Research Trends || Pedagogy
[N]early all of the conversations in composition studies involve place, space, and location, in one way or another. (Keller and Weisser 2007, 1)
As educational spaces begin to catch up to developments in pedagogy that move away from isolated learning styles to instead embrace collaborative and cooperative learning styles, many educators have contributed to developing a critical pedagogy of place. In an article in Educational Researcher, David Gruenwald (2003) argued that a critical pedagogy of place examines educational discourses and practices that relate to the “place-specific nexus between environment, culture, and education” (10). Critical place-based pedagogies ultimately connect relations of space, place, and pedagogy to have a direct impact on the communities students inhabit. This ongoing discussion of the connections of space, place, education, and human activity is important to promote, in part because such conversations provide a better understanding of the digital–pedagogical terrain in which we find ourselves in the twenty-first century. Indeed, twenty-first-century literacy practices and pedagogical considerations explicitly address the need to take space into consideration along with pedagogical best practices. As Walls et al. (2009) noted in “Hacking Spaces,” the goal for such conversations is to change “learning spaces from their static configurations—which typically promote a particular and limited type of interaction—to flexible, technology-friendly spaces that support a range of interaction types and encourage collaboration” (271).
The role of human activity in education is certainly not new, however. Early development and education researchers such as Lev Vygotsky (1962) asserted that human learning and development are intimately tied to human activity. In reviewing some of Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspectives on active learning, Mark Warschauer (1997) noted that “Vygotsky stressed that collaborative learning, either among students or between students and a teacher, is essential for assisting each student in advancing through his or her own zone of proximal development" (471). This is no less true today as we continue to develop and adjust our pedagogy to address the hybrid space/place of technology-rich learning environments where students take up new activities to collaborate, cooperate, and interact in the construction of knowledge. Walls et al. (2009) explained that as scholars, teachers, and administrators begin to come to terms with the relations of space, place, and pedagogy, “space is being situated in tandem with best practices in teaching, often resulting in the promotion of learner-centered, knowledge-centered, and community-centered learning” (271). For Ann Brown (1992), transforming educational environments of isolated work sites that employ banking model pedagogy means learning to develop communities of learning. Brown claimed that “to create a community of learners, we must set up a classroom ethos that differs from that found in traditional classrooms” (149). She explained that a community of learners involves active engagement in an “intentional learning classroom” in which students “are encouraged to engage in self-reflective learning and critical inquiry” (149).
The upshot of these theoretical underpinnings is, simply put, that instructional spaces matter. Space and place carry a host of issues from identity to power to human behavior, and the whole matrix of space and place have very specific and very important implications for pedagogical practices. These tenets were the guiding principles behind the proposal that follows.