How built spaces influence practices of educators’ work: an examination through a practice lens

Abstract

In this era of the global pandemic of Covid 19, built spaces for educating have taken on a special significance. As this special issue was underway in 2021, much of our home country of Australia was living under conditions of hard lockdown as the Delta variant spread. Internationally, we saw similar conditions. Schools and universities operated virtually or at skeletal levels. Learning and teaching were undertaken in the home and the conditions that enabled and/or constrained teaching and learning practices changed markedly in a short space of time. There was a wistfulness for old certainties – buildings such as schools and universities took on special significance for their apparent reassuring solidity, shape and form which spoke of traditions of educating practices that had to be hastily remade. In this historical moment the arrangements that rendered possible these educating practices rather than those educating practices were laid bare. Nowhere was this more the case than in the relationship between built spaces and practices of educating. It is this relationship that this special issue explores. When we proposed this special issue of Studies in Continuing Education, it was pre-Covid. Our intended focus had been to dedicate this special edition to the relationships between changing workspaces and changing patterns of educators’ work and the subsequent implications for educators’ workplace learning. However, as our authors’ contributions reveal, the pandemic has not rendered such a focus obsolete. Instead, it has highlighted the importance of such an exploration and of different conceptual tools with which to carry out this analysis. Previous research into the built environment of universities in theGlobalNorthhas examined a range of trends characterised by an increasing corporatisation of academia. For instance, under the purported rationale of a greater cross-fertilisation of ideas, there has been a shift from academics occupying a single office to open plan [OP] and alternative workspaces (Baldry and Barnes 2012; Van Marrewijk and Van Den Ende 2018; Wilhoit Larson 2018). Yet there has been scant research into how such new, open and flexible workspaces enable and/or constrain practices of academic work, identity and relationships, and what may be the subsequent implications for academics’ learning and professional freedoms. Our special issue attends to these important concerns. What is clear from existing studies is that changes to academic workspaces instigate changes to the social, labour, identity, and learning practices of faculty. In turn, these transformations represent significant departures from traditional academic workspaces and the practices that they support (Van Marrewijk and Van Den Ende 2018; Wilhoit Larson 2018). Furthermore, they raise broader questions such as whether the move from a ‘room of one’s own’ has indeed facilitated a breakdown in academic silos and greater cross-fertilisation of ideas or instead led to a form of ‘call centre academia’ (Wolff 2015, para. 4). In contrast to the small number of studies on built space and professional learning in universities, there has been a sustained scholarly focus on the relationship between space, built environment and student learning in schools. Blackmore et al. (2011) suggest that place attachment and spatial identity is crucial in creating successful learning environments in new flexible spaces, and therefore the focus needs to be on the people in those spaces, not