that we really shared. We were young enough that we didn’t keep in touch after he moved.” 24 Morgan established a post for her study. Burton claims space for his many cocoons. #2 sought out a spot of her own to run lines. Jaime reveled in her cubby at the clinic, Theresa in her portion of her dormitory. Each marked held space to look back across the unfamiliar. 99 Spaces of learning allow us to stand upon thresholds and view the unknown between them.25 Looking across the long unfamiliar is an exercise in contrast, revelatory of a great deal. What once was held too closely to see properly, a new perspective deepens comprehension of what is important, what is meaningful, what has been taken for granted.26 At the same time, standing on such thresholds tends to reveal all that our perspectives do not hold, that which they are missing, how they might have changed. 3: THE BACKSTAGE. Considering thresholds and borders, the proscenium holds tremendous power. Such a strange thing that this imagined frame, borrowing its bounds from mere belief, can recast people and places into strange and distant worlds. Theorizing drama and stagecraft, Richard Schechner argues for a view of a ‘time-space sequence’ made up of seven parts: “training, workshops, rehearsals, warm-ups, performance, cool-down and aftermath” (1985). Perhaps the proscenium's greatest power is obscuring all but one of these parts, the performance itself; a power that is familiar to most schoolish spaces. To the average observer, a great deal of the experience of a theatre goes entirely unseen. The space beyond that arch holds within it a bustling, if hidden, world. This world is not merely one made-up of practice, the craft of acting and production, but also a built world. In a warren of small spaces beyond the stage and its mirroring auditorium, one can blend into the creation of a performance without necessarily stepping foot before the spectator. Furthermore, those hidden there in the wings, catwalks, and substages can change. 25 Scott’s classroom was a threshold back into the unknown, a jumping away point, from which he left teaching to try to forge some new self. “I was a teacher for two and a half years, but in this span of fifteen minutes, I knew that I had to find something else to do. That was so scary. I had thought of myself as a teacher for longer than I had even been one, and I had no idea what was next.” 26 Angel, huddled with her sister, overhearing the messiness of her parents’ separation reimagined family and understood the people who she loved most. “It was like a glimpse of what to expect, and it was my older sister who was there, supporting me and loving me when things were so uncertain. It was like this very clear moment of separation between our childhood to that moment and then becoming an adult.” 100 Clark Kent sprints down the sidewalk, looking to the sky, knowing that a transformation is necessary and imminent. He tucks into a phone booth, a revolving door, the back seat of a taxi, where, hidden from view, he undergoes mysterious transformation. It's a tender and often terrifying thing to admit change. That the once visible self, known to others, will shift and become something else entirely—something new, something unknown—is an admission that requires a private place, a hideaway. Removed momentarily from the attention of the masses, such places of learning allow us to be unseen in these tender moments, while ultimately remaining in partial connection with others. Some sense of a backstage or hideaway was common in the perception of participants. #2 spoke of an actual theater wherein the crooked hallways and cramped rehearsal rooms filling every unseen inch of their building made space for her to explore her craft but also her relationship with the theater community and those with whom she shared the stage. Some participants spoke of a backstage more similar to Goffman's (1990) , those built worlds and spacetimes in their own lives that allowed even partial separation from the public eye: reading rooms occupied in the middle of the night, a hammock cinched into a personal cocoon, a dusty corner in a library, or a pod of two, hunched together amidst the larger context of a math class, a parental separation, a getaway at camp. Others went further, seeking those spaces that were wholly closed, recounting the transformative power of tucking away into their bedrooms, burrowing beneath a blanket. Escape from the Observing Other, the Critic, the Loved One, into the maze of backstage spaces, allow the learner to evoke Schechner's remaining six spacetimes. There they can make ready their body and mind, costume themself, and practice their becoming.27 This preparation and transformation may leave lasting marks upon the performer, but the performance itself is fleeting— 27 Theresa imagined herself alongside that chemistry professor, practiced potential selves, wondering “what about me is interesting?” Scott costumed himself as a teacher, only to realize that he didn’t enjoy the role. Charles found such joy in pebble and duff as to set down a path of studying earth science. 101 but a few hours traffic. Time backstage inscribes the true changes in one’s lived experience: the empathetic understandings of another way of being, the subtle means of disguising oneself, the interactions of subtle listening, reactive expression, and self-projection. All of this, left behind when the curtain closes, resides in the backstage. DISCUSSION #2, Morgan, Teresa, Shap, Charles, Angel, Burton, Scott, Marlin, and Jamie tell a story of learning places that question paradigmatic discourses of schools, departing notions of streamlined performance or confinement. They demonstrate a learning space as one that can be slipped into without a sense of performing for others; a place in which to experience with others. They are places where the individual can fade into the built world, much like dark-garbed stagehands, to create, practice, and experience alongside their companions. Furthermore, there is a sense of trust in such spaces that there is little attempt to observe the learner. The spectator is removed from consideration, as those who share the learning space are fellow participants in the experience. Moving away from conceptions of a school’s inhabitants as teleological threats, targets, and heroes, or top-down fonts of knowledge, learning spaces assume a rather flattened hierarchy, wherein those who share the space unite in the purpose of experience. Instead of administrators, teachers, students, and an external community, there is only common interest. The assumption of learning spaces, so permeable and closely bordered by alterity, is that those who share their spacetimes are uniquely bound by common curiosities, contexts, or ambitions. Thrown into community with this strange blend of alterity and commonality, learning spaces offer the opportunity to feel a part of something much larger than oneself. Such spaces seem not to contain, so much as open sites of interaction, in which individuals can brush up against something different, something new, something other, in order to learn different, new, other ways of being. In this ontological realization is the true effect of a learning space. Breaking down the notion of a 102 container, learning spaces then open themselves to their surroundings. Rather than separating learners from the community at large they inscribe learners as members of the community at a particular moment. This opens learning spaces to those of all ages rather than conceptualizing the built world of schools as one only for particular, similarly aged cohorts, generally those from ages 5 to 18. The openness of the space further expands notions of lifelong learning, upholding them as a public good rather than a private pursuit. Without spectators and the evaluative act that they surely bring, the effectiveness of a learning space likely goes unmeasured. Yet, in sharing a spacetime with fellow learners, inhabitants come to individually understand that which they know or have come to know. Comparison is internal to the individual, rather than bestowed, standardized, and quantified by others. Important to note in this absence of measurement and comparison is the understanding that a learning space need not be a space of normative curriculum. Participants’ most thrilling moments of learning need not align with external aims impressed upon them, but in self-understood moments of becoming. With this falls away expectation of control. Absent standardized aims and subsequent measurement, a learning space can exist beyond the scope of imposed order. The many factors discussed in Chapter 2 (Mechanisms of Behavioral Control) regarding focus and on-task behaviors are rendered moot when the learners’ intellectual needs and interests dictate their purpose in a space, rather than compulsion. I cannot help but find connections between the participants’ spaces of learning and the work of the pedagogic progressives insofar as a design logic and discursive paradigm. Learning spaces blend into communities, full of thresholds through which they might be accessed, casting light and shadow upon the known and strange alike. Through these thresholds many can pass in their own due time, moving alongside others to explore and experience the world and themselves. These are places of swirling alterity freed from the ordering structures of curriculum and surveilling hierarchy. 103 Across these worn-down thresholds and backstages I orient my conceptualization and composition of chapter seven’s Descent Park. This theoretical architecture, departing what might be apparently observable as a school transforms into something perhaps more akin to a Community Center or public park. With it I attempt to continue the story told by these ten learners, to design and emplace a discourse of learning, to imagine how such a place might be taken up in its community, and to feel, through its conception, just what such learning might be like. 104 CHAPTER 5. SORTED CLASSROOMS, A PHENOMENOLOGICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Throughout the experiences of place recounted in Chapters 3 and 4 there is a striking lack of one particular social identity, or schoolish archetype, the educator. The NSS Report conceptualizes teachers more as managers than educators, as building staff in place to recount tales of past school violence in the hope that students may learn the diligence necessary to survive, there to lock doors and facilitate egress. In speaking with the 10 learners any sort of teacher fell to the background of their experience. Certainly there was someone in the room, leading Marlin’s lessons in mathematics, guiding Charles’ shattering of geodes, helping Jamie to reconceptualize privilege. Still, the learners were far more attentive to their peers and fellow learners than any particular mentor figure. In both of these pre-texts I see a focus on the institution and the individual, but there is a strange missing link, that liaison between the two, the one who fosters the relationship therein, the teacher. More and more in the last few years I've come across editorial articles likening the design of schools to that of prisons (D’Aprile, 2021; Valencia, 2020). The opening salvos typically echo one another with mention of imposing, monolithic exteriors opening to long, windowless, well-surveilled, interior hallways lined with closed doors. Rooms are traced out of grey-painted cinder blocks and every finish is drab and easily cleansed of graffiti. Lockers and classrooms are easily interchangeable, as is one school for another; highly legible for a student or teacher who needs to transplant. Spaces are essentialized, simplified, always filled. For me, these same descriptors never fail to bring to mind the mental hospital, especially those constructed according to the Kirkbride Plan. Of course, there are clear connections between these sorts of state sanctioned facilities, namely the long lifespans, turnover of inhabitants, and impossibly high rate of use. Still, it is strange to think of a school alongside a prison or a mental hospital. Michel Foucault perhaps eases this strangeness in his topology of heterotopic spaces, arguing that nominally 105 primitive societies sought to carve out “privileged or sacred or forbidden” sites for individuals in moments of crisis. Therein it was understood the degree to which becoming and change was a part of human life, and that societies designated space in which to experience it (Foucault, 1984, p. 4). Foucault considers places like boarding schools and the encampments of military service, where young people might go off to conclude their adolescence before returning to society as a whole. He goes on to say that in more recent years these heterotopias of crisis have begun to transform into sites of deviation, whereby individuals in moments of great change are seen as deviant and othered through removal from society. The line between these two spaces is a thin one, but, spatially, the difference is clearly felt. The standardization and symmetry so common to learning spaces since the days of the factory schools communicates a state-vision of eliminating deviance from their pupils. And while many schools still recapitulate these designs, it is the teachers present who strive to transform their individual classrooms into spaces that recall the crises of adolescence, to make such spaces privileged and sacred once more. In this pre-text I hope to examine the geosemiotic relationship between teachers and classrooms. While I have heretofore considered textual discourses and those that arise from the coalescence of individual experiences, this pre-text also seeks to examine discourses composed across a community, perhaps even taught. Working with a group of teachers, all trained in the same place, at the same time, all together, I was curious how their stories might align—where a set of shared experiences would manifest in a singular dialogue. Particularly, I hoped to render a discourse of teaching space, to better understand a narrative of the essential, perhaps ideal, classroom. METHOD Having sat in thought with security experts and learners for some time, I hoped to turn my attention to a new group in the construction of this pre-text. Alongside the learner, the teacher is the most intimate and familiar user of the school space, and, in most cases, carries the bulk of 106 responsibility for composing and emplacing the discursive meaning of a particular classroom. Thinking beyond security and broad notions of learning, I hoped that this study might bring to the foreground the functionality of a school through its most basic relationships—teachers and students in dialogue with one another within the space of a classroom. Beyond this focus on the experience of teachers, I wanted to elicit perceptions of classrooms in an altogether different way. While previous the pre-texts rely on either incredibly specific, goal- bound discourses (the formation of hard targets) or something taken as altogether fluid and open (learning), in this examination I hoped to think about schools and educative spaces as they function for the particular (D)iscourse of teachers. In this hope I came to the method of the multiple sorting task. A participatory game of sorting and re-sorting a series of images, the task draws upon participants’ lived experiences, image banks, and constructs regarding the built world (Downing, 1992; L. N. Groat et al., 2019). Emerging from the work of clinical psychologists as a means of better understanding clients’ perceptive frameworks of their lived emotional and physical worlds, the task was eventually adapted for use in environmental design research and architectural co-design processes (L. N. Groat et al., 2019). Scholars of the sorting task theorize the advantages of this gamified, experience-oriented process in two ways. First, the sorting task acts as a means of entry into extended interview processes. Especially regarding architecture and design, the sorting of images provides an entry point to possible familiarity. Even structures that seem completely foreign to the participant can be reckoned with according to those qualities that are common to participants’ experience. With this, the sorting task removes the need for common language as an entry point to conversation. The images themselves can mediate talk on an individual level. Second, the results of a sorting task can render a detailed analysis of experience and perception. In some studies researchers rely on multidimensional scalable analysis that layers and correlates participants’ categorizations. Even absent this sort of quantitative 107 condensation of experience, the task offers great potential in phenomenological work for the examination of commonalities between participants’ divergent experiences, a sort of first step for theme-rendering. Beyond these, it seems to me that sorting tasks offer a third clear benefit to the interview process. While sacrificing the open-endedness of a typical phenomenological interview, implementation of the sorting task creates a common set of starting references among participants. Since every participant begins with the same set of images, the possibilities in tracing trajectories of experience across interviews is more feasible. Ultimately the interview used in this pre-text is one about teachers’ experiences with classrooms, yet the image set allows for a sort of superimposed storytelling whereby the individual’s understandings of lived-space are overlaid upon each image with the understandings of others. As noted, the sorting task has frequently been used to facilitate quantitative analyses of for the purposes of environmental design. For the sake of this pre-text I will depart this convention. Foremost, because I'm interested in distilling themes and affects from the retelling of my five participants. In this, the data generated from the sorting task in many ways resembles the findings of the previous chapter. I evoke themes, resonances, and questions still to be considered as a more than appropriate offering. PARTICIPANTS Engaging in these sorting tasks were five young educators, all in their second year as classroom teachers. I first encountered Amber, Blue, Gray, Jade, and Rose28 in a secondary English methods studio that I instructed at Michigan State University. The studio took place in two distinct settings across the course of two academic semesters. Once per week participants would meet on campus for a workshop-style course in English methods and planning, before assembling again later in the week 28 All names are pseudonyms. 108 to facilitate a series of after-school literacy clubs at a local middle school. I had the privilege of continuing on with these students for another academic year as a co-instructor and (for one) field instructor during their time as intern student teachers working in classrooms around the state. In the wake of COVID-19, our interactions across this second year together were conducted over videoconference. Now, several years removed from their experiences in the university, this group still echoes as the most spatially diverse teaching experience that I've had with one group of students. In our time together we worked in a variety of different university classrooms and non-classroom spaces, settings throughout the middle school, virtual classrooms and collaborative spaces, and in their individual field placements as student teachers. Because of this massive variety in educational settings I was curious how members of this cohort might conceptualize learning spaces. Much of the instructional work that we engaged in together felt distinctly extracurricular. The middle school literacy clubs Were attended voluntarily, and as such the teachers regarded the Media Center in which they worked as little more than a starting point. They were awkward and reluctant in those moments where they felt they needed to ask the students to engage in a certain sort of schoolish sitting, typically at the beginning of a day's instruction. Evident in their encounters with the students was a desire to break apart the perimeters and confines of the educational space. They reoriented tables to create conditions for dialogue and interaction that better suited them. They segmented the space according to different needs; Establishing writers’ rooms, recording studios, silent lurk working spaces, and rehearsal stages. They opened the hallways to their learners, shifting the dimensions and expectations for mobility and scale. They followed their students’ leads, moving through the space in ways that would often be considered curricular unconventional. Many of these behaviors, established in the space of the middle school clubs, eventually migrated to our interactions back on campus. The group seemed intent to reorient every space that we occupied together. Fortunately, we often found ourselves in classrooms with highly maneuverable furniture, furniture that they could recompose in 109 much the same way that they did at the middle school, establishing spaces for various tasks, composing choreographed station work across their planning experience, and breaking down the walls to move beyond the classroom at a moment's notice. I consistently saw these five teachers grappling with space and attempting to conceptualize their work in new and different ways. But again, this work felt distinctly extracurricular. I wondered what sort of educational world building they conceptualize now, as four of the five continue to work in secondary schools (while the other currently works in early childhood education). I wondered if the constraints that come with a contract of one zone perhaps stifled this world building, and what essential qualities might arise from their similar experiences. It is their spatial exploration that this pretext hopes to narrate. 30 SPACES In order to conduct the multiple sorting task, I relied on a series of 30 images of various learning spaces.29 Each space was selected to demonstrate a unique array of traits from the aforementioned literature (Ch. 2), such as seating arrangements, presence of student work, presence of materials, light and window orientation, mediating visual aids, access to nature, etc. The images were selected from a number of different sources ranging from late elementary through university settings. Each image was cropped to a 3 by 5 aspect ratio and scaled to express as complete a view of the setting as possible. This of course recognizes one of the key disadvantages of a conventionally photographed space, as no matter how the room is captured portions will remain behind the camera and unseen. Most notably absent were doors and egress. Seemingly, most interior spaces are photographed from their doorways, as if to express a sense of entering into them. This convention sacrificed the ability for participants to read exit sequences as well as legibility of how individual spaces interact with their surroundings. 29 During Blue’s sort the Mural website continuously failed to load six of the images. 110 Images were selected to be of as high quality as possible, without the need for any color adjustment for the sake of clarity. This was important to me as I wanted the lighting of each classroom to speak through the image as it might in true presence, while also remaining legible for the sake of the sorting task. Some of the spaces are apparently darker than others, still the images themselves are not difficult to decipher. Initially the images were printed for manual sorting, but as participants universally expressed their desire for virtual participation, I utilized a web-based application called Mural to upload the images and facilitate the sorts. Using the application, participants were able to manipulate individual images in a number of ways. Most notably they could resize the images to zoom in on particular features or traits of the spaces and learn more about them. Mural ultimately provided a virtual experience of the sorting task that accomplished all the goals that I had for the manual iteration. Participants were able to move, stack, isolate, and group the images across their multiple sorts. PROCEDURE Each participant’s sorting task occurred in two distinct sequences: the mixed sort (what I see as a more descriptive process) and the ranked sort (a more evaluative process). I previewed the concept of each sort with participants and offered the opportunity to begin with either sequence. Four of the five participants elected to start with the mixed sort in order to gain familiarity with the images before making evaluative decisions about them. Gray deviated from this convention, voicing the desire to understand the spaces at large before parsing the details that compose them. The interview process spanned the two sequences in a think-aloud format . As participants manipulated the images I prompted them to think-aloud through their process, their recollections, their resonances, and their affect. I recorded each interview as the participant shared their screen. This style of recording yielded both speech and moment-by-moment visuals of their sorting process. I also took sparing notes to guide later transcription, as well as brief periods of discussion at the end of each sort. My own 111 participation in the sorting tasks was rather limited. I prompted each type of sort, then often found myself engaged mostly as a listener. When participants’ think-aloud fell silent, I would take note of those moments where they seemed to come up short, when they couldn’t form an obvious association, and I would inquire about the images in question—what the participant was grappling with. As the sorting is meant to elicit sensitivity to different types of space and discourse thereof, I took responsibility for allowing each. MIXED SORT. As noted, four of the five participants elected to begin with the mixed sort. To demonstrate the concept behind the mixed sort I began with a quick tutorial as demonstrated below—an array of six geometric figures, two circles, two triangles, and two squares, with one of each shape appearing in a yellow hue and one of each shape in a blue hue. I described the idea of naming an establishing construct for each sort (i.e. color), and the categories within that construct (i.e. yellow and blue). I then resorted the figures according to a second construct (i.e. shape), this time with three categories (i.e. circle, triangle, square). I made sure to indicate that any given construct could have an undefined number of categories, and that all of this was according to their perception of the images and their experience with place, that there was no standard that I was using to evaluate their choices. FIGURE 17. SORTING DEMONSTRATION 112 After orienting the participants, I opened a five-by-six grid of the images, assured them that the images were randomized (so as not to emphasize top-left code preferences), and invited them to reacquaint themselves with the images and name their construct when they were ready to begin. At this point participants could begin shifting the images across the virtual plane, studying, resizing, and grouping as they saw fit, all while thinking aloud. When participants declared their sorting complete I would ask that they take me through their various categories and attempt to label each one as it related to the others. In the event that groupings were spatially organized in relation to one another I asked that participants detail their organizational decision making. Upon completion of each sort I took a screenshot of the full array of images. In an in-person version of this task, each sort would have begun with a deck of images that were randomized and maintained a standard size and format. Using the web application’s tools I was able to select all of the images, delete them, and open a new five-by-six grid following each sort. Beginning new sorts with a new grid was essential to the process as it simulated regrouping the images into a singular and standardized deck. Without this function some images would have remained resized and different from the others according to previous adjustments made by the participant. I asked that each participant complete at least two mixed sorts but offered the opportunity to do more. This required that they reexamine the space of classrooms from the perspective of a different construct, looking beyond that which they had already given their attention. Each participant completed at least two distinct mixed sorts, while Amber completed three. RANKED SORT. Alternate to the mixed sorts, I asked participants to rank the images according to two different pre-determined and subjective concepts: preference and familiarity. While the mixed sorts relied on undefined constructs and categories, the ranked sorts asked participants to compare the spaces with some aspect of their own experience. I was careful to invite multiple forms of ranking as individuating 113 all 30 images might be quite tedious, especially done twice in a row. As such, this ranking process was achieved in several different forms across participants. Some asked for a framework (provided in the form of an empty grid) wherein each image could be placed in a single corresponding box to build out an itemized ranking, while others chose to create tiers. Tiered systems operated on multiple scales, ranging from three to six levels. Some chose to separately rank the individual images within these tiers30, while others noted that to share a tier was essentially to be indiscernible. In the process of these ranked sorts I always initiated the preference sort first to ensure that an individual's understanding of preference was not overly influenced by expression of familiarity. In pilot sorts it was apparent that familiarity tended to relate with either high or low preference. By opening with the preference sort participants were given time to make decisions about the spaces before being prompted to consider their circumstantial extant experiences with them. Across all five participants I made an active verbal decision to resist defining preference. This resistance was born of a desire to see them talk through their own conception of the construct. For the most part they took this up through the lens of teaching. They considered which spaces they imagined would be most impactful upon their students, the classrooms in which they could imagine enacting their own lessons and style. Particular places broke this convention and were taken up more broadly as desirable or uncomfortable. Similarly, in the familiarity sort I was careful to allow participants their own definitions. To that end, the one verbal cue that I was careful to provide across all five participants was inquiring which image’s spaces felt familiar. In this notion of feeling there is a particular opening of how a place might be familiar. Participants noted that certain images showed places very unlike those that they had experienced, but that they had a certain “vibe” that felt just like so-and-so’s class or reminded them 30 In this case, it was described that ranking within the tiers indicated slight preference or familiarity from one image to another, but the difference between tears was often much greater. 