The architecture of pedagogical encounters

Abstract

When teachers approach their first experience of classroom interaction, they often tend to focus on curricula , syllabi , schemes of work, educational technology, and the various challenges that have to be faced in teaching a group of around thirty different students who, though having the same age , are characterised by distinct personalities, abilities, aptitudes, interests and levels of motivation. The pedagogical encounter in this sense is very challenging indeed: decisions have to be made regarding what to teach, when to teach, how to teach and to whom. As teachers, we have to decide about the pace of the delivery of the lesson, how and when to involve students in participatory interactions, when to use small and large group teaching and so on. There are issues of discipline and order in the classroom, as there are ethical dilemmas that need to be resolved, related to all the aspects of the teaching-learning encounters mentioned above. There are also issues concerning not only relationships with students, but also relationships with policy-makers, colleagues, parents, and the wider community. All this takes place in a context of uncertainty, to the extent that no recipe answers exist to that perennial question: how does a good teacher teach? Individuals and human, interactive contexts are far too complex, and it is therefore difficult if not impossible to predict responses and reactions in any communicative situation. Indeed, it is this very complexity that legitimizes teachers' claim that their work constitutes a 'profession', given the inadequacy' of fixed responses to pedagogical challenges. Teachers can only be good workers by reflecting carefully on their own experience, and by drawing on their baggage of theoretical understandings so that they can improve as they go about their task. But among this uncertainty of shifting foundations for human interaction, there is one context which is crucial and which is perhaps slightly more predictable and rather more subject to direct manipulation , and that is school and classroom architecture. The physical or material context in which teaching takes place is the most obvious, and unfortunately the least referred to - at least in local educational research - among the variables that have an influence on the pedagogical encounter. The fact that parents are so sensitive to the state of repair of school buildings does indicate, however, the extent to which there is a popular understanding of the link between teaching, and the context in which it is carried out. Let me explain what I am referring to by 'material context' before I proceed to examine what I am here calling 'the architecture of pedagogical encounters'.