Spatial Theories of Education

Policy and Geography Matters

Kalervo N. Gulson, Colin Symes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134139613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This collection of original work, within the sociology of education, draws on the 'spatial turn' in contemporary social theory.

The premise of this book is that drawing on theories of space allows for a more sophisticated understanding of the competing rationalities underlying educational policy change, social inequality and cultural practices. The contributors work a spatial dimension into the consideration of educational phenomena and illustrate its explanatory potential in a range of domains: urban renewal, globalisation, race, markets and school choice, suburbanisation, regional and rural settings, and youth and student culture.

1 Knowing one’s place

Educational theory, policy, and the spatial turn

Kalervo N. Gulson and Colin Symes

geography…now looks set to become the sexiest academic subject of all.

(Eagleton 1997)

Educational theory moves by fits and starts, and often takes its developmental cues from other disciplines. It is not that educationalists are incapable of generating original thought that might lead to application elsewhere in the disciplinary spectrum, but more that they tend to be the followers of broad epistemological trends or ‘turns’ rather than their creators. In the latter parts of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of ‘space’ in social theory, a resurgence, or ‘turn’, that education has yet to address, at least in any concerted way. The word ‘concerted’ suggests that the turn might have begun to occur, albeit in isolated pockets, in and around education, and that there are already incipient theories of space pertaining to matters educational that demand wider attention and systematic analysis. And one of the objectives of this chapter, and book, is to demonstrate that this indeed is the case: that ‘space’ is luxuriant with ideas, concepts, and theories, which, if employed, could result in education taking a new turn. As such the conceptual framework for this book is necessarily an eclectic one that exemplifies the diverse and contested notions of space and their application in education. Like any text this book excludes and includes, and while we have been at pains not to advocate one position, many of the chapters do focus on a social constructivist view of space, and, in some ways, there is a reliance on the work of the contemporary spatial ‘canon’ (C. Taylor, personal communication)—composing the work of Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja.

The contributors to this book recognize that spatial theories are not restricted to geography, their traditional ‘home’, but travel through and between social theory and are ‘implicated in myriad topographies of power and knowledge’ (Gregory 1994: 11). As its title suggests this book is concerned with theory, with the adoption of ‘theory’ as possibility, working to unsettle, to destabilize, to shift assumptions in educational policy studies. The deployment of theory by the authors in this collection rests comfortably with what Stephen Ball calls the ‘necessity and violence of theory’ (Ball 2006). This is also congruent with the central premise of this book: that drawing on theories of space contributes in significant and important ways to subtle and more sophisticated understandings of the competing rationalities underlying educational policy change, social inequality, and cultural practices. Therefore, examining education policy from a spatial perspective is not about creating ‘new’ problems as such, but rather it is about providing explanatory frameworks that, perhaps, disrupt understandings in, and posit new possibilities for, ‘mainstream’ education policy studies.

The immediate and initial possibilities of this can be seen in terms of the everyday language of space. This chapter’s title is not atypical of how the language of space, perhaps because it is linked so palpably to experience, is imbued with the sense of inclusion and exclusion as individuals and groups move through, in, and out of communities. There is a sense that knowing one’s place has a powerful sociological resonance; stories and narratives mediate the way space is apprehended and comprehended. Because spatial manoeuvre is such a key part of quotidian life, much of our vocabulary is concerned with specifying the fundamental ordinates of space, with communicating information about position, direction, and movement. Words such as ‘here’ and ‘there’ are critical to establishing proximity and immediacy, and in conjunction with modifiers such as ‘closer’, ‘further’, and ‘nearer’ provide a way of calibrating and mapping the spatial experience. Space also provides metaphors for understanding the nature of society and social experience (see Bourdieu 1999).

The spatial turn tends to emphasize the transient and social nature of space, that space is a construct not a given. Here it is usual to contrast space with place, the more nominal sense of space. For example, places generally have names; they figure on maps, have boundaries and parameters—there is an element of fixity pertaining to them. Place lends itself to more ‘objective’, scientific accounts of space—even though what constitutes a place is itself a construct, subject to myriad judgements as to where its boundaries and populations begin and end (for debates on space and place see Agnew 2005; Casey 1996; Harvey 1993; Massey 1993b). Space is more generic, more amorphous and porous, hard to pin down. It is more subjective, more quotidian—not the object of parenthesizing and naming in quite the same way place is. The fact that it is usual to refer to spatial practices is also revealing: places do not have practices in quite the same way. Space in this sense is more of a verb than a noun.

