Scholastic settings and spaces of Urban Education

Author(s):

Jeanette Böhme(presenting / submitting)David Brick(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2011

Network:

5. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

05 SES 08 A, Urban Education and Children and Youth at Risk (Ethnographic Research)

Paper Session

Time:

2011-09-15

08:30-10:00

Room:

JK 28/112,G, 58

Chair:

Sofia Marques da Silva

Contribution

Humans do not only keep on learning throughout their whole lives, equally the spaces, in which these learning processes take place, tend to become ever more multifarious – particularly in centers of urbanity. The Globalisation, mediatisation and informalization of educational spaces provokes the dissolution from the pedagogical sphere. Hence the status of schools as monopolies of education is increasingly questioned.

Our researches show how schools in Germany respond to that crisis: they attempt to isolate themselves from non-scholastic spaces of education, they insist on the attendance of the adolescents by restrictive means of compulsory education and within this locked spatial education, students are compelled to internalize an attitude towards learning that is embodied by the sedentary book culture. Within this sedentary book culture an attitude was favoured, which was characterized by the physical arrestment of movement. It was intended to channel the urge to move into an inner mental wandering.

When locking and placing of learners and their positioning in the school system has been a strategy of the sedentary book culture, then plenty of fundamental questions come into focus when speaking of Urban Education. For when we speak of urban systems nowadays, we mostly refer to post typographic cultures, which we for instance describe as networking-cultures. How do schools position themselves in the midst of this rapid cultural transition? We argue that schools devalue and reject effects of Urban Education.

In order to further confirm this thesis empirically, our research currently focuses on the progressing discrepancy between the postulated spatial practices in schools and the spatial acquisition of adolescents in urban scenes, who actively explore urban space. Focussing on this perspective, we investigate the skater scene paradigmatically. We aim at reconstructing the educational potential of their performative dealing with urban space. Those adolescents display a lot of competences in the continual alternation, rapid adjustment and last-minute respondence of varying spatial conditions.

Urban architectures in specific are interpreted in terms of their performative possibilities.

Strategies of spatial acquisition allow them to seize the metropolitan stimuli.

Precisely these practices can be seen as the outcome of Urban Education. They compete with the accomplishments of typographical education in schools. For now schools succeed by powerfully defending the maintenance of the sedentary book culture and by pathologising urban practices as hyperactivity. Thus the juvenile experts of urban space are sedated in order to manage placing them within the prevalent sedentary school culture. On behalf of those adolescents our main concern is it to generate perspectives on the organisation of spaces of learning and education in which the potentials of urban as well as typographic settings of education are realised and acknowledged.

Method

This paper aims to contribute to the establishment of a Spatial Research on School and Education. It is argued from the perspective of Genetic Structuralism. The conception of space is made accessible by undertaking a multiple-layer-analysis. • Spatial designs (particularly expressed within pictures) • Spaces of interaction (observed through gestures and speech) • Spaces that are manifested in topographic and architectonic orders. By acknowledging the materiality of space we therewith follow the Spatial Turn, a concept that increasingly attracts attention in the field of educational science in Germany. In terms of methodology our research targets an empirically founded theory construction and is an inductive one. Various methods focussing on image reconstruction, speech analysis and ethnography will be taken up. During the current research process the image reconstruction method by Max Imdahl has for instance been a method to effectively reconstruct scholastic space designs. Accompanied by the encoding program Maxqda the analysis of bigger data was made possible. While analyzing skater-specific grammar of scenic practices, observations were reasonably generalized into structuralist hypotheses. The unifying aspect of methodical design is the principally structuralist research interest which aims at reconstructing structures of meaning of juvenile educational processes within scholastic and non-scholastic settings.

