Dis-stanced learning: adult learners, Heidegger and spatiality
Peter Gray, Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Scotland
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick
Introduction
There is an expanding literature on the experience of adult learners (Edwards 1994), but that experience seems to take place in what David Harvey calls 'a spaceless world' (Harvey1975: 15). This paper suggests that the spatial element of adult learners' experiences must be understood as more than just context or background. One way of achieving this understanding might be to adopt a Heideggerian approach to spatiality. In Being and Time (Heidegger 1927/62), spatiality is an essential component of the being of humans, who produce spaces in the course of their everyday activity within their world. Research into this process of spatialisation may widen understanding of several experiential issues in adult education, such as empowerment, sstudent community and, most importantly, institutional atmosphere.
What I wish to explore here, therefore, is the phenomenon of space, as it is experienced by adult learners. Whilst space and spatiality can be understood in a variety of ways, I begin from the assumption that experience, for the embodied subject, is always experience-in-space (O'Loughlin 1998). Although there are links between the 'spatial turn' and post-modernism, notably in the work of Harvey (1990) and Soja (1989, 1996), I do not employ a post-modern conception of the de-centred or fragmented self (Johnston & Usher 1997). As feminist critics suggest, embodiment entails a rather more stable conception of the self, one in which the subject always speaks from 'some-where' (Haraway 1995). My research, therefore, takes account of the situated knowledge of actors, with the assumption that this knowledge can be recorded, reflected upon and critically assessed (Brookfield 1998). 'Situated knowledge' implies, in addition to its class, gender and other dimensions, some awareness of where it is coming from. As a reflective practitioner, I ought, then, to begin by giving a short account of my own spatial development.
The view from a ridge
I grew up in Edinburgh, a city organised around hills, especially the Pentland Hills forming its Southern boundary and the Firth of Forth sweeping out into the North Sea. Allowing for a post-modern spin on the Cartesian privilege of observers in high places, I was spatialised, made aware of space, by the hills and the distances that they opened up. When I eventually returned to formal education, Stirling, as a hill-foot university, had a special appeal. Stirling was at the end of my childhood arc, in the farthest distance, backed up against the Ochils. It was part of an escape route into the Highlands. Its isolation from home was helpful in the sense that failure would not be seen, but there was also a lack of involvement at first. I did not know anybody. Everyone seemed to be part of some community to which I did not belong. Such was my space as a mature student.
The view from the hills in Edinburgh was not just a panorama of the city but was also an outlook, in the multiple senses in which Patrick Geddes uses the term (White 1998:125), on the incredibly diverse and complex project of urban existence, the struggle for living-room. As for my outlook on the space of the university, an exchange year at the University of California, Berkeley, gave me the chance to compare two very different campuses. There were different people, to be sure, but the spaces (or was it their atmospheres?) were qualitatively different as well. Diversity is always good, and the spaces were indeed diverse, but this difference in atmosphere intrigued me. Consequently, one of the themes of my research, which will be discussed below, is the atmosphere of higher education institutions.
Of course, I have not always regarded space as something to be theorised. The chance acquisition of Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974/91) was the catalyst there. There was also, however, an interest in the concrete and the particular, the naming of names. Simmel has pointed out that every definable space is unique (Simmel 1901, in Frisby 1997), and that uniqueness goes against the generalising emptiness of much theoretical discussion, which fails to grasp the 'here and now', or the 'there and then'. My situation as a white, semi-Scottish, semi-male can be re-interpreted, for example, in terms of post-colonialism, but I cannot escape what Heidegger calls my 'thrown-ness' (1927/62:236), the way in which one is always already in some form of space. Consequently, I enter the hermeneutic circle - I must explore space from within.
Towards an analytical framework - Heidegger and spatiality
Space comes in more than fifty-seven varieties. Lefebvre alone refers to at least ninety, of which physical, social, mental and representational spaces are but four. Rather than attempt to define each variety, I adopt a constructionist approach to spatiality. That is, while there is 'worldstuff' out there, any meaning or spatial organisation that it has arises from human engagement and interpretation (Humphrey 1993:17). This applies at all levels, from cosmology to the kitchen sink. Kristen Ross describes the feelings of terror and disorientation induced in prisoners brought into interrogation centres - ordinary dwelling houses - during the Algerian war (Ross, 1994). The use of basins, electrical fittings and empty bottles for torture, reversing their normal domestic purposes, rendered these spaces unheimlich, a total reversal of the homely evocations to be found in Bachelard's poetic spaces (Bachelard, 1964/94).
This uncanny sense of anxiety is also used by Heidegger as a means of accessing the human way of being-in-the-world (1927/62: 233). His treatment of spatiality makes it a primordial component of being-in-the-world. This is part of his project, in Being and Time , to show that temporality is the ultimate horizon of being. The relationship between spatiality and temporality in his work as a whole is ultimately unsatisfactory (Dostal 1993: 165). Nevertheless, the discussion of spatiality in Being and Time is a fruitful source of ideas, leading, for example, to Giddens' concept of 'space-time compression' (Giddens 1991) and to aspects of the radical work on space and gender of Luce Irigaray (Irigaray 1987). In seeking to move beyond Cartesian subject/object distinctions, Heidegger proposes that spatiality is only meaningful against the horizon of the human life-world. For Heidegger, 'space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space' (1927/62: 146). Human actions do not occur in space, but themselves constitute spaces.