However, there are also problems with these understandings that we recognize, and we have attempted to create a cautious, and careful, collection that is attendant to Gregory’s call for us to ‘interrogate…“common-sense” understandings’ (1994: 12). For in the early 1990s, geographers Neil Smith and Cindi Katz (1993) warned, pace Gregory, of the dangers of the proliferation of spatial discourses in the social sciences. They suggested that while ‘space’ and ‘place’ had escaped their traditional disciplinary confines, something we will take up below, the histories of scholarship and significant debates about their salient meanings had been largely left behind when they migrated; they had effectively been lost in translation. Apropos this loss, Smith and Katz (1993) argue that the ideas of space and place are more often used by social scientists as metaphors, rather than as complex theorizations of material and symbolic life. A spatial metaphor ‘can only suggest and stimulate further thought: it cannot provide an answer. But, too often, it is assumed that this is what it does’ (Thrift and Whatmore 2004: 8).

While these critiques might be simply dismissed as the backlash of a field of study losing its semantic monopoly, and as a modernist ploy to fix meaning (P. Thomson, personal communication, 2006), the proposition that there might be important debates and traditions of theorizing that are of potential interest to social science researchers in general, cannot be so easily put aside. Thus, this book takes the position that space and place are integral, yet under-examined and under-theorized, components of policy studies, development and critique.

In this chapter we briefly set out the key ‘trajectories’ of space in social theory. We also examine what happens when spatial theories ‘escape’ traditional disciplinary confines and take on, using Lefebvre’s term, ‘transdisciplinary’ elements. As Soja defines it ‘transdisciplinarity’ is ‘not being the privileged turf of such specialized fields as History, Sociology, and Geography, but spanning all interpretive perspectives’ (Soja 1996: 6). Importantly, this raises the issue as to what extent education is education any longer when it takes up the spatial dimensions of its field? The contributors to this book, while not wrestling directly with this question, are nonetheless expanding the field of education into new territory, an expansion which the last part of the chapter ‘maps’.

FROM EUCLID TO SOJA

It is of note that while educational history is a long established field, with a celebrated body of literature and scholarship that has contributed to understanding the way educational systems have developed, educational geography—its spatial equivalent—remains relatively underdeveloped and ‘unnamed’ though a few have identified themselves as practising it (e.g. Marsden 1977, 1987).¹ The absence of a well-defined field devoted to examining the ‘spatial’ questions and dimensions of education may be due to a long tradition of history assuming an ascendancy over geography in social theory. At the core of this tendency is the issue of mutability, that time is more amenable to change, specifically political change, than space, which was held to be incorrigible and resistant to transformation. Nonetheless, as Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (2000) argue, as do others such as Massey (1993a):

space is exceedingly hard to write about shorn of its relation to time. Though part of the reason for the turn to space in many disciplines has been a drive to move away from the tyrannies of historicism and developmentalism, the fact remains that space without time is as improbable as time without space. (Crang and Thrift 2000: 1)

Arguably, Platonist tendencies evident in the scientific and mathematical conceptualization of space held back the appreciation of space in social terms. The notion of a positivist ‘spatial science,’ particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, looked to the development of theory on the basis of statistical analysis; a ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography premised on the ideas of ‘abstract space’ that ‘conceive[s] of space as a surface on which the relationships between (measurable) things were played out’ (Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine 2004: 4). In a similar vein Massey (1992, 1994) has noted how ‘space’ in particular was very often written about as if it were an empty vessel within which action took place, or as an effect of social, political, and economic relations. These codifications were characterized by abstractionist impulses that necessitated space being uprooted from its contexts and which, arguably, were not useful for the humanities and social sciences where it is what individuals and societies do with space that ‘counts’. Quantitative approaches have also been criticised for not engaging with other perspectives such as feminist geography (e.g. Falconer Al-Hindi 2001). Nonetheless, some have argued against an either/or approach to space, for as Trevor Barnes and Matthew Hannah (2001) contend, in relation to statistics: ‘how and why they are constructed, by whom and about whom, how they are used and mobilised, and to what ends and for whose interests, are critical social scientific questions for critical social scientists’ (pp. 379–80).

Indeed, there developed the view that mono-disciplinary approaches to space, be they of a sociological, historical, or geographical kind, might be insufficient and that a ‘transdisciplinary perspective’ might provide more insights. Urban sociologists and geographers interested in the connection between space and capitalism challenged the ‘quantitative revolution’ because it downplayed the political relationship between space and social relations. What is certainly a feature of these moves after the ‘quantitative revolution’ is the shift towards ‘space as process and in process (that is space and time combined in becoming)’ (Crang and Thrift 2000: 3, original emphasis).