Expected Outcomes

During the running DFG-project investigating „the relation of scholastic space and scholastic culture“ we observed irritating practices with regard to the scholastic setting in urban systems: it became apparent that German schools – in contrast to the actually by law postulated opening up in terms of interchanging with the district, economic cooperation partners or parents - are rather interested in isolating themselves. We interpret this orientation as the scholastic opposition towards the dissolution of pedagogy which is especially notable in urban centers. There Urban Education is coupled with informal learning within varying spaces. Via the study of the skater scene it becomes apparent that their members are competent to adopt urban space by intensely exploring the performative potentialities of urban architecture. Thereby they are capable of interpreting performative complex spatial structures in a short space of time. How do the schools deal with these urban experts? As representatives of the scholastic exterior they are excluded, their competences disregarded and their presence is only acquiesced if they let themselves be tranquilized, if necessary also with anaesthetics.

References

-Baumann, Zygmunt (2003): Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt a.M. -Böhme, Jeanette ((Hrsg.)) (2009): Schularchitektur im interdisziplinären Diskurs. Territorialisierungskrise und Gestaltungsperspektiven des schulischen Bildungsraums. Wiesbaden. -Böhme, Jeanette (2006a): Schule am Ende der Buchkultur. Bad Heilbrunn -Böhme, Jeanette (2006b): Machtformationen medienkultureller Bildungsarchitekturen: Aura & Charismatisierung - Kopie & Standardisierung - Code & Regulierung. In: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik. Themenheft zum DGfE-Kongress »Bildung-Macht-Gesellschaft«, Heft 1, S. 27-35 -Böhme, Jeanette/Brick, David (2010): Urbane Kompetenz = Hyperaktivität? Nomadische Raumpraktiken und schulische Raumordnungen. In: Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, Heft 4, S. ??? -Böhme, Jeanette/Herrmann, Ina (2011): Schule als pädagogischer Machtraum. Typologie schulischer Raumentwürfe. Wiesbaden -Böhme, Jeanette (2005): E-Learning und der buchkulturelle Widerstand gegen eine Entschulung der Gesellschaft. In: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Heft 1, S. 30-44 -Boettner, Johannes (1988): Himmlisches Babylon. Zur Kultur der verstädterten Gesellschaft. Berlin, New York. -Brandau, Hannes/Kaschnitz, Wolfgang (2008): ADHS im Jugendalter. Grundlagen, Interventionen und Perspektiven für Pädagogik, Therapie und Soziale Arbeit. Weinheim/München. -Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix (1992): Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Berlin. -Foucault, Michel (1994): Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses. Frankfurt a.M. -Gebhardt, Winfried/Hitzler, Ronald ((Hrsg.)) (2006): Nomaden, Flaneure, Vagabunden. Wissensformen und Denkstile der Gegenwart. Wiesbaden. -Giddens, Anthony (1995): Konsequenzen der Moderne. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt a.M. -Hitzler, Ronald (2004): Unsichtbare Bildungsprogramme? Zur Entwicklung und Aneignung praxisrelevanter Kompetenzen in Jugendszenen. Expertise zum 8. Kinder- und Jugendbericht der Landesregierung NRW. Düsseldorf -Innis, Harold A. (1997): Kreuzwege der Kommunikation. Wien/New York -Kajetzke, Laura/Schroer, Markus (2009): Schulische Mobitektur. In: Böhme, Jeanette (Hrsg.): Schularchitektur im interdisziplinären Diskurs. Wiesbaden, S. 299-314 -McLuhan, Marshall (1989): The Global Village. Der Weg der Mediengesellschaft in das 21. Jahrhundert. Paderborn -Staubli, Thomas (1991): Das Image der Nomaden. Freiburg Schweiz/Göttingen -Sting, Stephan (2001): Der Mythos des Fortschreitens. Die Geschichte der Subjektbildung. Berlin -Welsch, Wolfgang: Eine Doppelfigur der Gegenwart: Virtualisierung und Revalidierung. In: Vattimo, Gianni/Welsch, Wolgang (1998): Medien-Welten Wirklichkeiten. München, S. 229-248

Author Information

Jeanette Böhme (presenting / submitting)

University of Duisburg-Essen

Faculty of Educational Sciences

Essen

David Brick (presenting)

Universität Essen

Bildungswissenschaften