psycho classrooms: teaching as a work of art
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Psycho classrooms: teaching as a work of artCath Lambert aa Department of Sociology , University of Warwick , Coventry, CV4 7AL, UKPublished online: 02 Feb 2011.
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Psycho classrooms: teaching as a work of art
Cath LambertDepartment of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK,
Taking its title from Psycho Buildings (2008), an exhibition of architectural sculptures atthe Haywood Gallery, London (UK), this paper explores the complexrelationship between pedagogy and space. Specifically, it aims to re/conceptualiseteaching and learning as ‘aesthetic encounters’, paying attention to the haptic,experiential and participatory aspects of spatialised pedagogic practice. Drawing onexamples taken from pedagogic art, a field of practice hitherto neglected within criticalpedagogy, it is argued that the design, construction and critique of teaching and learningspaces needs to engage with the aesthetic distribution of what can be seen, said, andexperienced by teachers and learners. These ideas are explored through one example of apsycho classroom, The Reinvention Centre at Westwood at the University of Warwick(UK). It is suggested that as spaces of creative dissensus and ruin, psycho classrooms canwork to disrupt and reconfigure the distribution of the sensible (Ranciere 2004) and assuch represent spaces of potentiality.
Key words: aesthetics, classrooms, critical pedagogy, pedagogic art, Ranciere,The Reinvention Centre at Westwood.
Introduction: from Psycho Buildings to
psycho classrooms
The idea of emancipation implies that there are
never places that impose their law, that there are
always several spaces in a space, several ways of
occupying it, and each time the trick is knowing
what sort of capabilities one is setting in motion,
what sort of world one is constructing. (Ranciere, in
Carnevale and Kelsey 2007: 262)
Valuing the room, as fabric and experience, is
underestimated. Achieving difference comes from
providing different conditions; we should not give
up on tired infrastructure. (Le Heron and Lewis
2007: 7)
During the summer of 2008, when the ideas
for this paper were taking shape, I visited an
exhibition at the Haywood Galley in London
called ‘Psycho Buildings: Artists’ Take on
Architecture’. The name of the exhibition had
been taken from a book of photographs by
German artist Martin Keppenberger, present-
ing architectural structures which were in
some way ‘eccentric or idiosyncratic’ with the
‘salutary power to disrupt our habitual
impulse to comprehend and consume the
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2011
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/11/010027-19 q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2010.542479
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spaces around us with a single glance’ (Rugoff
2008: 17). This seemed to me a useful
ambition in relation to educational spaces,
and from therein my ideas coalesced around
the notion of psycho classrooms. There were
several features of the Psycho Buildings
exhibition which spoke directly to my work
around classroom space. The Curator, Ralph
Rugoff describes the aims of the contributing
artists as being:
to reactivate the complexities of our relationship to
space, and to prompt us to re-examine our notions
about the relationship between the individual and
his or her surroundings. Often working against the
grain of established architectural practices, [the
artists] create habitat-like sculptures and
architecturally inflected installations that invite us
to consider how built spaces function as social,
psychological and perceptual environments. At the
same time, their immersive sculptures highlight the
crucial role of physical experience in our aesthetic
encounters, emphasising what must be experienced
rather than merely seen, and actively engaging each
visitor as an adventurous participant in the work.
(2008: 11)
Psycho classrooms, then, refer to sites of
dissonance and critique in and through which
the potential of space to influence pedagogy
can be realised. Such classrooms aim to
disrupt the habitual impulses and relations of
teaching and learning and invite adventurous
participation. Such an invitation presumes an
equality of the intellectual capacities of those
working within the space, accompanied by a
willingness to allow uncertain outcomes. The
aesthetic and material design and usage of
such spaces works to disrupt and redistribute
what forms of knowledge might be sayable,
audible, visible and do-able: for example,
psycho classrooms should enable the gener-
ation and deployment of embodied and
emotional knowledges. All of these factors
are taken up in more detail in this paper, in
which I aim to explore critically our complex
relationship to (pedagogic) space(s) and to
think about the social and political function of
the educational environment as well as the
ways in which the spaces help constitute
individuals, groups and relations as they
interact with/in them. I wish to draw attention
to the embodied, experiential and participa-
tory aspects of spatialised pedagogic practices
and to re/conceptualise teaching and learning
as ‘aesthetic encounters’. In so doing, I draw
on the work of Jacques Ranciere (2004) and
his understanding of aesthetics as a regime for
the re/configuration of sense perception. Put
simply, what we see, hear, feel and say, are
routinely delimited by our location in geo-
graphical, political, social, cultural and econ-
omic time and space. To situate pedagogic
relations and experiences in aesthetic terms is
to draw critical attention to the ways in which
teaching and learning both support hegemonic
modes of sense perception and have potential,
to use Ranciere’s (2004) terminology, to
‘redistribute the sensible’.
This paper aims to deploy and extend these
theoretical resources through the analysis of a
university teaching room called The Reinven-
tion Centre at Westwood, at the University of
Warwick (UK). Drawing on my experiences of
being involved in the design and development
of the room, together with subsequent
research on its usage, I explore the ways in
which The Reinvention Centre at Westwood
offers one example of a psycho classroom with
the potential for shaping and transforming
pedagogic practice.
