Fixed furniture doesn't have to mean poor learning
“We can only teach it this way”
“Why?”
“Because the furniture in the room is fixed”.
I’ve heard this argument many times and I still get frustrated by it. Many academics still seem to think that the way the room is set out is the primary determinant of teaching quality and because the furniture is often fixed, then the quality is equally fixed. Well, today I want to talk about affordances and how they have an impact on teaching and how teachers can think differently in order to create richer experiences for their students.
But first, some background…
Gibson’s concept of affordance is a key proposal. The idea is quite straightforward. In any interaction involvingan agent with some other system, conditions that enable that interaction include some properties of the agent along with some properties of the other system. Consistent with his emphasis on understanding how the environment supports cognitiveactivity, Gibson focused on contributions of the physical system. The term affordance refers to whatever it is about the environment that contributes to the kind of interaction that occurs. One also needs a term that refers to whatever it is about the agent that contributes to the kind of interaction that occurs. I prefer the term ability, although Shaw et al. (1982) preferred to coin the term effectivity for that concept. I believe my use of the term ability is also synonymous with Snow’s (1992) use ofthe term aptitude.
Affordances and abilities (or effectivities or aptitudes) are, in this view, inherently relational. An affordance relates attributes of something in the environment to an interactive activity by an agent who has some ability, and an ability relates attributes of an agent to an interactive activity with something in the environment that has some affordance. The relativity of affordances and abilities is fundamental. Neither an affordance nor an ability is specifiable in the absence of specifying the other. It does not go far enough to say that an ability depends on the context of environmental characteristics, or that an affordance depends on the context of an agent’s characteristics. The concepts are codefining, and neither of them is coherent, absent the other, any more than the physical concept of motion or frame of reference makes sense without both of them. – Greeno, J 1994, Psychological Review, Vol 10, No 2 p.338
As he says… quite straightforward.
The important phrase here, I think, is that “(T)he concepts are codefining,”. The ability for someone to see the possibilities in a room full of fixed furniture is partly due to affordances of the room, but also the facility of the person to understand ‘the room’. Without the person, the room is just, well, a room. With a person, the room becomes a realm of possibilities. Without the room, the person is, well, a person. For there to be some creative use of the space, the room needs to suggest affordances to the person, and the person needs to be able to suggest actions for the room (based on past experiences or other conceptualisations) and BOTH need lead to “an activity that can be supported” such as ‘different teaching’.
So, how do we go about exploring the affordances offered by the person-room interaction in such a way that it might be useful in our own practice?
One of the mental frameworks that I have found useful in thinking about the affordances of different objet/situations that I encounter is one that I have shamelessly ripped off from Kalantzis and Cope and the Learning by Design Project Team. Within their work, they expand on the idea of teaching students to learn within a contemporary world and that the thinking skills required can be taught effectively by teachers with the right skills. They have developed a framework of Knowledge Processes, and it is this framework that I find useful.
An example:
Of the room, I might ask “How is this room similar or the same as other rooms that I have been in/seen/experienced?” This is essentially a locating strategy – I’m really asking myself: ”Is this a room?”. From there I begin to search my experience and stored knowledge (including memory) for situations I have been in that are similar but different to the room. I am looking for adjacent experiences in order to begin to conceptualise the room. ”Is this a room, or is it a theatre? Is this a room or is it a colosseum?”
I begin conceptualising the room by naming the things I see in it – walls, roof, floor, chairs, tables, carpet, lights, air-conditioning etc. I continually test these named conceptualisations against my experience of roomness. As this is an iterative process, and as I am keen not to lock down my thinking on this idea of “room” just quite yet, I begin to theorise about how the concepts can be (re)-conceptualised.
In order to do this, I need to analyse the space (and all the concepts within it – including the concept of ‘space’) on two equally important levels – the first is the functional level. How do the ‘things’ (concepts, remember?) in the room work? What are their functions? Physically, how are they constructed? What is their purpose? What are they made out of? etc. The idea here is to get a sense of how things work – either intentionally or unintentionally. I might say that the flatness of the desks provide a good writing surface, but equally I may think of them in terms of height, hardness, area, colour, taste, reflectiveness, spatial orientation/distribution, sound transmission qualities etc etc.. I begin to break down the concept of “desk” into its functions. This is important if I wish to begin thinking about the desk as something other than a desk in the future – it is here that the affordance of the object and my ability to be able to act in relation to that object may begin to coalesce.
The other dimension that I need to analyse the room in is that of the critical (human) aspects in the design of the room. What was the purpose of the room being constructed in this manner? Was it to keep the teacher at the front as the centre of all knowledge and to dis-empower the students? How does this ‘room’ reinforce or create power relationships with all who use it? Whose interests does it promote? What are the implications for the environment? for justice? for freedom? for truth?
At this stage, some possibilities begin to surface about how the room may be used: The most obvious one is as “a room” or “lecture theatre”. This would be an entirely appropriate application of the conceptualisations and analysis done so far, and most people would be able to do this fairly easily – unfortunately, this is where the idea of “roomness” gets further entrenched and teachers fall back on what they have always done. The other approach is to apply all the thinking that we have done to a creative way of using the room. This is harder, but is transformative. ”How can I use this room differently?”, stops being about ‘the room’, but begins to be about ‘how can I use all these concepts differently’? What does the room afford me as a function of what I am able to do/know?
Recognising that it may be true that the furniture is fixed, but that does not mean that there is only one way to use it has a direct impact on the choices that you make as to what you choose to teach and why.
It takes time to learn to think in terms of affordances, but with practice it gets easier – and then that’s when the opportunities to be a better teacher seem to come much faster and, seemingly, with much less expended effort. This is a good thing.
So, the next time you walk into a lecture theatre, take a few moments to reflect on the affordances the combination of you and the room provide for more engaged teaching.
(Today’s image is courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewscott/2330212397/sizes/z/)
