"supporting cast"... or constraining cast... you mean the physical spaces
are generally taken as fixed and given, while you see them also as
construed in talk and re-constructed in action?
Yes, I should think that this is a variable: to what extent does a
particular activity system tolerate, encourage (prohibit or punish) moving
furniture around or re-casting spaces into arenas for diverse activities?
There is clearly a difference between the layout and sociospatial
affordances of your prototypical pre-school localities and your
prototypical lecture hall... at this point I always think of the work of my
colleague Dennis Beach, who made a point (among other points) in his
dissertation to show how the fixtures of the lecture hall facilitated the
job for science lecturers who acted as authoritative dispensers of solid
knowledge, while science lecturers whose modus operandi was to also
activate students had to work all the harder, among other things because
the room itself did not support other looking directions than bench to
lectern and fixed rows of seats made any movement of students from their
places awkward. I suspect there may be some sociospatial analysis in the
later volumes of Bernstein's "Class, code, control" -- Beach built a lot on
Bernstein, while B.B's theoretical building is one I have so fare not
oriented myself in (I know it only from the outside).
In the R&D or evaluation work I have been involved in concerning the use of
IT in education the spatial aspect is one that has constantly struck me as
interesting, although I haven't had the opportunity to _really_ sink my
teeth into it. I give it some attention in a section of a recent paper on
workplace-based distance education by video conference (it's on the Web:
http://cite.ped.gu.se/cite/earli/dyrk.html ) based on one of these
projects. In this case I found it so paradoxical that distance education
today in Sweden is trumpeted as a way to break up the one-way authority
structures of "the traditional classroom" (which was more or less echoed in
the funding application) while the conferencing arrangement as used in the
project -- with a teacher in one location and a group of students in
another -- rather reinforces the sociospatial asymmetry, when it is
altogether practically unfeasible for the teacher OR the students to set
foot in the dedicated space of the other. It isn't impossible to implement
a more egalitarian structure of communication, but you have to paddle much
harder.
In the paper I refer to:
Jones, Karen. and Kevin Williamson. 1979. Birth of the schoolroom. Ideology
and Consciousness, 6: 59-110.
=2E.. which I got from Valerie Walkerdine, who touches upon the matter a bit=
in:
VW (1984) Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: the
insertion of Piaget into early education. In Changing the Subject.
Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity, J. Henriques, W. Hollway,
C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine. London: Methuen.
Sigh-h... seems I always bring up the same few refs when this area is "on
the floor".
Eva