114 of something that they’d seen in media, if not in person. This assumption of resonance as a valid form of familiarity allowed for quite a different analysis than familiarity-as-lived-sites might have. DATA & ANALYSIS Titling this pre-text I rely on the notion of a phenomenological discourse analysis. While discourse analysis and phenomenology may seem like disparate disciplines, there are similarities between the two that I believe warrant further exploration and coincidence in this research. As I use it, the language elicited for analysis in this piece is primarily a dialogue of subjective experiences with place, rather than between two active speakers. The participating teachers speak to the classrooms that they evaluate and conceptualize, and with those classrooms the discourses that compose them. At its core, discourse analysis is a method of studying the ways in which meaning is constructed in social interactions, not merely through talk, but also emplaced discourses. Then, taking phenomenology as an approach to understanding the ways in which human beings experience the world around them, the two rest at the particular intersection of discourse and place, considering the ways that language has formed the physical world and our experience therein, these two methodologies also seem to intersect. In analyzing the sorting tasks I return continually to a stance of curiosity about the experience of interacting with classroom spaces as a teacher and the essentials that arise in these experiences, an inquiry that depends upon phenomenological examination of each teachers’ lived experience. But I also give attention to the ways that these participants communicate their subjective experiences. Analysis of the study occurred in three phases: transcription, discourse analysis, and hermeneutic theme-rendering. Each phase allowed me to examine the data in different ways, with different takeaways. Ultimately all three phases brought me closer to the stories told and gave me time with the words and worlds shared, that I might see them again and anew. 115 CONSTRUCTS & CATEGORIES Across the five participants, 11 mixed sorts occurred, generating data in the form of construct and category labels assigned to each classroom image. As the mixed sorts were performed openly, without dictating formative constructs into which the participants should structure their thought, each contributed a different set of working labels. While some of these were reconcilable with one another, if not downright similar, others we're entirely unique. Detailed in the following sections are all 11 constructs as well as the categories that participants used to assemble them. (R1) INFERRED INTERACTION STYLE. Rose attempted to differentiate the spaces according to the ways that she understood the potential for interaction within them. In part, she read each space according to its designed possibility and limitation, but also as a series of decisions made by and organizing teacher toward instruction and relationship. According to these understandings, Rose termed the categories of dissemination, flexible dissemination, small group talk, and discussion. Spaces of dissemination were those that rose believed limited opportunities for interaction. They were designed primarily for a teacher figure to deliver information to an audience. Spaces of flexible dissemination were similar but demonstrated potential for brief encounters of talk. This sort of flexibility is mostly visible through proximity, as students sit nearer to one another or in organizations in which they face one another. The category of small group talk was used to describe places spaces in which students were grouped into pods or clusters, suggesting that is significant amount of instructional time would be dedicated toward interaction within these groups. Discussion oriented spaces were those that Invited talk at the largest scale, creating sight lines throughout the classroom such that students would be able to see and hear one another. 116 (R2) PERCEIVED EFFORT TOWARD WARMTH/COZINESS. Rose then took up an examination of perceived effort toward warmth and coziness. Some of those indicators that she described in building this reading were artifacts of student and teacher presence in the classroom, decor, light quality, access to nature, and distinctiveness of the space. Building out this construct rose seemed to describe space according to two separate levels of effort. Certain classrooms were described as “Flexible and Warm”, the highest degree of perceived effort. These were spaces into which Rose believed the teacher had put considerable time, expense, and thought toward the student’s well-being, building out comfortable and welcoming environments. When describing these flexible and warm classrooms, Rose dismissed the contributions of the institution in the formation of the space, considering them to be wholly imagined and composed by the teacher as a relational act of placemaking. Some other classrooms were described as demonstrating an “Institutional Effort”. These spaces were marked with what Rose considered innovative furnishings and wall coverings. Some were colorful and interesting, while others were indicated with a high degree of functionality. In several instances, Rose indicated spaces of “Collaborative Effort”, classrooms which Rose believed to be a result of institutional design and a well-meaning individual educator. Such spaces contained both high quality standard elements and personal touches. When considering spaces of little effort, Rose made two distinctions, indicating both personal and designed apathy. “No Effort” spaces were indicated as classrooms that were likely unchanged from their uninhabited form. “Shared Spaces” were similarly unwelcoming but felt different in that they were never intended to feel otherwise. Rose described such spaces in terms of lecture halls or conference spaces that are used by many different groups of users each day, without any sort of resident teacher. (A1) SEAT GROUPINGS. Amber examined the classrooms according to their student groupings, considering seating arrangements to create an opposing binary of “Independent” or “Grouped”. This construct was not 117 about proximity or clustering as much as gaze. Grouped classrooms used desk organizations that created person-to-person or face-to-face sightlines, while independent spaces oriented students toward material features of the space. (A2) FOCAL ORIENTATION. In a second binary construct, Amber situated each space’s focal orientation as either “Dynamic” or “Static”. In a dynamic space an inhabitant would be intended to continuously change their focal orientation, their gaze wandering across other students, an instructor, and various texts. A static space was one that Amber argued had a distinct and prominent “front”, upon which gaze was intended to remain. (A3) INFERRED INSTRUCTIONAL STYLE. Amber’s third binary distinguished each space’s inferred instructional style. “Lecture” oriented spaces were broadly construed as those in which a learner would take/receive information from some source other than their peers. These spaces included everything from rather conventional lecture halls to computer labs to what Amber described as a “default” classroom, marked by individual desks arranged in neat rows. “Discussion”-oriented classrooms were those that invited students to take, receive information from their peers directly. (J1) EASE OF INTERACTION SCALE. Jade differentiated classrooms according to the ease of their interactional scale, defining categories according by the size of groups already shown, as well as groups that could be imagined given each space is size and furnishings. Similar to roses conception of dissemination and flexible dissemination, Jade made distinct lecture spaces and independent spaces. Classrooms that were organized according to small groups were generally red as facilitating groups of as many as four people, and therefore labeled quads. Classrooms that facilitated talk across much larger groups, approaching in some cases half of the implied occupants at a time we're labeled large group, while those that could 118 facilitate a full class discussion were labeled whole group. Spaces that were either exceptionally large or showed evidence of adaptable furnishings we're considered mobile and were thought to be capable of any interaction scale. (J2) FOCAL ARRANGEMENT. Jade then set out a binary construct similar to Ambers Focal Orientation, here termed Focal Arrangement. Much in the same way that Amber wanted to think about whether students were invited to look toward static or dynamic points of focus across the period of encounter, Jade defined categories of single focal point or multiple focal points. (B1) SPACETIMES. Blue defined each space according to a spacetime, a conception that she imagined marking different classrooms as either futuristic, contemporary, or traditional. Traditional classrooms were largely identified visually using particular desk orientations, usually situated in rows facing either a whiteboard, chalkboard, or projector screen. Contemporary classrooms were more likely to utilize pods of desks and might orient students toward different means of interaction, either in the form of digital media, simulation or creation, or toward one another. Futuristic classrooms were those considered to be largely unfamiliar to Blues experience, but that seemed to move away from this sort of singular orientation and rigid structures of the traditional spaces. (B2) VISUAL INTEREST. Blue defined a binary construct based around each space’s visual interest, defining each classroom as either drab or stimulating. Drab classrooms were conceptualized as not having much to look at other than curricular content. This included views from the classroom windows, decor, and architectural detail. Stimulating classrooms were further distinguished through their use of color, interesting furnishings, and enticing light. 119 (G1) SEATING ORGANIZATIONS. In yet another seating-oriented construct, Gray made sense of the ways that classrooms utilized different seating geometries—identified as rows, circles, pods, individuals, and miscellany. Rows were defined as linear organizations of any number of desks. Rows always implied a universal orientation wherein every desk faced the same direction. They observed the patterned arrangement of circles, wherein the whole group was oriented in large, inward facing ring(s). Pods were identified as groupings of 2-6 students sitting in close proximity, unbound by the geometries of rows. Individuals were desks that defied strict bounds of orientation, but also did not group people in any way. Finally, miscellany accounted for the presence of multiple arrangements present in one space. (G2) TEACHER’S VISIBILITY. Finally, Gray grouped classrooms according to the inferred visibility of the residing teacher. In doing so they relied on contexts such as the presentation space (i.e. lectern, boards, apparent desk) and the possibilities of movement. Gray considered classrooms focal if they were arranged in some way to emphasize and center the presence and visibility of the educator. Removed classrooms were those that instead centered the presence of students and their activity. Mixed spaces were those that Gray either believed to do both, and those that they found illegible. TRANSCRIPTION Engaging in the sorting task with each of five participants offered up two primary types of data: the sorted images themselves and dialogue with the participant. To render this data into analyzable components, I began by transcribing dialogue from the recordings into a columnar format (Ochs, 1979). Within this format I divided talk into discernable utterances, mediated by the participant’s interaction with an image when possible. Each of these utterances was then further broken down into syntactic fragments of thought to account for the stop-and-go nature of spontaneous talk. This fragmentation was especially necessary because so much of the interviews 120 occurred monologically between the participant and the mediating images, whereas a typical dialogic transcript might portray the turn-taking between multiple voices. Expressed grammatically, these fragments most closely represent unpunctuated clausal structures. As they are transcribed, they loosely reflect (without the intensity of diacritics) the rhythm and tenor of participants’ speech.31 In another column, each utterance was notated with a code of its mediating images32, and in a third column (used quite rarely) I noted aspects particular to the utterance that might otherwise be managed with diacritics, such as sudden changes in volume or tone. This initial transcription, then, reflects the three parties present in each sort—the participant, the images, and my own participation. TABLE 9. DEMONSTRATION OF THE TALK-ORIENTED TRANSCRIPT - ROSE Utterance Images This one I think just how unique and how like natural it is goes with the coziness Because apparently I saw this thing once that like greenery really helps with like R 24 students feeling alive in the classroom 30 Not like they're in some depressing doctor's office So I would put those two with that together This one I’d put in there too I think there's lots of ways to make things cozy or like more comforting or more all 4 the words that we've already said And this one it's the couches and the light and the like soft colors I'd say And I know there was another one like that so I can just This one Same thing with the couches or like the flexible seating 5 I think flexible seating does a lot for that even when it has to get put away because students throw things So that one can go here 31 This balance of loose representation was most important for the sake of repetition in analysis. Reading and rereading these transcripts, I was able to maintain a semblance of the participants’ expression without having to decode complex codes. I found that it was not so much a matter of meaning making through these rhythms, but rather some degree of cueing recollection of their voices, their presence. 32 Images were numbered via a remote key. Participants did not see these numbers in the course of their sorting. 121 Table 9 (cont’d) What is it about flexibility? M Does that go with coziness Or does that go with like welcomingness? I think coziness comes from feeling comfortable in a space And if you have the option to choose where you are in the space and like how you're feeling and how you're sitting then that helps you feel more comfortable and welcome and cozy you all those things Building from these initial talk-oriented transcripts, I created tabular records of the sorted images. Reconstructing the groups from the various sorting tasks, I labeled each image with the assigned category labels from the mixed sorting tasks, numerical ratings from individual participants’ ranked sorts33, and any descriptive or sensory language used during the think-aloud to describe the portrayed space. For example, in the table below, Grey interacted with image 11 repeatedly throughout their sortings. In their first mixed sort they differentiated the types of seating arrangements across the classrooms, defining 11’s as using rows. In the second mixed sort, they explored whether each space seemed to communicate a focal, removed, or mixed instructional presence, describing 11 as mixed because of the multiple orientations of the students’ desks, as well as the massive quantities of visual resources around the room. Grey then ranked classroom 11 as their least preferred (30/30) and 14th most familiar (14/30). In the course of the various sorting tasks, Grey described classroom 11 as both rigid and crowded. 