Configuring Learning Spaces

Abstract

The idea of learning space has many attractions, but it holds traps for the unwary. The idea is at once educationally expansive, potentially emancipatory and even subversive. It opens up the hope of students becoming authors of their own learning in spaces that they claim as their own. But the idea of learning space, as it is being taken up, deserves to carry warning signs. There are invisibilities associated with it, invisibilities connected with a potential psychological overload on learners and with a possible down-valuing of knowledge as the student’s own learning journey is given prominence. This, at least, is the argument I shall try to make in this chapter.