Bound

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Mon, 27 Oct 1997 08:13:38 -0800

At 6:27 AM 10/27/97, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
>I'm trying to build on Eugene's comments (below)--often (or at least
>sometimes) a design is created in order to promote social ends. I'm
>thinking now of open classroom schools. 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." Students
>used the structure to wave to friends in other classes. Lots of boundary
>objects at work!

of course, the most difficult boundaries to work with are
the ideologicial boundaries, the private-space boundaries, the
historical spaces that shape our practice and organize our sense of personal
comfort or discomfort - asking folks like architects, for example,
to surrender their control of a design through negotiations

with community-users, involves certain privilege-boundaries, certain
intellectual boundaries (architects "know more" about design); where
as community users "know more" about their needs... space is most
certainly as ideological as it is physical and structural.

In many ways we are bound to these imagined boundaries more rigorously
than to structural boundaries.

diane,
....thinking of Frigga Haug, and her insistence that women need to need to
think about "where our chains chafe the most..." is a good example
of boundaries that cannot be negotiated.

"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