33 In the case that a participant ranked each image (even within tiers), I scaled these numerical ratings from 1-30; 1 being the most preferred/familiar. For those who explicitly noted that their tiers were independent of further ranking, I took an average of the rank within the tier. For example, if a participant sorted three images into their top tier, all three images were rated a 2, with no 1 or 3 ratings. 122 TABLE 10. DEMONSTRATION OF INDIVIDUAL SORTING DATA – GREY, IMAGE 11 Image Sort 1 Sort 2 Preference Familiarity Descriptors 11 Rows Mixed 30 14 rigid crowded These tables, built around each individual’s responses, were then collated across all five participants to create a dataset of sorted categories and averaged scores for the sake of examining common preference and familiarity. This table includes nine mixed sort categories for each classroom image (two from each participant except Amber, who did an extra sort). For example, the following tables demonstrate the mixed categories and averaged ranked scores for classroom 25. Across the nine sorts, the participants paint classroom 25 as a space designed for the dissemination of information rather than discussion or group work (R1, A3, J1), achieving this focus by isolating and making static its students in rows (A1, A2, G1) oriented toward a singular, focal educator (J2, G2). In their view, the space makes no attempt toward coziness or student stimulus (R2, B2). As such, this classroom was generally less preferred, ranking an averaged 23.5 (of 30), while also feeling rather unfamiliar, ranking an averaged 21.4 (of 30). TABLE 11. DEMONSTRATION OF AGGREGATE SORTING DATA – IMAGE 25 R1 R2 A1 A2 A3 J1 J2 B1 B2 G1 G2 No Effo Diss. rt Ind. Static Lecture Lecture Single Futuristic Drab Rows Focal Pref. R A J B G Fam. R A J B G 23.5 25 25 27 19.5 21 21.4 24 18 29 19 17 Another aggregated table was built from the associated think-aloud language across all five participants. This table was useful in recognizing thematic trends in participants’ understanding of learning spaces, especially in moments of divergence. For example, the table below shows the limited description given to classroom 1, talked about just four times beyond the assigned sorts. Still, even in 123 these few descriptions can be found ideas about the ways the space controls users’ gaze and ability for interaction, characterizations of the kind of teacher who uses the room, notions of a figured “traditional” classroom, and resonances of prior experience. While this particular classroom did not garner much additional description, entries in this table ranged from four to eighteen items, with most images averaging nine descriptors. TABLE 12. DEMONSTRATION OF AGGREGATE TALK DESCRIPTORS – IMAGE 1 computers block doesn't feel like it has untraditional reminds of a tech lab sight/talk lines a resident teacher As previously noted, I did not intend to take up statistical analysis of these sorting tasks. While these tables allowed me to manipulate the data in search of themes, largely through the construction of averages, I did not use the numeration of these spaces to make any assumptions beyond consensus. The ratings as they are given do not adequately express intensities, rather they are a starting point. I oriented these transcripts toward hermeneutic reflection, allowing for an examination of those essential understandings of place (L. Groat, 1982; L. Groat et al., 2019). The preference and familiarity rankings can be compared, and the various constructs and categories can be used to seek out similar experiences in place, but do not suggest quantitative correlations. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS In order to better understand the participants’ experiences and conception of classroom spaces I examined the ways that they chose to talk about such spaces. By orienting my initial close readings around the ways that participants use language to position different types of learning environments as well as those who inhabit them, I was then better able to understand the themes expressed across their disparate experiences. To accomplish such readings I relied on three analytical lenses from the tradition of discourse analysis. Similar to the process of analysis used in Chapter 3, I combed through 124 the think-aloud transcripts annotating participant talk according to James Gee's Vocabulary Tool, Identities Building Tool, and Figured Worlds Tool (2011). VOCABULARY. While Gee largely conceptualizes the analysis of vocabulary according to the classification of language families and etymology (2011, p.60), I took up a second approach, analyzing participants’ diction at the utterance level according to complexity. Gee suggests a three-tiered system, wherein everyday language is considered tier one, more formal academic and public-sphere language is considered tier two, and specialist terms makeup tier three. Working through participants talk I used a word processer to highlight notable tier two and tier three vocabulary in different colors across the transcripts. While tier three vocabulary was nearly non-existent, the presence even of tier two diction suggested a heightened level of affect and attention drawn. These annotations allowed me to better notice moments that participants talk seemed to change, especially as major shifts in diction occurred or those in which participants couldn't seem to settle on one particular path toward description. For example, in Blue’s descriptions of visually interesting spaces, she gives attention to a series of classrooms with brightly colored chairs. Moving beyond a simple (tier one) description of the chairs as colorful, she defines them as stimulating (tier two), differentiating a particularly engaging result of incorporating color into the space. TABLE 13. DEMONSTRATION OF TIERED VOCABULARY So I guess some of them are kind of in the middle Where like maybe it would be OK But it’s still a lot of like There's not a lot of color You know some of them are like very colorful I guess Even though it's just the chairs like in some of them I think it provides a bit more interest or like stimulation Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 125 IDENTITY BUILDING. Much in the same way that I used the identities building tool in Chapter 3, I chose to examine the ways that participants enacted, recognized, and positioned various social identities within the sorted spaces. I opened this tool with a set group of identities that I wanted to keep an eye out for: teachers, students, administrators, families, and community members. As I worked through each transcript, I kept a designated column for the notation of any mention of these identities. When a participant would mention any of the groups, I would take note of the ways they used language to position that particular sort of person and how the participant imagined their relationship with them. Take for example the three following utterances: Rose: Because I think that that's something that students actually really notice is like how warm a classroom feels Rose positions her students as demonstrating a certain level of attention to the feel of a classroom, yet she hedges this observation with the word “actually”, indicating that there is some level of broken expectation, either personally or on a larger scale. It is as though students are not expected to notice what a classroom feels like, that they just moved through the spacetime of school unseeing and unfeeling, not really experiencing anything just passively encountering it. Rose refutes this idea and positions students (broadly) as feeling beings. She continues, several utterances later, having taken notice of flexible seating options in several of the classrooms: Rose: I think flexible seating does a lot for [perceived warmth and coziness] even when it has to get put away because students throw things Rose further conceptualizes her students as agentive beings. She considers the way that a classroom can shift in its orientation and relationship with students. She desires to have a space filled with flexible seating options that her students might utilize but recognizes that she may have to adjust according to their decision making. In this, Rose sees her students as capable of changing their environment, not 126 merely being affected by it. She doesn't indicate that it's flexible seating that prompts students to throw things, rather, they make their own decisions completely distinct from the environment. Yet, the teacher must adjust the environment to meet them. This stands in contrast to something said by Jade, wherein she refers to students entirely objectively: Jade: Where we're putting students more in tables with groups Or like having them move around some In this expression, students operate according to the will of the teacher and the space as it is organized. They are not conceptualized as agentive or having power over the material environment. These two subtle, and very different ways of talking about imagined students demonstrate complexities in each teacher's relationship with them. Such complexities were demonstrated regarding most social identities. My primary purpose for seeking these identities was as reference back to the paradigmatic discourses explored in Chapter 2. By building out a sense of the people who are meant to inhabit a space, and particularly the ways that these teachers position those people, I had a sense that I would be able to understand where in these particular paradigms each teacher related their own experience. Thinking back to Jade and Rose, we might consider them to be very different types of teachers according to the paradigmatic discourses. Jade, in her assumed ability to place and move students, might be read as participating in the discourse of schools as sites of order or control, while Rose, granting attention to students’ agency and spatial preference, might align with a discourse of openness and community. While I understand that these paradigmatic discourses are not monolithic for all- encompassing, I was curious to see the ways in which they might guide and become illuminated by each teacher’s talk. Furthermore, I was curious how the participants would imagine an emplace themselves in the shown classrooms. I wondered whether there would be a variety of interactions, whereby certain 127 classrooms invited more intimate imaginings while others could only ever be seen as someone else's space. In my own experience with the sorting task, primarily taken up to conceptualize notions of home, I recognized a strong sense of ownership over particular images. Spaces that I found more aligned with my own design logic and preference tended to invite me as the sorter to imagine a certain level of inhabitants, while those that did not were little more than pictures. In paying close attention to participants language I was curious if I would be able to recognize a similar convention in their use of the sorting task. Another offshoot of this analysis was the expectation of particular kinds of teachers. In thinking about the ways that the participants positioned identities within the images I hoped to better understand the ways that they thought about teachers in given spaces. I wondered if they might create characterizations and imagine particular types of people who would occupy each classroom. In this sort of figured identity I saw an opportunity to better understand again the emplaced discourse of what it means to be a teacher and perhaps even the type of teacher that each participant so desires to become. FIGURED WORLDS. My final examination in the vein of discourse analysis took up the perspective of figured worlds—those socially-produced models or images of being that people hold evident as “typical” or “normal” (Gee, 2011; Holland, 2003). Figured worlds organize the discourses that we participate in on a daily basis. They systematize everything from modes of speech to movement. As I worked through participants’ interviews, I paid particularly close attention to utterances that pose an aspect of a space or the interactions therein as somehow standard, taken-for-granted, or expected, as well as features that participants’ reactions betray as deviating from their own figured world. Occasionally this analysis also involved annotating participants’ descriptions of built worlds beyond the provided 128 images. Participants used spaces from their own experience to contextualize the sorting task, thereby illustrating standardized forms evocative of their own figured worlds. HERMENEUTIC THEME-RENDERING Phase three marked a turn back to the phenomenological roots of this project, taking up participants’ narratives with an eye toward thematic expression of their experiences in classroom and learning spaces. Rather than delve too deeply into the particulars of language and representation, this analysis focused on participants’ experience and the telling of those experiences through the sorting task. Though I formally refer to this as the third phase, it is a process that began the moment that each participant joined the telecall. There was no formal opening of this analysis, as it was an irresistible and continuous strand of thought across the course of the pre-text. A slow tumbling of the participants’ words occurred throughout the research process: across the five interviews, in each keystroke of transcription, in the close readings, again and again as I sifted through the words offered. This thematic rumination rendered a theoretical substance upon which I was able to parse other aspects of analysis. In organizing my analysis across the phases of transcription, discourse analysis, and hermeneutic theme rendering I was able to move from very specific consideration of the images to a much broader conceptualization of the discourse of teaching spaces and the (D)iscourses of teachers. Beginning with transcription, I grounded analysis as a close and iterative examination of interaction with the participants regarding the act of the sorting task. In this initial examination I found that I was able to provide context to their experiences, getting a sense of the participants as much as I was able to get a sense of their conceptualization of schools as spaces of teaching. By moving this reading into a more focused analysis of their discourse, I expanded outward, thinking less about their reading of a specific image to better understand the ways that they figured schools as a concept, understood particular archetypes of teachers, students, families, and administrators, and learned to home in on the 129 sorts of language that they were using to convey these ideas. In rendering themes across the five participants I was able to move yet further from the particularities of the images. This theme rendering considered the broadest scale yet, operating at the abstract level and accessing the sort of discourse that I was most interested in working with. Gray read each classroom space as an empty stage, suggestive of potential choreographies. He traced lines of movement that he imagined himself and his students taking through each classroom, and the ways that eyes might follow. Amber regarded each space as a sort of conduit to either ease or obstruct dialogue in the instructional interaction. In a similar vein, Jade was notably attentive to the ways that spaces functioned to direct behavior and control students’ bodies. Blue paid close attention to the implied spacetimes and suggested narratives of each image. Considering classrooms as implications toward particular futures, she thought about the ways that different spaces might connect a student to a different potential self. And Rose continually concerned herself with perceived effort on the part of attending teachers, reading into their assumed attempts to create warmth and environments that welcomed their students. No two readings were exactly alike, though similar sorts occurred across participants. Examinations of the seating arrangements were by far the most common, with all but one participant taking up such a focus at least once. In thinking about seating, participants sorted according to the organizational forms and types of interactions that different forms suggest, the group sizes made possible, and ways that various arrangements direct the gaze and attention of a space’s users. Beyond seating, the participants were attuned to the visual interest and perceived coziness of the spaces. They were continually interested in the feel of each classroom, both in the bodily experience of being therein, as well as the sort of legible resonances suggested. 