The epistemological and ethical import-
ance of ‘situating oneself’ in relation to the
field and subject of study has been well
established, not least by feminist writers
(Bondi et al. 2002; Haraway 1991). This
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importance arguably intensifies when the
focus of study is, in part, one’s own academic
practice. As academics and educators, our
critique and generation of educational sites
and spaces is necessarily imbricated in
complex social, political and economic
structures: at global, national, local and
institutional levels. As such, we are not only
located within but also implicated in the neo-
liberal project of educational reform, even if
our engagement aspires to critique and
reinvention. So, what is my own location in
the spacetime in and of which I write? I am a
sociologist of education engaged in teaching
and research (and its associated administra-
tive and emotional labours) within what Bill
Readings (1996) might call a ‘University of
Excellence’, a Russell Group university1 in
England. In recent years my thinking and
practice have been influenced significantly by
my active role within the Reinvention Centre
for Undergraduate Research,2 one of the
Centres for Excellence in Teaching and
Learning (CETLs) funded by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE) in order to to promote ‘excellence’
across all subjects and aspects of teaching
and learning in higher education.3 An
evaluative report of the Centre for Excellence
initiative (Saunders et al. 2008) has high-
lighted the contribution many of the Centres
have made to the design and re/development
of new or renewed university space. The
Reinvention Centre is no exception to this.
Within its remit of promoting and supporting
undergraduates to be research-active, a key
focus of its work has been on the reinvention
of pedagogical space which enables and
facilitates research-based teaching and learn-
ing. The outputs have been both concep-
tual—researching and theorising the complex
and dynamic relationships between pedagogy,
curricula and space—and concrete, in the
form of two new teaching and learning
spaces. My involvement has included input
into the design and refurbishment of one of
these spaces: The Reinvention Centre at
Westwood. This classroom provides an
open, challenging, aesthetically interesting
space in which, it is hoped, some of the
political and pedagogic principles of
research-based learning can be put into
practice (see Hodges 2007; Lambert 2007,
2009; Neary and Thody 2009). This paper
presents The Reinvention Centre at West-
wood as one possible example of a psycho
classroom.
The discussion here shares a concern with
others in the field of social and cultural
geography to unsettle and re-distribute social,
cultural, political and economic power geo-
metries. A desire to shift away from hierarch-
ical models of conceptualising scale, relation
and location (Marston, Jones and Woodward
2005; Escobar 2007) is furthered here through
a consideration of the spatialised production
and consumption of knowledge(s). In particu-
lar, this study contributes to discussions
surrounding the scalar politics of knowledge
and the social construction and occupation of
different ‘knowledge spaces’ (Turnbull 1997;
Wright 2005). Revisiting these familiar con-
cerns through the more unfamiliar lens of
Ranciere’s (2004) theoretical framework of
aesthetics offers new conceptual terrain for
critical geographers and others concerned with
the spatial generation of knowledge and the
role of knowledge in the construction and
legitimisation of knowledge producers and
consumers.
I begin by locating an exploration of
teaching and learning as aesthetic encounters
within the broader critical educational project.
I highlight the role of utopian ideas, paying
particular attention to conceptualisations of
utopia as process and ruin. The discussion
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then considers the ‘pedagogical turn’ in art, a
trajectory which can be read, in part, as a
reaction to the conditions of production of
both art and knowledge generated by con-
temporary capitalism (Harvey 2005; Rogoff
2005). A critical interrogation of the
relationship between space and knowledge is
facilitated by activities, events and discussions
which take place at the juncture of art/peda-
gogy, and I briefly highlight selected examples
which might be useful to those of us whose
work takes place within schools, colleges and
universities rather than art galleries and
museums. I pay attention to the ways in
which pedagogic art seeks to generate alterna-
tive modes of knowledge and sets up different
expectations of the roles and competencies of
participants. In particular, the ‘haptic archi-
tectonics’ (Rugoff 2008: 24) of the physical
environment emphasise the importance of
sensory and perceptual engagement. All these
factors are then considered in terms of how
such a spatial aesthetics can inform pedagogic
practice, through an analysis of the design and
usage of The Reinvention Centre at West-
wood. But first: an aesthetic re-viewing of
critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy and spaces of hope
In recent decades, the urgent task of enacting a
powerful critique of neo-liberal hegemony in
education has been the focus of critical
educators’ energies (see, for example, Amsler
and Canaan 2008; Askins and Fuller 2007;
Nelson and Watt 2004). This has led to many
commentators feeling stuck in a position of
impossibility, where imagining and generating
new modes of engagement is difficult, if not
unthinkable. It has also led to a reiteration of
hope, drawing on deep-rooted inter-connec-
tions between education and utopia, both in
the sense of the centrality of education to
classic utopian visions4 as well as the role of
hope in reimagining a different future through
pedagogic transformation (see, for example,
Giroux 1997; Halpin 2003). As the following
analysis makes clear, I draw on key tenets of
critical pedagogy and argue for a re-articula-
tion of these insights within educational
spatial design and rebuilding. However, there
are limitations to a politics of hope which
tends towards idealised and humanistic ver-
sions of community, social organisation and
consensus. Instead, I argue for a form of
utopia concerned with a politics of process,
dissensus and ruin. Such an approach is not
against hope, but rather seeks ‘to extend
optimism into realms which are most com-
monly interpreted as pessimistic, anxious or
discomforting’ (Kraftl 2007: 120). Anxiety
here serves a critical function, in Tyson Lewis’
(2006: 12) words as ‘a productive index of
social contradiction’ and ‘an emotion of the
future’ (2006: 14). Ruinant utopias share a
commitment to incompletion and endless flux,
to process and critique, described by Peter
Kraftl (2007: 126) as ‘an architecture of
endless questioning’. Their effects are con-
tingent and affectual, more likely to be realised
in the contemporary and everyday moment
rather than an imagined future place of
comfort (Garforth 2009). For David Harvey
(2000: 183) spatial utopias tend towards
finality in contrast to the more open-ended
possibilities offered by temporal utopias of
social process: ‘to materialize a space is to
engage with closure (however temporary)
which is an authoritarian act’ (see also Levitas
2003). Whilst mindful of these restrictions on
the utopian possibilities of material space,
I suggest that pedagogic art can nonetheless
help us imagine the spatial aesthetics of an
architecture of endless questioning.
