Innovation, educational space and an invitational mat: The va and ILE theory

Dr Martyn Reynolds (Silvavaka Consulting)

Space is important

For quite a long time I was both Specialist Classroom Teacher and host of pre-service teachers in a boys’ high school. I ran tours for newcomers, walking around the buildings and glimpsing at the spatial arrangements in classrooms. We found rows of individual desks facing one way, café style groups, and anything in between. Over the years, conversations zeroed in on eye contact, power, the role of sociality and belonging in learning, and some teachers’ deliberate attempts to disrupt convention. Space and how we use it in schools is important.

Space in Innovative Learning Environments

Space-focussed, lightly research discussions of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) also met my ears during that time.  ILE literature includes two sets of elements. Tangibles are hard materials – seats, walls, desks and so on. Intangibles are soft and relational aspects that include school culture; flexibility of practice; a porous approach to who teaches and learns; and socially constructed, student-initiated, authentically located learning. Listening to these ideas, relationships between space and pedagogy grew in my mind as significant.

Linear relationships have been imagined between learning spaces, the ways they are used, and the learning outcomes of students. In direct relationships, agency is held by the build not the learner. This is a hard/design focussed approach. Other more complex relationships between tangibles and intangibles suggest shifts in the former might enable shifts in the latter; they might jigsaw; or the power of space might rely on proper use. This, of course, asks questions of what ‘proper’ might mean and who gets to decide. It would be good if designers, teachers, and communities were on the same page.

Space and va

These issues resonated as I became more immersed in Pacific educational thought through my doctoral work. Journeys with Pacific people taught me to think of space as never empty. Va, relational spaces, both connect and separate, carry ethics of care and link all entities across physical, social and spiritual dimensions. During my study, Pacific students told me that learning environments were really important to them. The va of some classrooms was uninviting.  The emotional temperature was cold. Asking questions was limited for fear of ridicule. Racism was a factor at times, occasionally reproduced by Pacific students who reinforced stereotypes on each other.

However, there was also the support of the ‘brotherhood’, a collective felt by many Pacific students and visible to me. The brotherhood was most often talked about in connection with Poly Club, a va where seniors looked after juniors, care was exercised, and it felt like a warm home-in-school to many boys.

Pacific student sessions

The words of my students ignited a desire to facilitate an educational va less cluttered by relational issues of shame, rejection, and racism. I imagined a va in which Pacific students’ personal, social and spiritual comfort encouraged learning. The tangible aspects of what resulted, Pacific Study Sessions (PSS), featured the school library – a flexible and IT capable space. Intangible elements included voluntary attendance; freedom to occupy the space as desired; student priorities driving the choice of work; teachers being present; and senior students as organisers. The accounts of others interested in Pacific spaces in education encouraged me to also think about vision, community involvement and transformation.

Vision

With Pacific student leaders, a relational vision developed for the PSS. We thought there was no reason why the mutual support offered in Poly Club could not be fostered elsewhere. A second element was the significance for Pacific students of one-to-one contact with teachers. Teachers were invited. Third, the vision included opportunities for Pacific students to lead. Finally, I hoped the visibility of the Pacific collective being successful in an academic space might erode the relational negativity of stereotypical thinking.

Community involvement

Members of the school’s Pacific and teaching communities supported the PSS. Lunchtime and after school sessions didn’t make it easy for parents. But senior students became the community voice, advising on times unlikely to clash with sport; organising blessings; offering encouragement to juniors to attend; and setting up the library. I made social media postings to connect with community immediately after sessions and some parents responded almost as quickly.

Some teachers who came saw their importance in terms of specialist subject knowledge. They might turn up, ask if anyone needed specialist help, and leave if greeted with silence. Others came and just generally encouraged or talked about matters of mutual interest if specialised help wasn’t needed. Some spoke of a deepening sense of connection. Others expressed pleasant surprise at what was being achieved. That was a lesson to them.

Transformation

The PSS evolved over three years. Initially, attendees valued proximity by grouping together in a mezzanine. Later, they inhabited the whole library, accessing hard wired technology to supplement wi-fi. Perhaps an increased level of comfort fostered an example of the way people can [re-]colonise or appropriate spaces, changing their original or intended use. Previously a senior student had told me, ‘These are PI boys, they won’t want to be reading. They won’t want to be in the library.’

Early on, requests for PSS centred academic deadlines. Later, members of the Pacific student cohort moved together from Period 5 to PSS and then on to Poly Club, a powerful visible statement of belonging in both cultural and academic spaces.

Transforming school culture is a long-term relational matter. But as cohorts of junior students arrived at a school where the PSS was a fixture, repeat attendees replaced a hit and miss pattern. Expectation had been created.

Innovation and space

Pacific wisdom offers teachers ways of thinking about space that connect aspects of education such as eye contact, power, sociality and belonging across physical, social, and spiritual dimensions. It also frames holistic connections between ILE tangibles and intangibles so that we focus not on a thing itself but on the relationships that inform its significance.  Vision structures format. Belonging is linked to comfort. Time is related to opportunity. Relationships between students/students and students/teachers become central. The recognisability of an existing space that involves peer leadership, care and homeliness can be leveraged to configure a new, welcoming space – a mat that makes invitational sense.

The undercurrent of this post provides a couple of sets of questions. First, what are the conventions in education that we need to deliberately disrupt in order to better serve our Pacific students – and others who we know don’t get as good a deal as they might? Space is never empty – so what do our students find in our educational spaces? What silent rules are we following, and whose interest do they serve?

Second, when we are thinking about ILEs and innovation generally, whose model of ‘appropriate’ are we valuing and whose ideas of successful education do we honour? When ILE literature talks of school culture, how does that culture reflect the wisdom and lifeways of the communities we seek to serve? We can change the physical and technological aspects of space as much as we like, but real innovation comes from putting our students (back) at the heart of things, listening to them, learning from them and their successes, and innovating in our environments accordingly.

Space and how we use it in schools is important. Innovation is needed. The PSS was a good special programme. However, we need to change ‘ordinary’ educational spaces and do this every day.

---

Dr Martyn Reynolds was born in London of British heritage. He has 35 years of experience of teaching in England, Aotearoa New Zealand, PNG and Tonga. Martyn currently provides PLD to schools, and is involved in consultancy and research in Pacific education, Oceania oralities, and educational leadership in the region.  His PhD inquired into Pacific boys’ ideas of success in education. He is secretary of OCIES, enjoys travelling, runs whenever he can, and can often be found in the outdoors.