130 FINDINGS Wonderfully apparent across these rounds of analyses is the ultimate lack of consensus between participants. Surely there are similar inclinations and common points of attention, but the constructs and categories suggested in both the mixed and ranked sorts continually fall short of unanimity. For this I'm thankful as it really demonstrates the power of those themes that did rise to the top across participants’ varied experiences and priorities in learning/teaching spaces. Woven together in the following are four sets of thematic noticings, demonstrating the ways that concepts of figured worlds, assumed identities, power, and dwelling brush up alongside one another and through one another in the course of description. THE FIGURED WORLDS Conceptualization of high familiarity classrooms illustrated several figured worlds, described with some continuity between the five participants: the “Default” classroom, the Socratic classroom, and a generally ideal classroom. Amber coined the term default classrooms as those most commonly found in secondary spaces, but sometimes even in the post-secondary world. These classrooms are most commonly identified by their use of rows of desks or tables to indicate a singular, rigid, frontal focal point, ideal, as Rose described, for the dissemination of information. Generally disliked and highly familiar, the spaces shown above were described by participants as “traditional” or “default” classroom styles. Notably, these spaces frequently shared other named characteristics in the mixed sorts as they were conceptualized as those that sought to isolate, silence, and immobilize students for the purpose of making prominent a focal figure who could then distribute information. TABLE 14. SORTING DESCRIPTION OF DEFAULT CLASSROOMS # R1 R2 A1 A2 A3 J1 J2 B1 B2 G1 G2 P F No Static 2 Diss. Ind. Lecture Ind. Single Trad. Drab Ind. Focal 22.3 8.6 Effort (Front) Static 10. 7 Diss. Shared Ind. Lecture Lecture Single Trad. Drab Row Focal 19.5 (Front) 7 131 Table 14 (cont’d) No Static 16 Diss. Ind. Lecture Ind. Single Trad. Drab Ind. Focal 20.3 7.2 Effort (Front) Across the figured world of the default classroom was a notable sense of understanding regarding the teachers that occupy them. Communicating more than just a particular, perhaps lecture oriented teaching style, participants characterized default classrooms’ teachers as less caring and aloof. Rose indicated that such spaces often lack personal touches and can feel as if the teacher themself is somehow uncomfortable therein, as if they could pack up their bag in just a matter of minutes and leave for another job. Speaking particularly about classroom 23, she said: Rose: It looks like they just want to like come in like do what they need to do and then leave Because there's not really much of like any personality Like you can't really get much about who the teacher is, how they feel, or what they do, what they like Again, considering classroom 27, she described the default classroom as a space of transience, noting: Rose: And like I feel like the less you put in there then the more it seems like you are trying to set yourself up to leave whenever Mike: Leave for the day or leave the school? Rose: Both, both Participants noted that any adornment of default classrooms tends to be entirely curricular and without personal character. There is little sense that the design, perhaps most apparent in curricular décor, is particular to the context and users of the classroom in a current spacetime. Rather, maps, anchor charts, and resource posters tend to be generic and mass produced, potentially found in any/every 132 other content area classroom in the school, state, even nation. Jade differentiated a default classroom’s ornamentation as opposed to a natural mural painted on the wall of classroom 20: Jade: I remember the ‘Carol never wore her safety glasses’ poster in like four different science rooms throughout my life Like do they just give this out to every school? TABLE 15. SORTING DESCRIPTION OF SOCRATIC CLASSROOMS # R1 R2 A1 A2 A3 J1 J2 B1 B2 G1 G2 P F Grou 16. 4 SG Warm Dyn. Disc. Mobile Mult. Fut. Stim. Misc. Remove 9.5 p 5 Grou 19. 5 SG Warm Dyn. Disc. Mobile Mult. Fut. Drab Misc. Remove 12.7 p 6 No Grou 16. 9 Disc. Dyn. Lecture Large Single NA NA Row Mixed 15.5 Effort p 0 Grou 22. 24 Disc. Warm Dyn. Disc. Whole Single Fut. Stim. Circ. Remove 10.9 p 2 Grou 15. 27 Disc. Share Dyn. Lecture Whole Single NA NA Circ. Remove 16.5 p 5 Grou 13. 29 Disc. Some Dyn. Disc. Whole Single NA NA Circ. Remove 16.8 p 3 A second universally figured world among the participants, the Socratic classroom was similarly positioned as common to secondary and post-secondary education. Such classrooms were primarily identified with inward-facing seating that directed the attention of every student toward one central location whereby a dynamic focal shift could be more easily achieved. In the examples identified by participants, the focal point was not always intended to be an instructor. Gray noted that while the material design of a Socratic classroom communicates the importance of student talk and often downplays the presence of an instructor, this is a design that fully depends upon the pedagogy of the present instructor, noting: Gray: They can either observe or participate in different degrees according to how that teacher feels it should be done 133 Which leads to a variety of Like when people practice their idea of Socratic teaching I think you get sometimes a wide variety of results Because they have a different idea of what it means to remove yourself from it And what to what degree do you participate if that makes sense Overall, the Socratic classrooms were described as demonstrative of far more effort on the part of the instructor to create dialogue and community across students (with possibilities of whole group talk and decentralized focus). But they were also perceived as misguided and described as largely performative and perfunctory. Participants were critical of such spaces, noting extremely specific preparation and conditions to function and the artificial sort of talk that they promote, arguing: Gray: I don't think I don't think it reflects how people naturally have dialogues outside of a top-down controlled scenario Especially working with 5th and 6th graders And the reason I think this is that it requires so much training for students to know how to behave in the Socratic seminar It's useful for being able to grade discussions Which is why I think it developed partially Socratic classrooms didn't carry the same perception of low effort, as participants generally assumed that the teachers who had arranged them had decided to go beyond the Default. Yet, the design of the Socratic classroom was regarded as generally less important, as the attention of the group is not meant to be peripheral but inward, thus emphasizing content studied, and the interactions shared therein, while deemphasizing most aspects of its appearance. Yet, they noted that such spaces often fail in in secondary schools because they are too crowded and the sight lines necessary for dialogue are interrupted by layers of students. While the concept might be decent, it is one that is 134 adapted into a larger design that does not account for what it is trying to accomplish, fundamentally at odds with the paradigmatic space in the moment of its construction: Rose: And I think that that's what usually makes talking as a class a little bit harder Or like getting them to like to connect to each other TABLE 16. SORTING DESCRIPTION OF IDEAL CLASSROOMS # R1 R2 A1 A2 A3 J1 J2 B1 B2 G1 G2 P F Grou 4 SG Warm Dyn. Disc. Mobile Mult Fut. Stim. Misc Remove 9.5 16.5 p Inst. Grou 8 SG Dyn. Disc. Large Mult Cont Stim. Pods Mixed 9.5 16.4 Eff. p Coll. Grou 13 SG. Dyn. Disc. Mobile Mult Cont Stim. Misc Mixed 8.9 20.0 Eff p Coll. Grou 20 SG Dyn. Disc. Large Mult Cont Stim. Misc Mixed 6.7 24.1 Eff. p Inst. Grou 22 SG Dyn. Disc. Quads Mult Cont Stim. Pods Mixed 6.5 20.9 Eff. p In clarifying the built worlds of “Default” and “Socratic” classrooms, participants exposed a particular vision of their ideal teaching spaces. Across the ten most preferred classrooms there were clear patterns in what the participants valued as a model. Most important to this conceived space is the clustering of students, as the top nine preference scores all align with spaces that suggest the curricular use of group talk. Such spaces do not attempt to separate the students for the purpose of presenting to them, but rather assume a regular practice of discussion. Similarly important to the participants was the multiplication of focal points, whereby no single point in the space was meant to remain the center of students’ attention. At any given moment, each of the small groups in an ideal classroom has its own focal point, often one that is trained inward, toward other members of the group. Regardless of the rigidity of an examined classroom, the presence of smaller self-focused groups tended to dramatically increase participant preference. Building from a small group, talk-oriented design, participants further idealized spaces that demonstrated effort on the part of the teacher to create personal interaction. Such effort was 135 recognized largely in acts of curation and adaptation. According to the participants’ collective telling, a teacher inherits a default classroom, (as noted) imperfect and intended to separate, immobilize, and silence students. From this starting point, a teacher can bring their own personality into the space through the accumulation of materials and attempt to undo this intended ordering. This curation, while important, also seems to be partially performative, as spaces which were not readily recognized as classrooms, even when clustering groups and decentralizing focus, were less preferred, suggesting that one can go too far. For example, while classrooms 4 and 5 were repeated recognized as cozy and welcoming, they were also disidentified as classrooms. Grey described such spaces as “just living rooms,” and Amber saw them as too comfortable for curricular space, imagining that students would lose sight of aims, saying: Amber: It’s nice that it's comfortable but it's a little too comfy It gives me nap vibes Beyond teachers’ responsibility for effort, the institution of the school is also accountable for ideal posturing of a teaching environment. A subset of classrooms (shown below) was interpreted as the failure of the school to create recognizable sites of learning. Participants made associations with community centers, police station holding cells, and corporate conference rooms. They imagined such spaces as being primarily transitional, through which someone might move for a brief while without forging relationships. A strangely specific feature of the ideal, Amber noted the importance of some sort of elevated surfaces in defining a space in which all parties will participate in some sort of work, notably requiring materials. For several participants, there is a certain comfort in understanding the sorts of tools and responsibilities that will likely be present for students throughout the course of an experience implied by something like a desk or a table. Those spaces that were without seating altogether, much less 136 something to write on were often seen as transactional and awkward. This was primarily due to the fact that without such pieces of furniture the classroom begins to be seen that's a completely passive space for the student. One of the sorted images, classroom 25 portrays a black box theater bordered by several rows of chairs. Such a space was disorienting to the participants as they commented on the fact that it could only be used in a very one-directional manner. They imagined such a classroom facilitating lecture or presentation, without much participation from the students.34 Several participants echoed the sentiment voiced by Blue, saying, “It feels like someone's going to pitch some sort of timeshare to me.” Here participants really speak to the idea of an ideal learning space as one that goes beyond momentary transaction and conceptions of gain. The classroom is not meant to be a place in which the teacher should have to make some sort of sales pitch, but rather a place that is forged around real interaction and variety in pedagogical methods. To do nothing but stand and deliver is not an option. Similarly, a subset of well-liked spaces were nonetheless excluded from conception of the ideal because of their resonances with spaces beyond the “core” curriculum (National Education Association of the United States, 1894). Among them were something of an art room, choir risers, an empty stage, a morgue, and an unused feature of a local hiking trail. Participants knew exactly what these spaces felt like, but they did not feel like school. Blue said of some of these spaces, “they feel like where school35 is going, but not where it is right now.” I can't help but notice how many of these descriptions are germane to the arts, to the use of one's body. It seems that places of learning are often disassociated from the body, as wholly intellectual sites. In schools and classrooms, bodies are meant 34 I was astounded by the lack of imagination to potentially invite the students out of the chairs. This image spoke a great deal to how the participants were conceptualizing students within the classrooms. 35 As an abstract. 