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Art and the pedagogic turn
There is a rich literature examining the inter-
play between space and radical art/architecture
(Borden and Rendell 2000; Harvey 2000; Lees
2001). In addition, the performative function of
architecture, as it shapes space through social
and material practice, has been explored within
critical geography (Lees 2001; Thrift 1996) and
within the history of education (Burke 2005;
Grosvenor 1999). Despite this, outwith the
critical art literature (see Bishop 2007; Podesva
2007; Rogoff 2008), scant attention has been
paid to the ‘educational turn’ in contemporary
artistic and curatorial practice. This article
seeks to redress this, and in doing so suggests
that the convergence of pedagogy and art opens
up spaces of potentiality.
In an interview given in 1969, German artist
and lecturer Joseph Beuys declared that, ‘To be
a teacher is my greatest work of art’ (Beuys, in
Sharp 1969: 44). Beuys worked across the
boundaries and distances between art, acti-
vism, and pedagogy. People and dialogue were
recast as artistic materials and his ‘social
sculptures’, ‘debate based installations’ and
‘permanent conferences’ draw attention to the
spatial forms in which thought and action are
enacted in, and act on, the world (Beuys 2006
[1973]). Beuys’ political interventions, taken
together with the founding of the Situationist
International and the 1967 publication of
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1994
[1967]) in France, provided the scaffolding for
the development of participatory art from the
1960s. The construction of ‘situations’, ‘hap-
penings’ and ‘events’ became artists’ new paint
and canvas. As Claire Bishop (2006: 13) notes,
in contrast to the passivity and social division
generated by ‘the spectacle’, ‘“constructed
situations” aimed to produce new social
relationships and thus social realities’.
This focus on art’s ability to have a productive
role in the social world, underpins more recent
developments in contemporary art, gaining
fresh momentum during the 1990s within the
framework provided by Nicolas Bourriaud’s
(1998) collection of essays entitled Relational
Aesthetics. Relational art does not seek to
represent the world but rather constitutes an
event or an encounter using people, dialogue
and social situations. Key artists associated with
this movement include Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre
Huyghe, Christine Hill, Vanessa Beecroft and
Liam Gillick. Whilst all such relational art is
potentially pedagogic in terms of its media and
method, there is also a strand of explicitly
educational art which might include works such
as Thomas Hirschhorn’s 24h Foucault (2004),
a ‘monument’ to Foucault in which visitors visit
a library, audiovisual space, map room and
auditorium5; or Pawel Althamer’s Einstein
Class (2005),6 an experimental project taking
place over six months, involving the provision
of physics classes to teenage boys who rarely
attended school. Their experiences involved
trips, holidays, and the production of a
documentary film (for discussion of both pieces,
see Bishop 2007). Other examples might
include events such as Academy: Learning
from the Museum (2006), designed to prompt
reflections on the role of the academy within
society through exhibitions, lectures and sym-
posia, projects, workshops and conferences7; or
SUMMITNon-Aligned Initiatives in Education
Culture (2007), a gathering shaped by the
participants through keynote papers, curated
conversations, lessons and open space meet-
ings.8 Both Academy (2006) and SUMMIT
(2007) are explicitly concerned with knowledge
production and modes of educational engage-
ment in the dispiriting and disabling context of
neo-liberal educational reform (see Rogoff
2008). Art practices such as these can be
illuminating in terms of seeking to understand
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and generate pedagogy as an aesthetic encoun-
ter. As Irit Rogoff (2008: 5) suggests, they
help create vital spaces for moving beyond the
immobilising stance of ‘forever reacting to the
woes of the world’. The form, role and status of
knowledge, as well as its mode of production,
are central to these aesthetic pedagogic exper-
iments.9 As such, they help us re/think the
relationship between the generation and circu-
lation of knowledge(s) and aesthetic space,
particularly in relation to places, such as
classrooms, in which participation and social
interaction occur.
The spatial production of knowledge
As Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (2000: 3)
argue, ‘far from being a given, space has a
history that is bound up in ways of knowing
and creates different objects of knowledge’.
Indeed, critical geography has long been
concerned with the spatial politics of knowl-
edge production, drawing on empirically
diverse examples in order to explore the social
construction of scalar hierarchies between
global and localised epistemologies (see, for
example, Turnbull 1997; Wright 2005). Turn-
ing to pedagogic works of art enables us to
revisit these problematics, paying attention to
the ways in which aesthetics play a key role in
the in/visibility and hierarchical framing of
knowledges. Such art practices have been
driven by a desire to not only generate
alternative spaces but also alternative forms
of knowledge. This was the explicit aim of The
Copenhagen Free University (CFU; 2001–
2007) established by a group of artists in their
own flat. As the artists explain:
We do not accept the so-called new knowledge
economy as the framing understanding of
knowledge. We work with forms of knowledge that
are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising,
subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the
kitchen, produced when asleep or arisen on a social
excursion—collectively. (Berry, Heise, Jackobsen and
Slater 2002)
The creators of the CFU deliberately estab-
lished and named themselves as a ‘Univer-
sity’,10 positioning themselves as antagonistic
to the ‘normalising academy’ in enabling
different forms of teaching and learning and
knowledge production. One of the artists,
Howard Slater describes this in the following
way:
the walls of the Free University are porous because
it’s a domestic space as well. People are . . . coming to
a different form of institution where perhaps the
experience of learning and discussing is as valuable
as the subject-matter of what is discussed . . . So
there’s not only this porosity, a leakage between
being in the university and outside the university, but
from that, because experience doesn’t stop, an
experiential knowledge becomes possible . . . the
imaginative expectations of what people are going to
experience here, are different from the normalising
academy where it’s perhaps our very experiences
that are jettisoned at the doorway. So the wall [in the
normalising academy] is impervious, you have to
almost leave your desires with your coat in the
cloakroom. (Slater, in Berry, Heise, Jackobsen and
Slater 2002)
The space of the Free University is ‘porous’,
not only in its merging with other forms of
space (such as domestic) but also in its
validation of people’s experiences and desires,
making the generation of ‘experiential knowl-
edge’ possible. What insights can be gleaned
by the educational designer, or university
lecturer, working within the often ‘impervious
walls’ of the Un-Free University? For this
educator, the most striking thing is the artists’
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claim that they have ‘imaginative expec-
tations’ of their visitors. Rogoff (2008: 3)
articulates a similar hopeful expectation when
she explains of Academy (2006), ‘By “potenti-
ality” we meant a possibility to act that is not
limited to an ability . . . it must always include
with it an element of fallibility—the possibility
that acting will end in failure’. The presump-
tion that those coming to the university would
make use of their own experiences in order to
create forms of knowledge and understanding
stands in stark contrast to the pre-ordained
modes of learning and knowledge inscribed in
much of the curricula we frequently (are
obliged to) ‘deliver’, complete with its pre-set
learning outcomes and prescribed methods of
assessment. In the ‘normalising academy’ (and
this also applies to schools, colleges and work-
based learning) students are routinely charac-
terised by ignorance and lack: both conditions
of deficit which will, it is hoped, be redressed
via educational provision (Ranciere 1991).
