School corridors and school yards, urban settings, alternative study programs and school girls’ fiction novels are diverse in character but can all be understood as transitory spaces and as possible unacknowledged in-between, temporary and often informal spaces of learning. Many of these transitory spaces can also be understood in terms of moving across different space(s) and open up the analysis of moving from one context to another, literally or figuratively. That is moving between different institutional as well as non-institutional settings, e.g. from the school yard to the classroom, from informal learning spaces of the rural world to the formal space of schooling or between fiction and reality in school girls’ worlds.

The proposed symposium will focus on transitory learning spaces, on how they can be conceptualized, on how they have been laid out, and not least, on processes which constitute these more or less temporary spaces of possible limbo? The symposium will also focus on the transitory, and to some extent non-solid character of space itself and how the conception, décor and use of specific spaces may change over time – be it school yards, school architecture or cityscapes. As it goes, this opens up to consider the more immaterial dimensions of educational spaces – themes of learning strategies and learning processes intertwined with (and sometimes sought prompted by) a specific – or more random - architecture. It also links to the relations between space and emotions and how spaces can be regarded and experienced as friendly, easy, forbidden obscure and/or dangerous.

Themes of school architecture as well as the light, the sounds and the smells of classrooms have already been explored to gain important insight into ideas of schooling and school life in a historical perspective. As such the notion of space is well-established within the European research field of educational history, and during the last decade it has been a frame for important methodological innovations (Burke et al. 2010; Lawn & Grosvenor 2005; Grosvenor et al. 1999). The idea of transitory learning spaces takes its outset in the increased interest of studying these hitherto overlooked and less treated spaces, but it can also be linked to a growing occupation with theoretical notions of process, movement and change that might push the very notion of space and how to study it into new realms. The proposed symposium on transitory (learning) spaces invites researchers to reflect on alterations in the way space has been studied and theorized and also asks whether the study of transitory spaces requires new methodological approaches to be developed.

Burke, Catherine, Cunningham, Peter & Grosvenor, Ian (2010): “Putting Education in its Place: Space, Place and Materialities in the History of Education”. In: History of Education 39, no. 6. Lawn, Martin & Grosvenor, Ian (eds.) 2005: Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines. Symposium Books. Grosvenor, Ian, Lawn, Martin & Rousmaniere, Kate (eds.) 1999: Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom. Peter Lang.