137 to be still and under control36, and those that are not are seen as deviant and problematic. Learning is intended to occur in rigid lines, rank and file, and students may use their bodies to express, to move, to explore, in their own time, extracurricularly. ASSUMED IDENTITIES Building from this, the classrooms that scored the highest preference seemed to suggest a great deal in the identities assumed in learning spaces. Participants spoke similarly across these preference scores regarding teachers and students alike. Most notably, the conception of a good teacher was one who largely fell to the background. A good teacher is an organizer who puts a great deal of time into the design and organization of their space and their curriculum, such that students can move organically and agentively through each. Gray oriented an entire sort around the apparent attempt to centralize or remove the teacher as a focal point in the room, building a discourse suggestive of the fact that those teachers who attempt to remove themselves actually put forth higher effort and likely generate better learning. Notable in the three highest preference images, there is no sign of a teacher’s defined space or presence in the room. While all of the images are completely absent of people, many seem to suggest a teacher's implied location through the presence of a focal desk or podium. While these three images very likely fail to capture something due to their limited perspective, it is worth noting that, as taken, they seem to suggest a classroom in which the teacher would be a roving, decentralized figure—which was highly regarded. According to participants, students’ primary identity is that of speaker (not always succeeding as listeners). With only a few noted exceptions (Amber thinking about how much space is needed by an individual to make things, and Grey imagining the ways that people could engage in something like a gallery walk), the participants imagined students to be in consistent dialogue with one another, 36 The participants struggled to imagine classroom spaces without desks around which to position movement and bodies. The very notion of a moving, active classroom becomes difficult to conceptualize. 138 collaborating on (undefined) work, hardly ever desiring to be somehow independent in the classroom. The rejection of both the “default” and Socratic seating setups seems largely a reaction against the individual speaker, as it is essentially silences all but one student at a time. Default classrooms are seen as isolating containers meant to maintain quiet, individual effort, and though the Socratic circle is intended to foster dialogue, the fact that the majority of students are silent at any given time is seen as unideal. Participants imagined administrators quite distantly, responsible primarily for providing the “default” classroom such that it might be inhabited and permitting high levels of augmentation toward the ideal. High impact administrators were imagined as collaborators who join in the teacher’s individual effort to create a welcoming environment for their students. Absent identity across all five participants are parents and community members. I take this as demonstrative of how divorced most students’ home lives really become once they set foot in the built world of schools. VIBES Participants repeatedly described the “vibes” of various images throughout their sorts, pointing out connections harbored in design as a whole or in particular details of a space. Relying on the notion of resonance as a similar conceptual sense, perhaps vibes are best illustrated by the workings of the inner ear. As the various pressure waves of our environment, be they sonic, barometric, hypnic, or otherwise, are funneled back into the labyrinthine tubes of the ear, the body vibrates with them. In rhythmic accordance with our environment, humans generate nerve impulses through which affect and memory brush up alongside one another. These resonances, these vibes, indicate a deeper sorting, one that has occurred timelessly beyond this study, as participants churn through their lived experiences again and again to understand how various spaces operate, make them feel, and the possibilities in which they might shape the spaces themselves. 139 Almost every instance of resonant reflections in familiar spaces lead back to schools themselves. Participants objectively stated the curricular functions of various spaces without any doubt. “This one is just a computer lab.” “I’ve never seen a classroom like this. Well, I guess a choir room.” “These ones remind me of a high school science lab.” “This was another that reminded me of college, like that second classroom where we had lab.” Again and again, learning spaces were resonant of others, creating a monotonous series of recapitulated built worlds which, for most people, mark the most visited public spaces over the first two decades of life. Schools are like other schools. Most classrooms are instantly legible to their users. Not only in the expectations of behavior, but also in the content area and curriculum meant to be taken up therein. The disruption of these resonances resulted in notable tension. Zooming in on the image of a classroom that Rose immediately identified as a history room, she discovered what appeared to be chemistry diagrams sketched out on the chalkboard. In the course of examining the room she then seems to extend their presence to understand the space as one in which teachers have not really made a home for themselves or their students. Rose: This feels like an old history classroom that is now used for chemistry I don't really think that this is warm at all It feels like they don't really want people to talk to each other And they also don't really care what you They don't really think that they're going to stay there for long Doesn't feel like a longevity thing So it could be used by lots of people Suddenly discernible alongside a few chalk outlines is a wholesale breakdown in the potential for the coming together of community within the particularities of the extant space. 140 Resonance beyond schoolish sites occurred occasionally. As noted previously, several spaces were likened to a holding cell and some sort of corporate space (see fig. 22—either a makeshift conference area thrown together in a hotel convention center, or a break room akin to that of Dunder Mifflin's in The Office. These resonances were taken up quite negatively, as spaces that might be familiar and functional, but wholly indicative of somewhere you don't really want to spend time. Alternatively, just one positive resonance beyond schools occurred, as Gray likened a space made-up of intermittently cushioned steps to an experience they had visiting Amman, Jordan. Gray: But I saw This is really common in Amman, Jordan Because it's called the City of Seven Mountains 7 jabals [extended fun fact about Jordanian Uber] So it's stairs The whole city Stairs To get like anywhere just stairs So they're super steep [tangent about Jordanian Uber taking on these hills] But uh this just reminds me of Jordan, so I like I like that Because there were a lot of public spaces and performance centers and things like that were constructed with that kind of in mind In remembering this particularly noncurricular space of Amman, Gray reimagines the possibilities of classroom 28. Suddenly what is actually a rather presentation-oriented auditorium, simply changing out stadium seating for a series of steps, begins to seem like something much more akin to a public 141 space and performance area. This simple transformation from presentation to performance is a distinct shift in a pedagogical mindset. By opening the classroom to one's experiences in the world, there is a possibility for a similar shift in the teacher’s self-conception. Resonance linking the spaces to college classrooms was common across participants. Unlike previous examples, there was no prevailing feeling associated with these resonances. For some, college classrooms seemed to indicate experiences of flexibility and choice, whereby learning becomes less about rote formalism and more about dialogue. For others, such classrooms carried with them the association of sterile, impersonal space; passed through by countless inhabitants, never really made one's own. Rose suggested a notion of a university classroom as a space that loses all salient meaning the moment that one’s own class departs it. When I asked participants if they had final thoughts about the process of the sorting tasks they pointed out a disconnect between their own preference and familiarity. When examining the five sorts alongside one another this was illustrated even more clearly. Of the 10 least preferred spaces, 7 were among the 10 most familiar. This connection between high familiarity and low preference was bolstered as 5 of 10 most preferred spaces, were among the 10 least familiar. Even spaces that had never been experienced before felt in some way preferable to those which were familiar. It seems that recapitulation in the built worlds of learning is incredibly tangible to those who have spent a great deal of time therein. More than anything, I believe that this suggests that some novelty is a refreshing concept. As much as analogous design can be a comfort, overuse can become tedious and monotonous. POWER & CONTROL Building from the prevailing notion of schools as sites of control (Ch. 2), participants conceptualized three common aspects through which classroom spaces function to maintain power— isolation, rigidity, and lines of interaction. Participants were highly attentive to the amount of space 142 implied between inhabitants’ bodies. Even lacking formal measurement, the five posited that particular distance between students demonstrated an attempt at isolation, and through it, individuation and silence.The spaces most commonly described as isolating share the qualities of frontward facing rows of individual desks, characteristic of Amber’s “default classroom”. Such spaces were familiar across participants and were generally disliked. Regarding the notion that such classrooms carry a high potential for controlling others’ bodies, Rose spoke of such layouts as ideal as a sort of reset, when something necessitated a return to order in an unruly classroom. She described the use of more group- oriented, talk-centered design in her own classroom which then had to be amended after students began to behave dangerously. Rose: Also I don't think my students could handle that much social That's why we had to change this year Things were getting thrown too much Then there was a fight Here, the use of isolating, individualized (default) seating was then in itself a punishment powerful enough to curb an undesired group dynamic. Attention to the various ways that spaces deny students mobility was primarily termed rigidity. Rigidity was emphasized in the size of a space’s overall footprint in combination with the implied number of inhabitants, the fixed quality of a frontward focal point, and the assumed weight of various objects within the space. All of this in combination was taken up in various reflections about crowding and the amount of space given to each individual within the classroom, how individuals might move throughout the space in relation to one another, and, particularly, an individual's ability to exit the space. Finally, participants gave a great deal of attention to what I think of as lines of interaction. These lines consist of the ways that individual inhabitants of a space might experience their 143 interactions with others. For example, the participants repeatedly picked out the following two images, noting their seating arrangements as strange and likely uncomfortable. Amber describes this, saying: Because you have like people facing forward And you also have people like facing the side Like right at that corner Like staring at somebody's face Which is weird And like unnatural When asked to follow up on this feeling, they described the perpendicular positioning of one group of students to another, and how awkward that is in social situations. Spatial perpendicularity between people was conceptualized by Jade as something most commonly utilized in sports, wherein a group of athletes orient themselves to a goal along one axis while spectators align with a different perpendicular axis. Its like one group of the students is always there just to watch what the other group is doing Either like behaviorally Or as some sort of performance Participants described this set up as creating a group of doers and a group of watchers. Beyond perpendicular sight lines, participants also described concepts of broken sightlines, whereby a student might find themselves behind a feature of the room or another student. Extending this notion is the discomfort of being watched while in public. This reminds me of the managerial techniques of hovering near a student or teaching from the back of a room, using the discomfort of being watched to manipulate a particular set of behaviors. 144 DWELLING A powerful strand of thought across all five participants was a notion of a classroom space as one to be taken up as something of a dwelling. Rose was vocal about this concept, illustrating it best by considering a learning space as one that a student might believe that they could return to find touchstones of their learning, including, surely, the texts, materials, and tools of a given concept, but also the very person that might have taught it to them, voicing an aspect of the ideal as spaces that Rose described as feeling “like a high school classroom that you can go back and see the same teacher next year.” Such dwelling is recognized in accumulation and curation. Participants wanted to see stuff inside the classrooms. Gray expressed his disappointment with those spaces that felt empty of instruments, texts, and things to play with. Importantly though, the stuff should not just be run-of- the-mill and generic, as described of the default classroom’s, it should be particular to the inhabitants and to the teacher-as-curator. Participants described teachers in this sense as residents of a space; most appreciative of those teachers who seemed themselves comfortable in their classrooms, demonstrated by some degree of longevity, openness, and attention. Complementing the spaces that best exemplified residency was the vibe identified as coziness. Participants described coziness through some combination of flexibility, potential for exploration, and adaptability to different moods and humors. Building from the analogous Danish concept of hygge, coziness is derived from a certain degree of thoughtfulness toward other souls, minds, and consciousnesses. A space that is cozy is one that takes the presence of another into deep consideration and embraces them, through its design promoting their own well-being, and therefore resulting in resonant experiences of comfort, warmth, and relaxation. Fascinatingly, experiences of coziness were expressed across four primary spaces seen above. While two of these spaces derived what I would imagine is apparent coziness through the presence of plush seating (again, regarded as more resonant of a living room than a classroom), soft, warm lighting, and curated stuff, the others offered stark 145 contrast. The inclusion of two outdoor classrooms speaks to the notion that coziness is most felt in the promotion of well-being. When conceptualizing the experience of a school day in all of its rhythms and routines, different users require different things; for some, fresh air, natural sunlight, and crunching leaves under foot provide these. ABSENT Building from the many studied aspects in the design of learning environments outlined in Ch. 2, I entered the sorts expecting to hear a great deal more about the quality of light and air in the given spaces. Though I realize that things like air quality are incredibly difficult to estimate through the examination of a photograph, I anticipated that certain rooms, especially those with more apparent windows, might garner some consideration in the possibility of fresh air. Beyond this, I thought it possible that some of the older looking classrooms might carry with them a musky resonance (especially considering the takeaways of Ch. 4). In practice, only the outdoor spaces suggested any particular air quality, as participants noted how much they would like being in those places for the fact of their fresh air. Light quality was only identified in the disruption of fluorescence, such as the inclusion of floor lamps or the application of paper over the fluorescent lights to ameliorate their flicker. I fully expected