Indeed, this is not just a matter of individual
teachers’ presumptions but it is the assump-
tion around which the entire formal edu-
cational system is structured. Whilst powerful,
this system is not, of course, monolithic.
A significant number of teachers and students
engage in pedagogic practices and generate
heterogenous spaces which are at odds with,
and offer challenges to, the ‘normalising
academy’. Within the teaching of Geography
in particular there is a critical traditional of
moving beyond the classroom and being
attentive to the spatial production of different
forms of knowledge (Le Heron and Lewis
2007; Hovorka and Wolf 2009). However,
these notable and important exceptions
remain marginalised and often (and according
to many commentators, increasingly) indivi-
dualised pedagogic interventions. For those of
us working within institutions circumscribed
by hegemonic models of knowledge
production, one of the key challenges is to
create and maintain learning and teaching
spaces and situations where we and our
students can bring our desires in with us, and
generate pedagogy and curricula which can
allow the expression of diverse experiences.
Haptic architectonics: embodied knowl-edge
Many of these concerns being raised and
addressed through radical art practice res-
onate with the central arguments put forward
by critical educators and activists, historical
and contemporary, such as John Dewey,
Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, bell hooks,
Henry Giroux and Patti Lather, who have
drawn (and continue to draw) attention to the
importance of learners’ active participation in
the production of socially and politically
relevant knowledge, as well as the validity of
learners’ own experiences as a basis for
knowledge generation. They have criticised
the violence of ‘banking’ knowledge deposited
into the passive student as a recipient or
consumer (Freire 1970: 58). A number of
critical, and in particular feminist, commenta-
tors, have attempted to ‘bring the body’ into
pedagogic debates and documented the
attendant difficulties of talking about embodi-
ment, emotion and desire in educational
contexts (Beard, Clegg and Smith 2007;
Shapiro 1999). These debates need to be
revisited in thinking critically about spatial
practice, particularly when faced with the
challenges and opportunities of designing and
re/building educational spaces. As this existing
literature makes clear, embodied experiences
are central to knowing.
What would it mean, in practice, to bring
these pedagogical insights to bear on our
relationship to space? How might they
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intersect with a consideration of the aesthetic
in the material construction and habitation of
our places of teaching and learning? I would
like to briefly return to the Haywood Gallery’s
Psycho Buildings exhibition. Upon entering
the gallery, one of the first exhibits the visitor
encounters is Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s
(2008) Stone Lip, Pepper Tits, Clove Love,
Fog Frog (2008) installation (Figure 1).
I would have loved the opportunity to hold
a seminar within this pod-like structure, the
size of a large meeting room constructed from
wooden supports with transparent stretched
Lycra constituting the ‘walls’. You enter
through an oval aperture into a sensual space
in which sacks of spices hang in the material
ceiling. In contrast to the traditional black or
white box classroom designed to close down
any awareness of our bodies and the physical
spaces we occupy, Stone Lip, Pepper Tits,
Clove Love, Fog Frog (2008) heightens an
awareness of multiple senses and our own
‘structures’ of flesh, skin and bone as we stand
or sit in relation to the tactile structure which
encapsulates us. Thinking about how aspects
of this ‘haptic architectonics’ (Rugoff 2008:
24) might transform our classroom spaces is
productive, as is the opportunity it provides
for understanding the complex ways in which
(all) spaces solicit visceral and emotional
affects. Unlike the spaces of knowledge-
production in the ‘normalising academy’,
where you leave your desires with your coat
at the doorway, spaces such as Neto’s
structures ‘are based on collective sheltering,
and the visitors to his works are able to share
in a delicate game of desire’ (Herkenhoff
2008: 111).
In the second half on this paper, I turn to
consider these points in relation to a pedagogic
experiment in which I have been involved: The
Reinvention Centre at Westwood. I present
this university teaching room as one example
of a psycho classroom, which demonstrates
the challenges and possibilities of privileging
the haptic and the dissensual in our aesthetic
and spatial planning and practice. This is not
just an argument for the creation of aestheti-
cally interesting or pleasurable teaching and
learning spaces. Rather, it is a recognition of
the ways in which teachers’ and learners’
senses and perceptions can be dis/abled by the
sensory environment, with profound impli-
cations for what individuals are able to think,
say, experience and know.
Figure 1 Ernesto Neto, Stone Lip, Pepper
Tits, Clove Love, Fog Frog, 2008. Polyamide
textiles, digital cut plywood, spices, beads and
hooks. Courtesy the artist, Fortes Vilaca SP
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Photo: q Stephen White.
