Following the precepts of a Newtonian worldview, and the Kantian separation of space and time as discrete schemas, we tend to see time as linear, directive, understandable in terms of cause and effect, and progressive. We account for it through accounts or narratives. Diachronic (temporal) analysis of schooling therefore tends to focus on studies of practices and their effects on individuals, as perceived or more objectively measured. On this account, the school’s physical environment is a more or less unchanging backdrop, the role of which is little considered. A synchronic (spatial) analysis will be much more limited, assuming space as fixed rather than interpreted, part of the mechanical structure of a Newtonian or Cartesian clockwork universe.

Subjectivity is held to be less crucial to understandings of space than of time. Thus post occupancy studies of newly built schools tend to focus on aspects such as acoustics or energy use and tend to eschew consideration of other effects of the environment on the ongoing experience of individual students or teachers, though they may consider issues such as person flow and space utilization. Even where a more holistic evaluation is attempted, the emphasis placed on the experiences of users is very limited and is couched in the language of needs and functions: it is assumed that the building causes certain experiential outcomes on its own account rather than being responsive to a range of dispositions. The building on this account is not regarded in a broader sense as a part of the life stories of its users. A strong Enlightenment legacy renders it difficult for Western students of, for example, schooling to move beyond linear conceptions of time and unchanging, impersonal conceptions of space in their accounts, and to accommodate the post-Einsteinian insight that space-time is one multi-dimensional schema.

This is not merely a theoretical issue. Its practical consequences include a collective failure adequately to address aspects of organizational life in which the spatial and the temporal intersect. The AHRC Design Matters? project, a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Roehampton, and FeildenCleggBradley architects, faces the challenge of developing a suitable analytical framework for understanding students’ and teachers’ experiences of schools that captures more than conventional post-occupancy evaluations.

A revised theoretical and analytical framework is therefore called for, that situates the subjective and intersubjective as ongoing aspects of processes that occur in interpreted contexts, involving the various deployment of thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, artefacts and other entities, such as flora and fauna, in which space, as distance and proximity, is understood in relation to conceptions of distance and proximity in personal and moral discourse, as manifested in the language and experience of attachment and detachment, or appropriation and alienation.

We draw on three semiotic resources. The first is biosemiotics (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1992; Maran, 2006) with its construals of signifying environment as Umwelt, mapped subjectively as Innenwelt. The second is Tarasti’s existential semiotics (Tarasti, 2001), with particular reference to the importance of negation and affirmation in self development. The third is Stables’ work on functional, cultural and critical literacies (e.g. 1998, 2001) in the context of schools as ‘imagined communities’ (Stables 2003/2009, following Anderson, 1983). Prior to this is a brief consideration of the argument of Juodinytė-Kuznetsova (2011), who, using a Greimassian framework, offers the most sophisticated attempt so far in the semiotic literature to develop an analytic framework for interactions in physical space.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Juodinyte-Kuznetsova, K. (2011) Architectural Space and Greimassian Semiotics. Societal Studies 3(4): 2029-2036. Maran, T. (2006). Where Do Your Borders Lie? Reflections on the Semiotical Ethics of Nature, in Gersdort, C. and Mayer, S. (eds.). Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies. Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, pp.455-476. Sebeok, T. A. and Umiker-Sebeok, J.(eds.) (1992). Biosemiotics. The Semiotic Web 1991. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Stables, A. (1998). Environmental Literacy: functional, cultural, critical. The case of the SCAA guidelines, Environmental Education Research 4/2: 155-164. Stables, A. (2003). School as Imagined Community in Discursive Space: a perspective on the school effectiveness debate, British Educational Research Journal 29/6, 895-902. Stables, A. (2009, first published 2003). School as Imagined Community in Discursive Space: a perspective on the school effectiveness debate, reprinted in Daniels, H., Lauder, H. and Porter, J. (eds.) Knowledge, Values and Educational Policy: a critical perspective. London: Routledge: 253-261. Stables, A. and Bishop, K. (2001). Weak and Strong Conceptions of Environmental Literacy: implications for environmental education, Environmental Education Research 7/1: 89-97. Tarasti, E. (2001). Semiotics of Landscape. In Existential Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chapter 10: 155-163.