Course Space, Place, and Education

Course description

The perspectives of place and space offer rich insights into how and why we do what we do. We are all basically from a place and bound to the cultural practices there, and to some extent carry these with us when travelling to new places. A spatial perspective can dwell within or even try uncovering some of the presuppositions and expectations we have when trying to understand, learn and become a part of a new setting. And it can give insights to how places and spaces are made and deliberately constructed in order to enhance or even discipline certain ways of thinking and acting. In that sense, being a part of a place and space is a fundamental part of being human who is inseparable from cultural structures but can nonetheless be overlooked in times of an individualized and highspeed society.

By addressing the general question of ‘where’, a spatial approach can enable valuable insights on taken-for-granted aspects of education and learning. This is terms of: Where do educational experiences take place? How does the physical setting, its materialities, and the atmosphere affect the situation? Such questions prove relevant when thinking back one’s own learning experiences. The content might be difficult to remember, but the smell and sounds of the environment stand out clear. On a larger scale, space and place help us to realize the institutional practices that frames our particular physical and cultural environments to learn in. Such environment could signify meaning and structures that transgresses our perceptions in terms of learning to be a professional, citizen or a student for instance.

In this PhD course, we will explore the relations between place, space, and education through theory and practice. We will discuss theories of educational environments in terms of learning, development, and participation. Furthermore, we will explore spaces and places in specific institutional contexts through fieldwork involving an excursion. During this, we will understand educational institutions in a wider historical and spatial perspective before focusing on research methodology.

Through the course, you will work with space, place, and education through a variety of modalities:

• A pre-assignment involving our own PhD project: How can you think or rethink your project through the lenses of space, place, and education?
• Literature on spatial theory and place-based learning.
• Lectures on learning in excursions and geographies of education
• Excursions and fieldwork to one educational sites https://www.kp.dk/en/locations/campus-carlsberg/
• Groupwork and plenary presentations
• Individual reflections

Aim/Learning outcomes

The aim of the course is to explore and experience education as situated in a physical space and to understand how places can be used for learning and for creating subjectivities.

Through the course, there will be these learning outcomes:

• Using examples of the relationship between space and education at different scales, participants will learn how a spatial perspective can add novel insights into educational practice.
• Investigating specific educational buildings, participants will get to understand how architecture shapes students/pupils and allow/prohibit certain identities and subjectivities to unfold
• Exploring their own projects through a spatial approach allow the participants to investigate the potential of this approach for their project.
• Through hands-on assignments and excursions, the participants will be acquainted with spatial methods that are valuable for studying the importance of place for learning.

Requirements for participation

Before the course, participants create a collage where they present and reflect upon their own project. Begin by reading the Butler-Kisper (2008) article on collage making and pay special attention to the conceptual form of a collage. A collage can be a working tool, a part of a paper presentation, or a part of the dissertation. The benefit of making a collage is that it visualizes the core aspects of the project, e.g., in terms of the backdrop of conducting the project, the focus of the research, and the theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches. According to Butler-Kisper, the conceptualizing collage is a way of answering a research question by creating a visualization of a concept/term that describes qualities of a phenomenon. For example: To collect images that thematically make sense and create a connection. And/or, to give the collage a name (cf. concept/term) that discursively supports the visualization through the theoretical perspective offered by the literature.  

So, in preparation for the course, participants create a collage either on paper or in a digital format, whereby the project’s relation to space, place, and education is conceptualized. Look through your empirical material for photos, images, or other forms of visuals. You can edit these images by cutting, colouring, or reframing them into a conceptual collage. In the same act, discuss and decide what name you want to give the collage, and if necessary, make more than one.

During the course, the participants are asked to present their collage, and time is reserved for adjusting the collage.

Target group/Participants

• PhD students at all levels interested in space, place and education.

Workload

• Course/ teaching hours: 21
• Preparation hours: 40 (reading)
• Written assignments etc.: 14

Program

Tuesday 2nd February

9.00 Coffee and tea

9.30 Introduction, purpose, programme, and presentation of participants

9.45 Presentation by Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen about the phenomenology of place and the significance of place for students' engagement in teaching. Based on a study of school excursions to museums and a flâneurial exploration of a Næstved Harbor, central categories are presented and discussed for how to understand the importance of place for in the cases of understanding engagement in learning and methodological in how to explore places.

10.45 Break

11.00 Disussing the cobceots of space and place in relation to educational analysis.

12.00 Lunch

12.45 Presentation of individual PhD projects in groups. Five teacher-organised groups with 3-4 people in each. Based on the pre-assignment, each person has 8-10 minutes to present their project for the rest of the group followed by 5-7 minutes questions from the group.