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Creating psycho classrooms: The
Reinvention Centre at Westwood
The Reinvention Centre at Westwood is a
classroom which was designed and refurbished
by staff and students from The Reinvention
Centre for Undergraduate Research at the
University of Warwick (Figure 2). A small
group of us worked intensively with architects,
the University’s Estates team and potential
users (students, teachers and administrators) in
order to transform the space from a disused bar
into a teaching room ready for use from
September 2006. The classroom consists of 120
square metres of floor space, in a rectangular
shape, located on the Westwood campus at the
University of Warwick. It is housed in a
detached building together with a cafe and a
shop. This unusual location (for a classroom)
provides an initial sense of disjuncture and
means it is rarely immediately recognised as a
teaching space. Passers-by often do a double-
take, and stop to ask ‘what’s this room for?’
At first glance, it does not look like a
university classroom. The rubberised floor is
blue and the furniture consists of rubber
blocks in bold colours, plastic light-weight
benches in grey and black, yellow bean chairs,
and a single replica Le Corbusier chaise
longue. The furniture can be easily moved
about by teachers and students to create the
layout they need and want. There are no desks
or chairs, and no fixed technologies. Instead,
the room has wireless capability and multiple
surfaces which can be projected onto. Our
intention was to design a room where there
would be no designated ‘top desk’ or space
which the teacher would automatically
occupy, thereby establishing the embodied
relations of power and knowledge from the
outset. The decisions about who goes where,
and in what ways they will occupy the space,
must be made and remade by students and
Figure 2 The Reinvention Centre at Westwood, 2007. Photo: q The Reinvention Centre.
Psycho classrooms 35
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teachers according to each pedagogical
situation. The flexibility of the furniture
combined with the heated rubber floor
makes a range of surfaces available and
presents users with options they rarely have
in a traditional classroom where the layout
and furniture orient and organise teachers’
and learners’ bodies and the relations between
them in limited ways (Figure 3). The proxi-
mities between people and objects in the room
are unfixed and up for negotiation. Students
might cluster together intimately on the large
bean chairs or occupy one each in a wide
sprawl. They might lie alone on the Le
Corbusier chair, or sit sideways, bunched
up on it with a fellow student or teacher to
look closely at a piece of work. In this way,
and echoing the ambitions of the Psycho
Buildings installations, the room aims to
disrupt the ‘habitual impulses’ with which
we understand and occupy educational spaces.
Our design took account of the ways in
which traditional Western classrooms not only
organise students’ and teachers’ bodies by
means of the habitual furnishings and layout,
but the visual and auditory functions are
likewise configured so as to draw people’s gaze
towards the locus of power and knowledge
production. This is usually achieved through
the positioning of a fixed projector screen or
whiteboard, or isolated and raised desk,
usually situated at one end of the room. The
remaining furniture is generally oriented
towards this point. There is often audio
equipment at the ‘front’ which enables the
teacher’s voice to be heard throughout the
whole room. In contrast to this, we wanted to
create a room with no fixed or strong lines of
sight or orientation, and with an acoustic
design which enables people to speak and be
heard from any part of the space, whilst at
the same time enabling multiple activities to
take place without the sound becoming
Figure 3 Students and teachers in The Reinvention Centre at Westwood, 2007. Photo: q The
Reinvention Centre.
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cacophonous. This was achieved by a combi-
nation of the floor and wall materials and the
installation of ‘sound boards’ on the ceiling.
Whilst making these practical decisions my
colleagues and I used the guiding metaphors of
dissensus and ruin, finding inspiration in the
constructivist art of the early twentieth
century, the iconic example of which is
Vladimir Tatlin’s experiment in architecture
as an expression of political desire: the
unfinished Tatlin’s Tower or Monument to
the Third International. This is a utopian
design, allowing for the possibility of a future
yet to be constructed, yet at the very same
moment the design points to its own impossi-
bility (Dillon 2008). In line with the principles
of research-based learning, we wanted our
classroom to similarly be a space of construc-
tion—where both students and teachers could
be producers and collaborators—yet not in
such a way that refuses critique or suggests
answers or solutions to the current ‘crisis’ of
higher education (Neary and Winn 2009). We
wanted a space for setting and exploring
problems rather than seeking the closure of
answers or solutions. Rather than wishing to
design a classroom ‘for the twenty-first
century’, or a room which would be ‘future-
proofed’, we aspired to create a space which
would be open to the possibilities of the future
as something to be made and remade, allowing
for conditions of struggle, dissensus and ruin.
For Readings (1996) the university is ‘in ruins’,
but rather than representing a site of despair
and loss, the concept of ruin suggests critique
and reconstruction. Patti Lather (1997) and
other feminist poststructuralist theorists have
used the metaphor of ruin in similarly
generative ways (see St. Pierre and Pillow
2000) and the same impulses can be found in
the ruinous utopias and their architectural
possibilities discussed earlier (Edensor 2007;
Kraftl 2007).
It is not easy to present designers, estates
teams and space planning committees with a
blueprint for a classroom based on the idea of
ruin. However, by thinking through the
sensory and aesthetic dimensions of the
space, we were able to translate a desire for a
room which offered some idea of uncertainty
and dissonance into practical decisions about
lighting, layout and colour. Ranciere (2007)
speaks of dissensus as a ‘modification of the
coordinates of the sensible, a spectacle or a
tonality that replaces another . . . a way of
reconstructing the relationship between places
and identities, spectacles and gazes, proximi-
ties and distances’ (Ranciere, in Carnevale and
Kelsey 2007: 259–261). Dissensus can be
understood in relation to Ranciere’s (2004)
conceptualisation of aesthetics, outlined ear-
lier in this paper. The work of aesthetics
demonstrates how sense-perception (‘the sen-
sible’) is distributed in such a way as to render
people and knowledges in/audible and in/vis-
ible. Within this aesthetic regime, dissensus
has the potential to disrupt, modify and
re-distribute the sensible, altering who and
what can be seen, heard and understood. In
this way Ranciere’s (2007) notion of dissensus
as a generative force breathes life into the
metaphor of ruin. We attempted such a
modification by organising aspects of the
room so that normalising forms of visibility
might be disrupted: for example resisting fixed
technologies, and by ‘opening up’ the ceiling
with the use of up-lighting and windows in the
rafters so that people’s gaze might be drawn
upwards, enabling them to take in the room
from a different perspective. In the far corner
from the door, an artwork by Liam Gillick
entitled Double Back Platform (2001), made
from orange and yellow Plexiglas and alu-
minium, nestles in the ceiling and can draw the
gaze of the curious across the room and up to
the roof (Figures 4 and 5).
Psycho classrooms 37
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The Mead Art Gallery describes how
‘Double Back Platform hangs from the ceiling
and juts out at right angles from the wall,
altering the architecture of the space . . .
Gillick is particularly interested in the way
these alterations may in turn affect the way we
behave’.11 Whilst some may wish to contem-
plate the art and its meaning, for the majority
Figure 4 Liam Gillick, Double Back Platform, 2001. Anodised aluminium, Plexiglass. Courtesy
The Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, Coventry. Photo: q The Reinvention Centre.
Figure 5 Students work under Liam Gillick’s Double Back Platform in The Reinvention Centre
at Westwood, 2008. Photo: q The Reinvention Centre.
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of those using the room it functions to provide
visual pleasure, something which Gillick
emphasises in his work (see Szewczyk 2009).
Like embodiment, pleasure in relation to
pedagogy is difficult to talk about and so we
tend to pretend it not particularly significant in
terms of what is happening in the classroom
(Hughes 2007; McWilliam 1999). However,
the use of artwork such as this foregrounds
aesthetic pleasure and helps us to pay critical
attention to the way the architecture incites or
indeed inhibits pleasure. Related to this are the
ludic possibilities presented by the aesthetics
of the room: in particular the large open space,
the use of bold colours and the iconoclastic
furniture. The potential for ‘spatial play’
(Marin 1984) captures the utopian possibili-
ties of space which foregrounds open-ended,
experimental and process-based activities.
In all aspects of the room, we were attentive
to the ways in which aesthetics restructures the
field of sensory experience and this in turn has
an impact on the sensory and embodied
aspects of pedagogy. The warm and tactile
flooring had functional intent: we wanted the
floor to be used as a working surface which
students and teachers might choose to sit or lie
on, or walk about with no shoes on. In Neto’s
(2008) installation, the soft flooring is seen as
allowing a ‘more fluid relationship between
figure and ground than is allowed for by
conventional built structures’ (Rugoff 2008:
24). We see a similar fluidity in the use of the
floor and the low-level furniture in The
Reinvention Centre, and this is articulated by
students and teachers in terms of them feeling
‘comfortable’ or ‘uncomfortable’ in the space
(Figure 6).
‘Comfort’ is, of course, subjective and the
diverse reactions from users reflect the
different embodied and aesthetic needs, tastes
and experiences of individuals. The issue of
dis/comfort also encompasses feelings of risk
and disorientation which may be generated by
the conditions of the space and by moving
away from the ‘comfort zone’ of traditional
classrooms and teaching approaches (Arnot
2007). Once familiar with it, users often talk
Figure 6 Students and teachers in The Reinvention Centre at Westwood, 2008. Photo: q The
Reinvention Centre.
Psycho classrooms 39
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about feeling ‘at home’ and see the once
uncomfortable space as ‘familiar’. Attentive to
the ‘haptic architectonics’ of the space, we
have observed how students and teachers use
the lighting and furnishings to create a
pedagogic space of encounter which, like
Neto’s Stone Lip, Pepper Tits, Clove Love,
Fog Frog (2008) is ‘habitat-like’ and can feel
‘immersive’. I once taught a small group of
postgraduate students in an evening class at
The Reinvention Centre at Westwood. The
students initially felt overwhelmed by this
large, demanding space when we had been
used to a small, predictable seminar room.
After three weeks of us struggling to make it
work, I was considering returning to a more
familiar classroom when I arrived at the class
to find the students occupying only the far
corner of the room, beneath the glow of
Gillick’s artwork. Whilst most of the room
was in natural darkness, our corner was lit
with the floor and wall lighters, but with the
strip lights turned off, which created the effect
of a domestic rather than institutional space.
The bean-chairs and blocks were arranged in a
small circle, with readings, notes and the odd
cup of coffee piled on the blocks. Coming in
from the cold and dark, the room felt warm,
welcoming and conducive to the sort of in-
depth, friendly and sometimes complex theor-
etical discussions we wanted to have.
In addition to my anecdotal and personal
experiences of teaching and learning in the
room, and talking to colleagues about their
experiences of doing so, we have been carrying
out a research project entitled Reinventing
Spaces12 which has systematically observed
the spatial pedagogies of groups of students
and teachers using The Reinvention Centre at
Westwood and other traditional and ‘innova-
tive’ classrooms across the campus. The
preliminary analysis of this data has found
that whilst many of the aims of the room are
realised in its usage, the relationship between
the spaces, pedagogies and curricula are
complex. Teachers trying to carry out ‘bank-
ing’ methods within a space such as this
struggle to maintain authority and learners’
bodies can appear unruly and irregular as they
occupy the multiple levels (floor, benches, bean
chairs) and shift about to keep comfortable on
furniture which is ill-designed for sitting down
for a long period of time. We have paid critical
attention to the instruction or construction of
knowledge taking place in this room, and
found the best examples of the space ‘working’
are when teachers and students are receptive
to generating and creating happenings, ideas,
experiences and knowledges, rather than
attempting to achieve fixed outcomes. For
example, one of the first users of the room,
history teacher Rob Johnson, talks about his
development of a history module based on
‘scenario-based learning’, where he would
distribute resources around the room; he and
the students would disperse, select from the
materials and read in silence, then after ‘some
time and space to think’ would all share their
thoughts ideas with others. In another session
he describes, the students were required to
re-imagine the classroom as an art gallery and
to show others around the exhibit (Johnson
2007). These methods make different embo-
died demands of students and teachers which
are attentive to the construction of time/space
and the relationship between them. Such
pedagogies accord with Rogoff’s (2008) belief,
described in relation to her Academy (2006)
exhibition, that fallibility is built into our
expectations of what will happen. In this way,
the notion of ruin needs to be integrated into
curricula as well as spatial practices.
The Reinvention Centre at Westwood was
not only intended to be ‘a machine for teaching’
(Neary and Thody 2009: 36) but also a space
for thinking and critique. Many of the
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pedagogic art practices described in the
previous section enact a spatialised form of
critique in relation to the production of
knowledge and the knowledge economy. The
design, construction and research of The
Reinvention Centre at Westwood is similarly
grounded in the educational and political
principles of critical pedagogy and sociological
critique which inform the wider practice ofThe
Reinvention Centre (see Lambert, Parker and
Neary 2007; Lambert 2009). The Centre’s
motif incorporates Paulo Freire’s (1970:52)
claim that, ‘Knowledge emerges only through
invention and reinvention, through the restless,
impatient, continuing, hopeful enquiry men
and women have in the world, with the world
and with each other’. As a material manifes-
tation of these principles, The Reinvention
Centre at Westwood incorporates radical
expectations. However, unlike the pedagogical
art located in museums, art galleries, ware-
houses and domestic spaces, our classroom is
positioned within, and not just in relation to,
the very ‘normalising academy’ of which
critical pedagogy is often so critical. This is an
important and contradictory location: there
are no certain outcomes in this space, only the
restless, impatient, hopeful process of strug-
gling with/in the economies of knowledge and
power which define higher education and its
connections to the wider social, political and
economic world.
Conclusions: the re-distribution of thesensible
In presenting The Reinvention Centre at
Westwood as one possible example of a psycho
classroom, I am not arguing that the trans-
plantation of lessons into sensory environ-
ments will bring about a transformation in the
production of knowledge. Nor am I denying
that transformative teaching and learning can,
and does, take place within the ‘tired infra-
structure’ (Le Heron and Lewis 2007) which
characterises many of our educational insti-
tutions. I am, however, suggesting that a
critical awareness of aesthetics and haptic
architectonics should be central to classroom
design and usage. It should also be integral to
the discussions we have and decisions we make
about what educational experiences we wish to
enable and what kinds of knowledge we wish
to validate. There is a critical role for aesthetics
in disturbing the dominant regimes of the
visible and audible, and making visible knowl-
edges which otherwise remain invisible (de
Sousa Santos 2008) and as such, the sensory
and aesthetic should be the loci for our critical
theory and practice. For Ranciere (2004: 12–
13), aesthetics, operating in ‘the terrain of the
sensible’, is necessarily the site for the
enactment of political struggle and emancipa-
tion. He explains that, ‘The arts’—and this
would also apply to teaching—‘only ever lend
to projects of domination or emancipation
what they have in common with them: bodily
positions and movements, functions of speech,
the parcelling out of the visible and the
invisible’. These sensory resources constitute
what is sayable, visible and possible, and the
distribution of the sensible configures the
allocation and contestation of these resources:
roles are defined and policed, and ‘parts and
positions’ are apportioned. In an argument
which takes a similar form to the Copenhagen
Free University’s ‘imaginative expectations’
(Berry, Heise, Jackobsen and Slater 2002) and
Rogoff’s (2005, 2008) ‘academy as potenti-
ality’, Ranciere (2007) calls for emancipatory
pedagogic and artistic practices to enable a
redistribution of roles and competencies. He
exemplifies this through artists whose work
assumes and addresses a spectator ‘whose
interpretive and emotional capacity is not only
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acknowledged but called upon’ (Ranciere, in
Carnevale and Kelsey 2007: 263). Ranciere
(1991) has worked through the same point in
an explicitly educational context when telling
the story of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the
nineteenth-century French professor Joseph
Jacotot whose own pedagogic experiment led
to his discovery and proclamation of a theory
of the equality of intelligences between teacher
and student. The argument that a radical
assumption of an equality of intelligences must
be our starting point rather than a future ideal
poses a challenge to many traditional configur-
ations of critical pedagogy. Despite a commit-
ment to equality and social transformation,
proponents of critical pedagogy often remain
wedded to a progressive model of educational
and social progress in which the role of
pedagogy is to enlighten and to provide
(more and the right kind of) knowledge to
those who remain ignorant.
In this paper, I have argued for the generation
of alternative and generative modes of critique
and knowledge construction through more
dissensual, open-ended and aesthetically-
aware modes of pedagogic engagement. Draw-
ing on the rich theoretical resources of
Ranciere’s (2004, 2007) work around aes-
thetics and dissensus, and using these ideas in
order to materialise some of the idea(l)s of
ruinous utopias, the discussion here offers new
conceptual terrain for considering the gener-
ation and framing of spatial and scalar
epistemologies and the construction of differ-
ent ‘knowledge spaces’ (Marston, Jones and
Woodward 2005; Wright 2005). I have used
the resources provided by pedagogic art in
order to suggest that there may be significant
gains for educators in the ‘normalising acad-
emy’ generating spaces which admit desire and
failure within our pedagogic encounters and
which enable imaginative expectations of
people’s capacities. This is what it would
mean for us to develop psycho classrooms. Like
Psycho Buildings, psycho classrooms are ‘not a
symptom of a disorder but a welcome deviation
from the rationalisation and abstraction of
space’ (Rugoff 2008: 17). They may take
myriad different shapes and forms, but they
deviate from the ‘normal’ in that they pay
attention to the aesthetic, and work—via
dissensus—towards a re-distribution of what
might be visible, sayable and doable with/in
them. Such a re-distribution has profound
implications for the construction and definition
of different knowledges, as well as for the roles
of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. Psycho classrooms
can become sites of antagonism in relation to
the dominant ideologies of the neo-liberal
institutions in which they are embedded: an
antagonism which generates spaces of potenti-
ality. In this way, it is possible that our teaching
may come to feel, like Joseph Beuys’, our
greatest work of art.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the three anonymous referees
for their thoughtful and provocative com-
ments and suggestions.
