Re: Boundary object

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Tue, 28 Oct 1997 18:00:17 -0800

Teacher's mantra: "once you close the door to that classroom, you
can do whatever you want." I cannot begin to tell you how many times
I have heard this. There is a control-management paradox at play, between
the school, the curriculum, the teacher, and the kids - no teacher wants
to be "watched"...while she/he juggles the impossible task of teaching.
That's why teachers work alone. When the physical space prohibits that
privacy, the privacy is either created artifically, or by setting up
borders to delineate teacher's spaces. Teaching is impossible: doing the
impossible in any public forum, or with another teacher, is, in a word:
terrifying.

diane ("Just wait 'til you're a teacher: once that door is closed, you can do
whatever you want..." ah. It echoes still.)

At 10:51 AM 10/28/97, Stephen Eric Van Hoose wrote:
>Peter, you wrote:
>
>The first high school I taught in
>had an open classroom design which was justified in terms of how it would
>end restrictions on how we think about learning, disenclose our minds,
>promote open dialogue, etc. Yet teachers did their best to construct as
>many barriers as possible between their class and others. Administrators
>used the structure to keep tabs on teachers with "bad attitudes."
>
>
>With the new development of the open classroom school, why is it that all the
>teachers tried to construct as many barriers as possible to create for
>themselves "new rooms" ? My fiancee, an El. Ed. major at the College of
>Saint Rose, also mentioned something to me about how teachers created rooms
>of their own by putting up barriers and such. She shared with me a little
>fact that these schools were built around the ideas of team teaching, but
>yet, teachers did not want to be part of this method of teaching. Is this
>true? What are some of the underlying problems to this spatial arrangement of
>the open classroom? What are some of the current philosophies on education
>these days and where it might be heading in the future?
>
>--STephen Van Hoose

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca