The school, as a key organisational metaphor for education, consisting a of building with adjoining and isolated rooms along a corridor, where a group of children or young people perfectly aligned behind their desks listen, memorized and repeat the information transmitted by an adult in front of them, started to be challenged at the end of the 19th century. Taken into account that formal educational systems started to be developed in the middle of the 18th century and were not fully implemented until the 20th, we can speak of an inertially prevailing permanently questioned organisation. The progressive/new school movement, with representatives as Dewey, Montessori, Giner de los Ríos, Freinet, challenged the idea of the classroom as privileged place for learning, warning against its restrictiveness for the integral emotional, cognitive and social development of students. However, it has been and still is prevalent in most schools around the world. In this context, classroom ethnography tended to maintain a concentrated gaze on the teacher-students’ interactions. However, in the last years, the growing tendency to rearrange the classroom space and to open it up, to the extent the buildings’ architecture allows, and the need of understand how learning occurs, call for an expanded ethnographic gaze to “material devices, technologies, embodiments and spatialities of educational activity” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011, p. 710). In this paper, based on our experience gained from ethnographic studies about schools and classroom and learning cultures, we provide evidences for the need and the richness of this expanded ethnographic gaze. When the pedagogical model puts the focus on the learner, the classroom is rearranged and teachers lose their centrality (Sancho-Gil & Hernández-Hernández, 1985), we need to develop new analysis frameworks and consider the dimensions of the visible and invisible pedagogies (Bernstein, 1975). When we want to explore the whole learning experience of children at school, considering them as learning agents, and not only pupils, we have to expand the focus out of the classroom and identified all the spaces through which students transit throughout the school day (Hernández-Hernández, 2010; Sancho, et al., 2010). When we recognize that the only way to understand how young people learn, we have to take into account their learning experiences inside and outside school, so, we invited them to become researchers for being able to scan the set of learning milieus composing their learning lives (Miño-Puigcercós & Sancho-Gil, 2015; Domingo, Sánchez & Sancho, 2014).

Sancho-Gil & Hernández-Hernández, 1985, Bernstein, 1975, Hernández-Hernández, 2010; Sancho, et al., 2010, Miño-Puigcercós & Sancho-Gil, 2015; Domingo, Sánchez & Sancho, 2014.