The story of a school building: Spatial representations of educational change.

摘要

The Story of a School Building: Spatial Representations of Educational Change documents the 250-year history of one high school building located in Binghamton, New York as the spatial representation of historical and economic forces that shaped the American high school in the industrial Northeast. The school building is a unique institutional structure in two respects: School buildings are publicly mediated spaces. Situated in time and renovated by use, school buildings are the material artifacts of educational memory, possessing what Ellsworth (2005) describes as "pedagogical intent."; A building is constructed materially through social practices and discursively, through the ideological practices it represents and which represent it. Markus (1993) speaks to the narrative contained in every building, "from the moment it is conceived, through its design, production, use, continuous reconstruction in response to changing use, until its final demolition, the building is developing a story, traces of which is always present."; During the late 1800s, as high school buildings transitioned from private to public control they became specialized structures spatializing the differentiation of students and curriculum. Hiller and Hanson's (1984) concept of the "transpatial" describes how alternating spatial patterns of centralization and decentralization sustained political and social continuity. Lefebvre's (1991) assertion that "class struggle is inscribed in space" contextualizes the monumentalist period of school architecture at the height of industrialization in the early 1900s. Monumentalism enforced transpatial identities to organize a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse student body. Deindustrialization in the second half of the 1900s dispersed capital and people away from urban centers. The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the centralizing ideology of monumentalism. This dispersal of wealth and authority invented two spatial categories: the suburban high school as an enclave of wealth and the urban high school as the site of economic and social decline. By 2004, national concerns with security and school violence resulted in school designs emphasizing controlled, supervisable spaces. Security through spatial design is contrasted with the agenda of the small school movement to ameliorate impersonal school environments to promote student engagement.