It is our concern or involvement as humans which creates a world, and 'world' is only meaningful for reflexively self-conscious beings. Heidegger uses the term Dasein to represent the human 'way of being', and this way of being, the 'here' and 'there' of Da-, is what world is (Fell 1979:32). Spatiality is thus the human way of putting wordly things into place.
In his later essay Building Dwelling Thinking , Heidegger gives the following example of what he means by the 'there' of Dasein:
When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am here that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it (1954/1993: 359)
What Heidegger means is that he is concerned with the door as part of a referential totality. Doors, windows, walls, chairs and other handy objects work together to make up this referential totality, which he terms a 'region' (Arisaka, 1994: 458). A door standing in the middle of a field is meaningless, except as an artwork. I can go through a door because I am concerned with it. At a deep level, I am aware of the function of doors as boundary markers and as ways of entering spaces. I am aware, again at a deep level, of the difference in function between doors and windows. At a slightly higher level of awareness, I undestand that I should probably not go through that particular door until the lecture is finished. In the university, one knocks on some doors but not others, some doors are left open, others are kept closed. Some of these understandings hold in the region of the university, others hold in the generic region of 'buildings'.
The key word in the paragraph cited above is 'pervade'. It is shared and private understandings which pervade the room and spatialise it. The room as object persists whether someone is there or not, but it is constituted as a space when someone is concerned with it, however remotely. From Heidegger's 'I am thereÉand also here', we can see that the space is constantly confirmed in its functional relevance by the actions and understandings of its occupants, and others who may be concerned with it in some way, such as the janitors. It may well function for me even when I am not there, as a potential study space or somewhere to leave unwanted furniture. In such a case I still pervade the room, because it is still within my world of concerns. The same process of spatialisation can be shown to apply even in situations where space is electronically mediated, such as virtual chat rooms. Virtual space is pervaded by those who use it, and it would not constitute a space were it not for the bodies at its periphery, sitting at their screens.
The degree to which one pervades, or permeates, a space is clearly somewhat variable. As an educational researcher, I would have difficulty pervading the space of a nuclear physics laboratory, or a tropical rainforest. I might understand the function of the doors in the former and the trees in the latter, but I would not understand, or be at home in, either of these regions to the same extent as their normal inhabitants. I would not, therefore, pervade the space to the same degree. This points to the possibility of slippage between shared senses of public space and individual perspectives on that space (Arisaka, 1994: 461). In both cases, my sense of space, or my spatialisation, is unrelated to metrical distance. In the rainforest, to travel a hundred metres might take me hours, whereas on the motorway the same distance takes seconds.
Heidegger's term for this process of spatialisation is ent-fernung, variously translated as 'de-severance', 'remotion' or dis-stancing'. Dis-stancing might be described as the process of 'locking-on' to a destination or object in order to approach it or put it in its place. More than this, it is the primordial basis on which the ability to make spatial judgements or measurements is predicated. When I set out on a journey, I do not usually measure off the miles or metres in such-and-such a direction, but concern myself with the 'between', the places or terrain which constitute the journey. This is what is meant by 'pervading the space': when I catch a train from Edinburgh to Stirling, I am already there.
Proximity, mobility and possession
In order to make use of this way of conceptualising space, I suggest that degrees of pervasion might be more easily thought of as degrees of proximity. One who is in close proximity to the university is at home there, is able to navigate it successfully. The study of proximity is sometimes referred to as 'proxemics' (Boden & Molotch, 1994), in which instance it refers to the effect on human relations of relative distance. In this case I suggest that, for students, proximity is a function of their mobility and their sense of ownership, or possession, of spaces. As largely incommensurable values, these need to be explored independently of each other, but can be related using proximity as a bridging concept. I will briefly consider each of these terms before going on to examine the value and application of proximity itself.
Students' mobility is high in relation to the university when there are minimal constraints on their access, such as in the case of students living on-campus, or single mature students with cars. Embodiment is, however, the embodiment of difference, and shared understandings of space are frequently normative assumptions. Thus, for disabled students, the campus university may be an obstacle course in which a normative spatiality breaks down. Wheelchair users become, in Michael Dorn's phrase, spatial dissidents (Dorn, 1998). Equally, there may be temporal constraints on mobility caused by work or child-care commitments. The provision of part-time and evening programmes, distance and on-line learning, outreach schemes and other initiatives can be seen as attempts to substitute institutional flexibility for personal mobility, although their effect may not always be to achieve this. There may even be advantages in requiring students to be mobile. The experience of Open University summer schools (Clarke, Morgan-Klein, Raffe & Schuller 1998), and collaborative Ed.D programmes delivered collaboratively at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow, indicates that in some cases, students may benefit from an enhanced sense of community in these situations.