13.45 Break

14.00 Presentation by Hanne about spatial methods. What are spatial methods? Why designated spatial methods? And examples of spatial methods e.g. walking interviews and using floor plans

15.00 Individual work with your collage: How has today changed and added to how I see my project both in terms of spatial methods and in terms of analytical ideas and concepts?

15.15 In the same groups, talk about how you have expanded your collage. What was particularly inspiring? What did you notice and why? What have you changed and why? 7 minutes for each project.

15.45 End

Wednesday the 3rd February

9.00 Coffee and tea

9.30 Presentation by Niels Bjørn about school architecture, urban development, the larger spatial context that Campus Carlsberg and University College Copenhagen (KP) are part of

11.00 Introduction to the assignment at KP

11.20 Joint departure for Campus Carlsberg

12.00 We bring our lunch and eat in the canteen at Campus Carlsberg

12.30 Assignment: collecting empirical material about space, place, identity, belonging, learning and teaching at the university college. Students choose a theme and work together in groups of 2-3 persons:

• 1) Professional identity and belonging: If and how is professional identity visible?
• 2) Learning and teaching: Which ideals about learning and teaching to the architecture show?
• 3) Power: What signs of having power or being powerless do you notice?
• 4) Routes: What routes are you taking during the walk around campus? What do you notice and experience?
• 5) Campus’ relations to the surrounding world: How is Campus Carlsberg situated in the local area? What interactions do you notice?

Empirical material e.g. photos are collected and brough back to DPU.

13.45 Return to DPU together

14.15 Each group make PowerPoint presentations, 5 minutes for each group presenting main findings and description of the process: What did we do? Findings? What was easy/difficult? Why? What would we do differently?

15.00 Presentations from the groups

15.40 Niels Bjørn present his analysis and findings

16.00 End

Thursday the 4th February

9.00 Coffee and tea

09.30 How to analyse space, place, and education in own projects, warming up with Lars and Hanne analysing each other’s empirical material

10.30 Break

10.45 In pairs, students analyse each other’s study with point of departure in the preassignment, 45 minutes for each project.

12.15 Lunch

13.00 Presentations of findings

15.00 Break

15.15 Individual reflections: What are the main ‘take aways’ from this course for me and for my project?

15.30 Evaluation

16.00 End

Language 

• English

Lecturers

• Hanne Kirstine Adriansen, Associate Professor, DPU, Aarhus University
• Lars Emmerik Damgaard Knudsen, Associate Professor, DPU, Aarhus University
• Niels Bjørn, PhD, independent consultant http://www.nielsbjorn.dk/

Literature

This is a preliminary reading list, a full list will be available after the application deadline. The literature will be distributed after the application deadline.

• Adriansen, H. K., Juul‐Wiese, T., Madsen, L. M., Saarinen, T., Spangler, V., & Waters, J. L. (2023). Emplacing English as lingua franca in international higher education: A spatial perspective on linguistic diversity. Population, Space and Place, 29(2), e2619.
• Berisha, T. (2023). Racialized spatial attachments: Researcher positionality and access in a Danish suburban high school. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (2), 63-79.
• Casey, E. S. (1996). How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: Phenomenological prolegomena. In S. Feld & K. H. Basso (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 13–52). School of American Research Press.
• Crang, M., & Thrift, N. (2000). Introduction. In Crang, M., & Thrift, N. (Eds.) Thinking space, pp. 1-30. Routledge.
• Evans, J., & Jones, P. (2011). The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place. Applied geography, 31(2), 849-858.
• Gruenewald, D. A. (2014). Place-based education: Grounding culturally responsive teaching in geographical diversity. In Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (Eds.) Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity (pp. 161-178). Routledge.
• Juul-Wiese, T. (2023). Imagined geographies of learning: Student perceptions of what can be learned where. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-15.
• Knudsen, L. E. D., Wallace, J., & Sabroe, M. (2024). Mapping post-industrial areas through entanglements of time and space. In N. Lee, M. Mosavarzadeh, J. Ursino, & R. Irwin (Eds.). Material and Digital A/r/tographic Explorations: Walking Matters (pp. 189-208). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5374-5
• Livingstone, D. N. (2010). Putting science in its place: Geographies of scientific knowledge. Chapter 1 and 5, pp. 1-16 and 179-186. University of Chicago press.
• Pallasmaa, J. (2024). The Eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. Part I, pp. 10-31. Wiley.
• Sattrup, L., & Knudsen, L. E. D. (2024). Out of the Museum Into the Art. In A. Sinner, P. Osler, & B. White (Eds.). Propositions for Museum Education: International Art Educators in Conversation (pp. 207-220). Intellect.

Venue

TBA

Course dates:

• 02 February 2027 09:00 - 16:00
• 03 February 2027 09:00 - 16:00
• 04 February 2027 09:00 - 16:00