Assembling Spaces of Learning ‘In’ Museums and Schools: A Practice-Based Sociomaterial Perspective

Abstract

It is often assumed in the education literature that spaces are either neutral backdrops to teaching and learning or are themselves agents for change such that changed spaces will change practice. In this chapter, I offer a less deterministic and dichotomous account of the space practice relation. Drawing selectively from new materialist social inquiry and contemporary spatial theory and bringing empirical material collected within museums and schools to bear, the argument is made that space, like learning, is a practice—it is always in a process of being made. Practices of a range of kinds—affective, social and material—play a constitutive role in spaces of learning and account for support ..