again that the presence of windows would garner more attention. DISCUSSION In attempting to name the discursive paradigm suggested in the data of Amber, Blue, Jade, Gray, and Rose there were strangely apparent breaks from that which has been suggested previously. None of the teachers really talked about impacting their students’ beliefs, and notions of optimizing learning, test scores, or productivity were minimal. Certainly, there was some concern with maintaining order, and at least a semblance of control, but far more frequently the participants reacted against structures designed to constrain movement and sound. In all of this one might expect the participants to fall in line with the pedagogic progressives, understanding and orienting learning spaces toward 146 their communities and the world beyond schools, but this was not the case. Communities and family were notably absent from their reflections. So perhaps security and safety, as suggested by the NSS? Again, not the case. One might read into notions of coziness as an effect of feeling safe and trusting the school environment to maintain that security, but this was never made explicit. More than anything, participants seemed to imagine schools and classrooms as sites of gathering, places for people and materials to coalesce, to share space even for just a little while. In their immense recapitulation, the built worlds of schools foster familiarity. Those who use them know exactly what to expect from them, how to navigate them, and perhaps understand just how much affect they might have upon them. More than this though, is the cultural ubiquity of their presence. Thinking back to Foucault’s heterotopia of crisis (1984), schools open the opportunity to gather whole cohorts within their halls, passing large swaths of childhood removed from communities and families, before eventually crossing the threshold of this crisis and rejoining society as a whole, at least for a time. It's this sort of curated, temporary collection that the participants highlighted across their sorts. But then what exactly marks the paradigm of gathering? How ought schools bring people together? When? And in what form? Above all, participants description of figured worlds, notably the “default classroom” and the necessity of augmenting the default to create places of learning, in accord with the general low preference of familiar spaces, seem to demonstrate a real desire for something new and different. These young teachers recognize that they already have to make changes to their classrooms so that they can function as they want them to, therefore willingness to try something new altogether is high. Something new, and, I think, loud. As spaces of crises, schools are meant to unite those sharing an experience more than they are to isolate from a normative society. Schools ought to be spaces brimming with talk and laughter, with comparison and contact. Again and again, participants returned to the idea of grouping students. In one turn of phrase, Gray described putting desks together to make 147 pods by slamming them together. More than a literal description of how to move classroom furniture, I saw this as a model of upheaval. Whereas the default classroom seeks to isolate and freeze students, the ideal figured world of a learning space brings students into one another's orbit in such a trajectory that they cannot help but see their lived experiences smash into one another, revealing all the commonalities and differences that have brought them to a shared moment. A great deal of time was devoted to describing the awkwardness of perpendicularity when it comes to human interactions. I think schools as they so often exist are largely perpendicular spaces. They are literally built of right angle after right angle, boxes, perfectly squared, all lined up for inspection. But they also tend to promote relationships of perpendicularity. Individuals, be they student or teacher, intersect ever so briefly in the moment of a common goal before pressing on, often with altogether dissimilar trajectories, never to retrace their path, never again likely to share space. Imagine then, space designed to reject perpendicular geometries and relationships. One created with the intent of multiplying intersections, stretching their intervals, and perhaps altering trajectories altogether. Perhaps one way that this might be accomplished is in an attempt to spatially enact more and varied resonances within the built worlds of schools. What might the sorting experience have been like if each participant had been able to identify transformative resonant spaces, like Grays Jordanian steps, across the images? What might schools be like if instead of other schools they were reminiscent in their design of temples, plazas, marketplaces, etc.? Here I think of a place like the National Mall in Washington DC, wherein the space of an hour’s walk one can stumble across neo-classical structures inspired by the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians just a stone’s throw from Romanesque towers and cathedrals evocative of the British Gothic Revival, all laid out across a very Parisian plane. Such a place attempts to communicate some narrative of spacetime and who the people represented there and then might be, have been, and could yet become. 148 What if we were to abandon the classroom altogether? Amber described the discomfort of conceptualizing a learning space without desks, but what of the possibility in removing students from the typical classroom to return to the communities so sorely absent? What if public spaces were to become the school? What sort of resonances of learning might this hold later in life? In these questions I take an invitation to design around the discourse of schools as spaces of gathering. Looking ahead to Chapter 8, I detail the formation of Juan Diego Middle School, a theoretical architecture situated upon the site of my first teaching position. In the work of JDMS I seek to design a place that draws upon the stories told here by five teachers. I look to the work of gatherers natural, spiritual, artistic, to set out a small school that might in its own presence serve teachers (and, always, students) to facilitate talk, create dwellings, and spark imaginings of places beyond the memory of other schools. 149 III. ARCHI-TEXTS37 Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. —Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium 37 How might these discourses, both the paradigmatic and the local, be otherwise emplaced? 150 Having built out both the larger discursive con-texts and more local discursive narratives of individual pre-texts, the project turns now to archi-texts, translating linguistic discourse into the material languages of architecture. These include the use of materials, forms, and spatial relationships. Archi-texts encompass the visual and sensory experience of the designed environment and its relationship to the human body. Archi-text is both a means of expressing the pre-text and a way of engaging with the con-text. It is through the Archi-text that the building communicates its meaning and purpose to the user. Furthermore, it is likely that in the expression of archi-texts, the designer becomes present in the work. Whereas con-texts and pre-texts exist independently, or, as in the case of this project, are elicited by the designer, it is in the archi-texts that compositional agency and decision-making take to front. The designer does not merely organize discourses into a space according to extant codes and proportions, rather, they offer their own style, perspectives, and hopes for a space, weaving their own story into the ever-coalescing discourse of the site. Following the con-textual foundation of discursive paradigms, then further conceptualizing the particularities of schools as sites of security, learning, and teaching through pre-textual analysis, the following chapters attempt to elaborate the types of spaces that might demonstrate these complex intersections of discourse in material form. Each chapter offers a newly imagined educational site, oriented toward one particular pre-text for the sake of understanding a sort of spatial (D)iscourse, one particular attempt of emplacing discourses materially. Each site is presented as a series of arts-oriented diagrams and figures. 151 CHAPTER 6. LAPIERRE-CRUZ SANCTUARY Panopticon. Cotyledon. Helm’s Deep. Cibeles Font. Wixom, Michigan FIGURE 18. THE EYE 152 FIGURE 19. SURVEILLANCE 153 FIGURE 20. EXTANT SITE PLAN 154 FIGURE 21. DIS/CONTINUOUS GENALOGY 155 FIGURE 22. COMPOSITES 156 FIGURE 23. FLOOR SEQUENCE 157 FIGURE 24. REVISED SITE PLAN 158 FIGURE 25. TERRITORIALITY 159 FIGURE 26. ACCESS CONTROL 160 FIGURE 27. INT. ROTUNDA 161 FIGURE 28. LIFT DIAGRAM 162 FIGURE 29. AUDITORIA PERSPECTIVES 163 CHAPTER 7. DESCENT PARK Palais Garnier. Walden. Shibe. Mortuary Temple of Ramses III. San Antonio, Texas FIGURE 30. CANOPY 164 FIGURE 31. THE STAGE AS IS 165 FIGURE 32. DIS/CONTINUOUS GENEALOGY 166 FIGURE 33. COMPOSITE 167 FIGURE 34. BACKSTAGE WARREN 168 FIGURE 35. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE 169 FIGURE 36. GATHERING OAK 170 FIGURE 37. THE WOODS 171 FIGURE 38. A LAKE AMID TREES 172 FIGURE 39. LIGHT FROM THE OVERSTORY 173 FIGURE 40. NARROW THRESHOLDS 174 FIGURE 41. THE FIELD 175 FIGURE 42. A PLACE FOR PLAY 176 FIGURE 43. THE PARK IN FULL 177 FIGURE 44. THE FOLD 82 83 The learner departs the Field to reenter the world anew. 82 “The infinite fold separates, or passes between matter and the soul, the facade and the sealed room, the interior and the exterior. For the line of inflection is a virtuality ceaselessly differentiating itself: actualized in the soul it is realized in its own way in matter.” (Deleuze & Strauss, 1991, p. 242) 83 “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” (Carroll, 2015, p. 39) 178 CHAPTER 8. JUAN DIEGO MIDDLE SCHOOL Honeycomb. Oculus. Horseshoe. Brownsville, Texas FIGURE 45. HIVE 179 FIGURE 46. LITTLE BLUE SCHOOL 180 FIGURE 47. ON THE BORDER BY THE SEA 181 FIGURE 48. RAMPS 182 FIGURE 49. DIS/CONTINUOUS GENEALOGY 183 FIGURE 50. ORIGINS 184 FIGURE 51. BUILDING UP THE VESSEL 185 FIGURE 52. REVISED SITE PLAN 186 FIGURE 53. EMBRACE 187 FIGURE 54. A COLUMN OF LIGHT 188 FIGURE 55. STACKS OF EXPERIENCE 189 FIGURE 56. HARK 190 FIGURE 57. SIGHT LINES 191 FIGURE 58. ACCUMULATION 192 IV. SUB-TEXTS38 I'm inclined while watching the turtle to turn it over and study its underbelly. From this unnatural position I see how this platonically solid creature makes its way through the world. —Dweller by the dark stream (Douglas Darden), Condemned Building 38 How, as a result of the act of emplacing discourses, might we otherwise understand the place of schools, reconceptualize their built environments, and retell their stories? 193 Having conceptualized paradigmatic con-texts, elicited and analyzed guiding pre-texts, and composed (D)iscursive archi-texts, Darden’s final conceptual text is that of the sub-text. Referring to the hidden or underlying meanings of the built world, this text serves to examine the psychological, emotional, or spiritual associations that it evokes. Sub-text is often unconscious or unspoken, but it plays a powerful role in shaping our experience of place. It is the layer of meaning that is discovered over time, as we interact with the design and interpret its form and function in relation to our own experiences and perceptions. 194 CHAPTER 9. THE UNDERBELLY Douglas Darden argued that the built world should not only serve functional purposes but should also communicate meaning and symbolism to its users. The con-texts, pre-texts, and archi- texts that I've offered to this point have sought to do just that. The means of historically embedding power and curricula into schools were explored through paradigmatic discourses. In methodologically elicited stories of security, learning, and teaching, I tugged at threads of meaning and symbolism according to the experiences of others. And I sought to infuse these experiences with my own, as well as the distant texts of theorists and authors, through the work of design. Importantly though, Darden conceptualized each design as an allegory that might challenge its own formational narratives and discourses. In Condemned Building (1993, p. 9), Darden wields the metaphor of the plow to make sense of sub-texts; as the outcome of design overturns and subverts the very meaning intended. He theorizes this not as a destructive act but one of cultivation and heightened potential. In the prologue to this piece, I described Darden’s Oxygen House as a structure refigured around dwelling toward death rather than life. By reimagining the sub-text of one's home, Darden effectively changed the meaning and use of the place. Certainly, Oxygen House functions differently than many, but it also fully realizes its own goals in each moment of its narrative existence. The house, designed remembering humans as a fleeting and frail species, cannot fail Burnden Abraham. But the success of this subversion begs the question of what unexpected lessons we might learn from other sorts of places, and for the sake of this work, what we have already unearthed about schools. Ultimately, this dissertation revolves around the project of examining design and composition as a means of analyzing discourse and experience through the process of emplacing them. In telling and re-telling the stories of schools through histories, inquiry, and design, a particular reimagination is made possible. As paradigmatic grammars and conventions fall aside, the plow of this process finds footing and cleaves across that which seemed so familiar. Across pre-texts and archi-texts, I found 195 key subversions in the narratives of schools as places of security, learning as a performance of knowledge, and the role of teachers as ordering monitors. The School Saves. We Surrender to the School. Across the centuries, schools have been given the tall task of saving lives. Stemming from the paradigms of containment and indoctrination, schools began largely as a means of correcting all that was thought to keep people from eternal life—be it one’s otherness or race or origin or political ideology or adoption of their family’s ways of being or even their misunderstanding of a text. On and on, transforming with the paradigms of control and effect, schools stood to save people from inactivity and scarcity by preparing them for their particular place in the workforce and opening pathways to the American dream. Schools have served to shelter communities from the effects of natural disasters and host triage for their lingering consequence. Schools are to save folks from a revolving carousel of behaviors deemed unacceptable or risky, and to save a nation at risk of irrelevance and antiquity. Then the authors of the Report of the National School Shield Task Force asked schools to save children from the violence that they themselves cannot seem to help but attract. In all of these salvific requests the school becomes a powerful agent of social change, holding authority over (largely passive and incapable) humans through a pervasive, if temporary, curriculum of insecurity and fear. Those within the space are controlled primarily by their hope to escape some negative outcome: hell, monarchal tyranny, economic irrelevance, bodily harm. It is only in subscribing to the grammars and curricula embedded within the school that one can escape these outcomes. So it has been for centuries—so has our dependence grown. In this reliance upon schools and the salves they offer, we pay the price of subscription, submitting