This sense of 'student community' is a measure of what I propose to call 'possession', the degree to which students feel that they belong in an institutional or other educational setting. It could also be described as ownership or involvement. Part-time students may have high mobility in terms of their spatial arrangements but may also experience a low degree of possession due to a lack of social interaction. Empirical work in progress at the University of Stirling bears this out: part-time postgraduates' sense of involvement is unrelated to physical distance but correlates strongly with the availablity of supervisory support and contact with other postgraduates (Gray, 1999a) Whilst this might seem obvious, it is an issue which is rarely addressed by those planning course structures or accomodation arrangements. In particular, part-time students perceive that there are others who have their own exclusive spaces, such as the Students Union. Similar effects are observed amongst nurse students. Due to the recent transfer of nurse education from an FE college on to the campus at Stirling, nurse students become conscious of a space which is perceived as culturally and academically richer than that of the college, leading to changes in classroom behaviour. This effect is even more marked for nurse students at the Highland Campus, where the effect of their geographical remoteness is to idealise the space of the main University. (Gray, 1999b).
Although the rhetoric of student-centredness and empowerment in higher and further education would seem to be intended to increase students' sense of ownership, this is not necessarily the case. Bates (1998) demonstrates the danger of an uncritical adoption of this rhetoric of empowerment. Bates suggests that, for some students, the classroom is a site of empowerment only insofar as it offers an opportunity to demonstrate resistance. This can be in the form of absenteeism, disruption, or refusal to complete assignments. The students involved are thus simultaneously empowered (on their own terms) and dis-empowered (in relation to the education system). The classroom thus becomes a contested space, highlighting the fluid boundaries between shared public space and individual perspectives towards it.
Conclusions: into the atmosphere
The contested space which Bates describes undoubtedly has its own atmosphere. It is impossible to have an atmosphere without a space. Or is 'atmosphere' really a way of describing the space of the university itself? Even the Open University has its atmosphere, spread across Summer Schools, television programmes and tutoring networks. A recent study of part-time Higher Education came to the initially-surprising conclusion that, according to its students, the Open University had the best atmosphere of any of the institutions under consideration (Clark, Morgan-Klein, Raffe and Schuller 1998). From a Heideggerian perspective this conclusion might not be so surprising. The OU uses a combination of distance-learning and intensive participatory activity. Its students either find that the university comes to them, or that when they go to the university, the learning process is inclusive, focused and convivial. The struggle to achieve proximity, to dis-stance oneself from the institution, is avoided, because the Open University is just that: an open space, easily permeated by learners. (Note here that I am not referring to barriers to participation, but to the post-admission experience of learners.)
Can we conclude, then, that 'institutional atmosphere' is synonymous with (learning) space, and, if so, is this more that a semantic exercise? I would argue that it is. The study of space and spatiality has, until recently, been divided between architects, planners, geographers, philosophers and mathematicians. Radical thinkers such as Heidegger and Lefebvre have had little influence on the philosophy and organisation of the learning space. A few educational researchers, such as Fraser (1986) have studied classroom environment, but most of this work treats the phenomenon of space itself as unproblematic, using a Cartesian framework which cannot capture the 'between', that which, to use a Heideggerian expression, 'worlds' subject and object. It is this 'between' which Heidegger pursues so relentlessly, and which is the bridge to better spatial understanding.
What Heidegger tells us about space is, for all its baroque folds and elaborations, relatively simple. We do not 'come alongside' a space such as that of the university, nor is it a fishtank with a definite 'in' and 'out'. Instead, we permeate it, we dis-stance ourselves from it, we engage with it, and thus 'make the farness vanish' (Heidegger, 1927/62: 139). As one becomes a spatialising student (Barnett, 1996), the university becomes a world. Because it is maintained as a space not by the funding bodies but by the activities of all its participants, questions of proximity, mobility and possession are vital to its continuing health. To summarise, then, I should like to present four provisional conclusions:
1)Participants in an institution produce the spaces of the institution.
2)Atmosphere is not an optional extra, but is a manifestation of the quality of these spaces.
3)Efforts should be made to ensure that all participants enjoy a high degree of proximity to their institutions.
4)Flexibility and mobility need to be considered together in order to enhance proximity. Public transport, childcare, catering and computer facilities are some of the factors involved.
References
Arisaka, Y., (1994), 'HeideggerÕs Theory of Space: a Critique of Dreyfus' in Inquiry, 38, pp.455-467
Bachelard, G., (1964/94), The Poetics of Space tr. Jolas, M, Boston, MA, Beacon Press
Barnett, R., (1996), '"Being" and becoming: a student trajectory' in International Journal of Lifelong Education, 15/2, Mar/Apr 1996, pp.72-84
Boden, D., & Molotch, Harvey L., (1994), 'The Compulsion of Proximity' in NowHere, Friedland, R. & Boden, D. (eds), (1994), Berkeley, UC Press