In this book the use of space is mostly concerned with making sense of materiality—in many ways this ascribes to Crang and Thrift’s (2000) contention that despite different adoptions of space across a variety of disciplines, ‘in all disciplines, space is a representational strategy’ (p. 1). Yet this too has its problems. As Neil Smith writes:

More generally, a naïve social constructionism which, suspicious of materiality, treats space first and foremost as representational or conceptual, turns out to be paradoxically conservative; it fails to unearth conceptions of space that differ significantly from traditional Enlightenment treatments of space…which in many respects represented an elaboration and universalisation of the presumptions of Euclid’s geometry. (Smith 2004: 17)

Smith argues that it was Henri Lefebvre’s book La production l’espace (1974, translated into English as The Production of Space, in 1991)² that provided the opportunity to systematically address these problems. This work has proved enormously influential in the last decade or so and is crystallized around the idea that, in relation to capitalism, space is socially produced, engineered, and constructed, and that social relations are always constituted relative to space (Lefebvre 1991). Lefebvre is certainly a presence in this collection with many of the authors referring to his work on perceived, conceived, and lived space. Lefebvre’s contemporary interlocutor, Edward Soja, with his Lefebvrian inspired spatial trialectic of ‘spatiality, historicity, and sociality’ (see Soja 1996; Chapter 3) is also a key reference point for many of the chapters. Many of the contributors also work with post-modern and post-structural ideas in productive tension with neo-Marxism (M. Peters, personal communication). These authors are working with, and within, ‘lived space’ as a realm of the imagination and as an incitement of the possible.

PARADIGMS AND GENEALOGIES OF THE SPATIAL TURN

In many ways the spatial trajectories in education have mirrored those of other disciplines in borrowing, appropriating, and employing the spatial theories of geography. We can see that much of the existing literature using, or referring to, space is ‘transdisciplinary’, encompassing such fields as art history and economics. Thrift and Whatmore (2004) assert that ‘whereas culture has been a shared currency that has kept geographers in conversation with others for a long time now, it is only more recently that space has begun to take on a similar iconic status, spinning out of geography through the intellectual curiosities and investments of many other disciplines’ (p. 2). The move towards drawing on these spatial ideas that have predominantly been played out in human (cultural and social) geography, is also part of, in terms of multiple trajectories of inquiry, what might be seen as a particularly post-modern exercise (e.g. Mourad 1997), one that, perhaps somewhat ironically, defies the modernist project of rigid classification and disciplinary policing.

So, for example, we can see some of these aspects in the particular instances of cultural geography and sociology of education. One of the key aspects of cultural geography has been its affinity with the ‘extra’ disciplinary—a resistance to being ‘disciplined’ in any strict sense (Thrift and Whatmore 2004). These endeavours draw on a number of ‘in-between’ disciplinary zones such as post-colonialism and feminist studies, which have also been a feature of recent sociology of education (see Ball 2004). Indeed, it is perhaps pertinent to see how ideas have taken flight within disciplines, as well as between them, with a number of special issues of journals in both education policy studies and human geography devoted to exploring theoretical contributions such as post-structuralism.³ In a sense what all the contributors in this book are doing is exploring the realms of possibility that follow from the blurring or jumping of boundaries. Joe Kincheloe (2001) claims that:

what we refer to as the traditional disciplines in the first decade of the 21st century are anything but fixed, uniform, and monolithic structures…. We occupy a scholarly world with faded disciplinary boundary lines. (Kincheloe 2001: 683, origianl emphasis)

Within the imbricated nature of the education ‘field’ certain approaches fall out of favour, only to come back into favour at some stage; history one moment, geography, when the moment is right, the next. These are more than shifts in ‘fashion’ and speak to a mutually constitutive relationship between objects of study and research approaches in explorations of educational policy processes and practices. Yet in exploring these theoretical ‘lines of flight’ in terms of disciplinary categories, in the sense, perhaps, of ‘lines of flight or of deterr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Knowing one’s place: Educational theory, policy, and the spatial turn
• 2 The spatial politics of educational privatization: Re-reading the US homeschooling movement
• 3 Mobilizing space discourses: Politics and educational policy change
• 4 Space, equity, and rural education: A ‘trialectical’ account
• 5 Geographical information systems (GIS) and school choice: The use of spatial research tools in studying educational policy
• 6 Disability, education, and space: Some critical reflections
• 7 Working the in/visible geographies of school exclusion
• 8 Warehousing young people in urban Canadian schools: Gender, peer rivalry, and spatial containment
• 9 Education and the spatialization of urban inequality: A case study of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010
• 10 On the right track: Railways and schools in late nineteenth century Sydney
• 11 Student mobility and the spatial production of cosmopolitan identities
• 12 Public–private partnerships, digital firms, and the production of a neoliberal education space at the European scale
• 13 Deparochializing the study of education: Globalization and the research imagination
• 14 Trade unions, strategic pedagogy and new spaces of engagement: Counter-knowledge economy insights from Columbia
• Contributors
• Index