When the classroom becomes infinite – utopia or reality?
Date / Time: 21 November 2014, 2–3pm
Venue: A&B Meeting Room (TC.2.27), Faculty of Education, University of Waikato
Eva Alerby and Susanne Westman
An ordinary day in an ordinary school, teachers and students are involved in different kinds of activities and relationships. This mix of activities and relationships are, among other things, influenced by the spatial formation of the school building and, in turn, influence the physical space—there is a mutual interplay between human beings and the place. Then, how can we understand and describe the relationship between the humans and places? Or more specifically, how can a learning place, such as a classroom, be understood?
A classroom in a school is often taken for granted; no one questions that a school building has classrooms. But taking something for granted can be a reason to return to the thing itself—the classroom. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we need to interrogate our presumptions through what he describes as hyper-reflection, a critical self-reflection that interrogates its own possibility.
In a traditional (Western) classroom, time, space, body and relations have often been—and still are—strictly regulated, and teaching and learning are often strictly controlled within the physical room. Another kind of 'classroom' is a learning place beyond the four walls of the physical room. We are going to open up for a discussion of learning places, beyond the boundaries of the physical classroom from a philosophical life-world approach, in accordance with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
ENQUIRIES: Please email Margaret Drummond
Eva Alerby
Eva Alerby is Professor of Education at the Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Alerby's works are mainly based on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the life-world. Her research interests are relations, identity and diversity in education, as well as philosophical and existential dimensions of education, e.g. time, place and silence.
Susanne Westman
Susanne Westman is Senior lecturer at the Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Westman has recently published a doctoral thesis in which she explores existential dimensions of teacher work in an era of changing educational policies. Theoretically, her study is based on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the life-world.