and empowering them to reconceptualize people within their halls and near their bounds. Children, for a brief while students in their charge, then become mere visitors—outsiders, either saved or beyond the task. With so much solemn dependence, revered as symbols of hope, opportunity, and 196 progress, a sort of hero-worship of schools is deeply ingrained in American culture. Schools that yield high-achieving students are held in high esteem, given blue ribbons and prestigious titles, while even those that don’t are often praised for their dedication to the mission, their impact on the lives of students and communities, in a word, for the salvation they offer. Unto these heroes we are expected to surrender. We are asked to trust them as a force for good and allow them to move us. So often we grant them uncritical control of body, mind, and becoming. Those who do not are labelled deviant, troublemaker, pest. Throughout Chapters 3 and 6 ring the sub-text of the new material (Barad, 2003), as the presence of schools establish and contribute their agency in a powerful interaction with humankind. The authors of the Report position the material world of the school as a place that is fundamentally imposing and controlling of others. I remarked upon the strangeness with which this move is carried out, as the authors conversely attempt to justify the firearm as a wholly passive device, even as it activates and empowers its users. The work of the Report at large calls to mind a sort of cyclical surrender to the material, as the firearm and the walls of a school take turns mastering the humans who attempt to use them, locked in a constant back-and-forth of security and liberty. Perhaps most important in this sub-text is the attention that it begs. In an American culture that is more and more consumed and consuming, there's a great deal of importance in the aspects of the material world to which we as humans yield our agency and power. Legislatively, economically, and so it seems, even in presence of mind, we enable the material to stand in for human relationships and experiences. Gun rights are protected fiercely despite the most straightforward understanding of the harm that they inflict, the undeniable fact that they are devices designed against human life. The report, in the interest of this protection, asks schools to do something similar, as they operate as impediments and barriers to their users. What might a truly human iteration of this project exhibit? A nation in which safety and security can be upheld through genuine education, trust, care, and presence? 197 A school tasked with opening pathways rather than foreclosing opportunities? The answers to such questions are not the point of this project, but they become all the more urgent in the experience that can be imagined in such a place as the school oriented toward the discourse of absolute security. We learn so as to escape our own obliviousness. We escape into learning unseen. Born unaware of the workings of the world and lacking the ability to fully comprehend its complexities, learning is often postured as a temporal escape from our obliviousness by expanding our knowledge, broadening our perspectives, and challenging our assumptions. It allows us to move beyond our own limited experiences and biases, to better understand the world and those with whom we share it. Existing largely in the same set of paradigms as schools as salvific spaces, learning is conceptualized as an upward trajectory through particular explicit curricula, a measured movement from the perils and hurts of ignorance to the relief of demonstrable knowing. To this end, schools themselves so frequently behave as a series of intricate stages upon which one might perform this demonstration. Sequences of classrooms, all lined up, just like the desks and chairs held within; so many tiny auditoriums in which the most learned perform their knowledge for those less so, that they might then take up parts in the act. If all the world's a stage, then the school is just the first of many, upon which one might give their earliest performances. Upon a successful recital, one can move along the sequence, upward and upward to the point of matriculation, and with it a trust towards self- definition and economic success. But the ten participants with whom I discussed the craft of learning seemed to reframe this notion. Instead of escaping emptiness into a life of fulfillment by performing their knowledge, they sought rather to escape the performance altogether. One by one they slipped away across hidden thresholds as though between tightly hung jackets, through entwined pine boughs and the interlacing passages of a rabbit’s warren. Reversing path and leaving behind the world of what is known, they 198 move instead toward the abyss, to reside for a while among that which is different, new, a bit unnerving. On this journey there are certainly others present, but they are not present as spectators or competitors but companions. There is a sort of bumping along together, shoulder to shoulder, at least for a moment, until paths lead in different directions. Each pursues their own learning in their own time, and significance is not something that can be scripted or timed, but occurs simply in the act of meandering along. Certain expected grammars of learning fall away. Teachers are present in the encounter, but they are seldom authorized as such by an institution. Rather they are known in hindsight for the teaching that they have done. The experience of learning cuts across classes and cohorts and content areas alike. The expectation of measurement falls away as there is no norm with which to compare. Like one shuffling across the frozen surface of a pond hours after it has been skated upon, tracing the intercrossing paths becomes a project of futility, but in pausing to recognize the experience had, giving up prediction for the sake celebration, one can embrace the beauty of those scarred and refrozen channels. In walking along with these learners and composing the myriad paths of Descent Park, the sub-text of an anonymous and experimental brand of learning was clear. Such a sub-text throws into question the discourses of assessment and management that so greatly preoccupy the world of teacher preparation. I can’t help but think of Dewey and the idea of education not as a process of isolating and solving for variables, but as an interaction of forces upon each individual’s trajectory (1902). Such a mindset asks for a step taken back, giving attention not to the minutiae of explicit, formal curriculum and individual evidence of uptake, but to the larger dynamisms and flows of interest and engagement across a community of learners. A school operating on such assumptions would necessarily be one of attention, attunement, and revision; seeking always to center its users rather than solve them. 199 Teachers are ringleaders, emcees, and conductors. Teachers are gallerists. In large part thanks to Hollywood’s characterizations of teachers (always in what feel like 5- minute classes), an archetypal lecturer holds center stage. While perhaps underpaid and underappreciated, this figure certainly demonstrates the responsibility of standing before their class. Even poor examples of pedagogues are always found front-and-center, calling on students, granting ethos to ideas, and exhuming authority of the institution. They become conductors, quick to command the performances of those around them. Paradigmatically, teachers are lost within the material world of the school itself, living grammars of the discourse and design. Proprietors of the doctrine to be passed on, enforcers of a model behavior, liaisons to a community of adults beyond, and means to the end of optimal effect. They become ringleaders, descriptive forecasters of the show to come. But they are fleeting. They become emcees pulling in the disengaged for one more set. Certainly we see vast numbers of educators pushed from the profession before their prime, but on a smaller scale there is some wisdom to these five-minute snippets of class portrayed in sitcoms and feature films, as it seems so often that teachers are asked to hold the attention of an individual for but a little while each day, a flicker of content with the hope of sustained later attention. They become comedy barkers, hoping that with just enough engagement they might be asked to put forth a bit of their own passions. The teachers that I spoke with and designed around communicated a very different sort of story, reading classrooms always for the type of teacher that they might find, might themselves become there. Consistently they hoped to find one who evinced longevity, who had achieved the status of fixture. They looked for those whose students would come back to visit them behind the same desk year after year; those who would pick up a lost knickknack and grant it harbor until the return of its owner, those who would slowly move their full self into the classroom, therein to dwell. Such an educator would seem to loom large, and like those archetypes, command a view in close up. Such is not the case. The participants looked for teachers who faded within their own 200 classroom, who they could imagine becoming a participant alongside their students, as present in the texts and things with which they filled the room as any. Such teachers become gallerists of tiny museums, curating the accumulation of different ways of being and seeing the world. In observing the student-as-gallery-walker, they stand by, always with a palpable nearness, but never attempting to overshadow the pieces on display. With the invitation of a tentative question or inquisitive look these teachers can spring to action with new details to examine, connections to make, and other works to outline a journey. They care for knowledges, preserve them, are expert in them, but recognize the smallness of their collection. As imagined by the participants in Chapter 5, such teachers adapt strangely to the paradigmatic discourses. They're required to measure the gallery walkers and take stock of just how well the experience moved them. They must include sponsored pieces, unfamiliar and ill-fitting the curation. They must always follow the script and never forget that their gallery is the preeminent, the most complete, the one worth seeing. In so many ways, what the participants revealed was not so much a sub-text of subversion as regression. Considering the histories that have shaped the discourses outlined in Chapter 2, the notion of schools as places that open out to the world and allow communities to share in teaching and learning has largely come into question. Between the difficulty of maintaining a strict schedule across an academic year, instructing, assessing, and instructing again across the standards of a formal curricula, and the need to ensure safety and security, schools as windows to community have largely been shut. When imagining Juan Diego Middle School, I continuously found myself feeling as though this place was not all that strange to the site upon which I designed its revision. That school where I began my teaching career was open to the idea of the teacher as gallerist and did many of the things that I hoped my own design would achieve. It wrapped its arms around its students and gathered in ideas, texts, and experiences through which to wander. Certainly, some of the design vernaculars 201 required revision, but the curricular grammars were largely familiar. Teachers in the original JDMS hold that power to curate, and eventually dwell as fixtures of the place itself. The freedom of a slow knowing of one’s students is encouraged, as teachers work again and again with their classes, granting time to understand their experiences and desires. In designing towards a school like this one there is a certain yearning to go back. For me, very immediately, to a school like the one in which I learned to teach, but societally to one that gives greater attention to the paradigm of community, and with it patience, trust, and possibility. LAST WORDS: AN EPILOGUE Beyond the project of this dissertation in exploring design and composition as means of analysis, there's a clear implication for educators. To this point I've already said so much, and I fear that in its brevity and tardiness this section might be lost, but beyond implication I implore: Educators, open your sensitivities to the built worlds of your own schools. Explore the material grammars, the design, the local and paradigmatic discourses that are there speaking to, through, and about you, your students, and your communities. Ask what is being said and how you might join in the conversation. Consider what might otherwise be said and how, even amidst bureaucratic and physical obstacles, you might enact small shifts. Shifts in the enactment of security protocols to be more humanizing and less imposing, to create learning environments that respect students’ desire to try and fail without failing, to build spaces of curation wherein you as an educator might dwell. These small shifts can make a big difference to the experience of a place, to the experience of schooling, and to the experience of life lived in the built world of schools. Even in this imploration there is a line of research to be done, stretching forth to the horizon. I have no doubt that I'll continue on in the attempt to build out this methodology, to frame studies with the process of design, even if only for my own edification and enjoyment. I want to better understand the ways that people sort discourses from the material world on their own, to examine 202 geosemiotic literacies as they are practiced and as they might be taught. I even think I would enjoy, despite the mental turmoil that it often caused in the past year, examining the ways that CPTED is used in the current design of schools throughout the United States, and the effect that such architectures have on their users, both teachers and students alike. More immediately, understanding where I'm headed next year—a small university that is massively emphatic of teaching—I leave this project with an epiphany. One morning, feeling rather unsure of what this was all meant to do or become, I woke with a start, suddenly understanding this piece as the outline of course to be taught. Reframing the various parts as inquiries into the individual experience, each pre-text becomes a project plumbing the discourses of one’s school community, students, and inhabited architectures, this work gives ground to the individual educator as they explore their own teaching through its emplacement. Ultimately, I think this is what I'm best at, serving as a attendant to an individual’s learning, helping them to build out the metaphors and grammars that can serve as entry to a bit of unlearning and reimagination. All of these words will likely require careful reconsideration in order to enter the conversation at a level any larger than that, but for now I'm pleased with how far it has come. In the end, I feel as if this piece, as a sort of conclusionary act has taken me through the woods, but where I expected to emerge upon a place to stop and rest I found a road headed West, into the vast wilderness and questions yet unasked.39 39 “You make too big a deal about this...You don't have to save the world... What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple years? (Powers, 2019, p. 235) 203 REFERENCES Abbas, M. Y., & Othman, M. (2010). Social behavior of preschool children in relation to physical spatial definition. 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