Teaching Spaces: A Critical Reflection on Spatial Exploration Exercises as Teaching Tools

Abstract

Reflections on opportunities for and limitations of teaching social justice at institutions of higher learning, especially universities and colleges, tend to be in danger of turning into exercises of assigning blame for refraining from and justifying inaction regarding teaching strategies that are being directed at raising issues of social inequalities and injustices. In particular, structural limitations—such as the corporate- or state-funded university and, more generally, economic pressures—can be detrimental to designing and pursuing transformative pedagogies. Such pedagogies run the risk of being perceived as insufficiently scholarly, reminding many teachers of their economic insecurity, in terms of anxiety over tenure decisions or the economic precariousness of part-time or temporary appointments that are increasingly common in institutions of higher education. If we start from the assumption that, structurally, universities and colleges often (re)produce inequalities, how can teaching in the university setting foster political and qualitative social change? In this context, it makes little sense to try to quantify social change by creating binaries between conservative and progressive, or to deploy a model that suggests linear progress from a status quo to social change. The starting point for the following reflections is that teaching, in the broadest sense, can create a sense of disorientation and confusion, a situation that inspires students and teachers to think beyond binary distinctions and linear notions of progress—in whatever direction.