Notes
1 The Russell Group is an association of the twenty
major research-intensive universities in the UK.Further information at www.russellgroup.ac.uk/.
2 The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research
is a collaborative Centre for Excellence in Teachingand Learning (CETL) based between the Department
of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the
School for the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes
University, both in the UK. Further information on theReinvention Centre is available at www.warwick.
ac.uk/go/reinvention/. The Reinvention Centre covers
a range of progressive pedagogies. This articlerepresents the specific views of the author.
3 Seventy-four CETLs have been funded by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to theamount of £315 million over five years from 2005/06 to
2009/10. This represents the UK’s largest ever single
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funding initiative in teaching and learning. For furtherinformation see www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/tinits/cetl/.
4 For example, the practice and philosophy of education
are central to Thomas More’s Utopia (see Halpin2003: chap. 3).
5 For further information on Hirschhorn’s 24h Foucault(2004) see www.palaisdetokyo.com/fr/prog/proj/hirschhorn.html.
6 For further information on Althamer’s EinsteinClass (2005) see http://cubittartists.org.uk/index.php?module¼eventsmodule&action¼view&id¼36.
7 For further information on Academy (2006) see
www.e-flux.com/shows/view/3620.8 For further information on SUMMIT (2007) see
http://summit.kein.org/node/520.9 The examples here are selective and barely scratch the
surface of interesting art/education events or installa-
tions. For some further projects see www.delpesco.
com/blog/archives/edu-projects/.10 The CFU were following the example of earlier
projects such as the Anti University of London,
founded in February 1968 (see Berke 1969), and the
Free International University for Creativity andInterdisciplinary Research co-founded by Beuys in
1972 (see Mesch and Michely 2007).11 See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/art/artist/
liamgillick.12 The Reinventing Spaces project involves a collaborative
team ofacademic staff, undergraduate andpostgraduatestudents investigating the relationship between curricu-
lum, pedagogy and space by means of ethnographic
enquiry. With additional funding from the HigherEducation Academy’s History Subject Centre from
2009, the research is being extended to incorporate a
historical perspective, using archival and oral history
methods. For further information see www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention.
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Abstract translations
Salles de cours psychotiques: l’enseignement en tantqu’œuvre d’art
Tirant son titre de Batiments Psychotiques (2008),une exhibition de sculptures architecturales a laGalerie Hayward, Londres (Royaume-Uni), cetarticle explore la relation complexe entre lapedagogie et l’espace. Specifiquement, il vise are/conceptualiser l’enseignement et l’apprentissagecomme des ‘rencontres esthetiques’, en faisantattention aux aspects tactiles, experientielleset participatifs de la pratique spatialisee pedagogi-que. En utilisant des exemples venant de l’artpedagogique, un domaine jusqu’a present negligedans la pedagogie critique, il est soutenu que la
conception, la construction et la critique des espaces
d’enseignement et d’apprentissage ont besoind’engager avec la distribution esthetique de ce qui
peut etre vu, dit, et experimente par des enseignantset apprenants. Ces idees sont explorees a travers unexemple d’une salle de cours psychotique, TheReinvention Centre at Westwood (Centre deReinvention) a l’Universite de Warwick (Roy-
aume-Uni). Il est suggere que comme des espacesdes dissensus et de ruines creatifs, des salles de courspsychotiques peuvent aider a bouleverser et
reconfigurer la distribution du sensible (Ranciere2004) et a ce propos representent des espaces depotentialites.
Mots-clefs: esthetiques, salles de cours, pedagogiecritique, art pedagogique, Ranciere, The Reinven-tion Centre at Westwood (Centre de Reinvention).
Aulas psicopatas: ensenando como una obra de arte
Nombrado por Edificios Psicopatas (2008), una
exposicion de esculturas arquitectonicas en laGalerıa Haywood de Londres, este articulo se
explora la relacion compleja entre pedagogıa yespacio. Especıficamente se aspira reconceptualizarensenar y aprender ‘encuentros esteticos’, prestando
atencion a los aspectos experienciales y participa-tivos de la practica pedagogica espacial. Utilizando
ejemplos de arte pedagogico, un campo pocoempleado entre pedagogıa crıtica, se discute que eldiseno, construccion y crıtica de espacios de ensenar
y aprender necesitan involucrar la distribucionestetica de lo que los profesores y estudiantespueden ver, decir y experimentar. Se exploran estos
ideas atraves un ejemplo de una aula psicopata, TheReinvention Centre at Westwood (El Centro de
Reinvencion) de la Universidad de Warwick (ReinoUnido). Se sugiere que las aulas psicopatas, comoespacios de disension creativo y ruina, pueden
trastocar y reconfigurar la distribucion del sensato(Ranciere 2004) y ası representar espacios de
potencialidad.
Palabras claves: esteticos, aulas, pedagogıa crıtica,
arte pedagogica, Ranciere, The Reinvention Centreat Westwood (El Centro de Reinvencion).
Psycho classrooms 45
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