A-Infos (en) Italy, FdCA, IL CANTIERE #37 - The Importance of Organizing SPACE for Teaching -- Paola Perullo (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

With the reopening of the new school year, in an increasingly bleak 
socio-political and economic context internationally, we risk losing 
sight of the healthy intention of instilling in children and young 
people the importance of intellectual engagement that can facilitate the 
construction of critical thinking and an alternative to the way of 
perceiving what is happening and to resignation. Teachers, in 
particular, should question the way in which the encounter with 
knowledge is proposed in schools, given the growing alienation regarding 
study and the desire for culture.

For many years, preschool has led the way in bringing the importance of 
organizing spaces within schools into the debate on learning and 
teaching, through theoretical research and experimentation. Criticism is 
coming from many quarters that the practice of teaching different 
subjects in the same way is still too widespread: you read a chapter or 
listen to a lecture, memorize it, and then take a test or quiz to verify 
how much each student remembers of that content. Imagine how different 
it would be to approach geography as an exploration of space, an 
observation of what's beyond the classroom, and the drawing and creation 
of maps. Or to organize history as a collection of documents brought to 
life through comparisons and dialogues, or even to approach literature 
as a vital intertwining of the written and spoken word, brought to life 
with readings aloud and plenty of drama.
In preschool, any free space becomes a theater, including the garden, 
where children are free to invent and build scenarios with simple 
materials, such as colored sheets, large cushions, cardboard boxes and 
cartons, sheets of paper of all sizes, clothes pegs, stones, glass 
balls...etc. Because the constructed scenario becomes the framework 
within which children begin the game of "pretend," which is the true 
theatrical game where everyone speaks and acts out their "part" of an 
invented script.
There's a great deal of democracy in thinking that schools can be 
equipped with open spaces, conceived as truly empty public spaces, 
designed for meetings, exchanges, and conversations. This idea harks 
back to the design of the Polis, conceived 2,700 years earlier by 
sailors from Greece who landed in Sicily. When designing the new city 
(near where the temples of Selinunte now stand), they chose not to build 
anything in the center of that "polis," precisely for the purpose of 
leaving an empty public space to be filled with discussions or 
theatrical performances. Another thing children emphasize when they have 
space is that "they argue less," another insight into how even personal 
relationships can improve through large shared spaces, because we don't 
experience a restriction on our imagination, but rather the ability to 
let it "travel" alongside that of others.
In short, it could be said that differently organized spaces produce 
different reactions, thoughts, and relationships. These changes can be 
seen even in small modifications, such as moving the desks and, instead 
of leaving them in a row, placing them next to each other to form a 
rectangle, or removing the desks to leave a circle of chairs, or even 
removing the chairs to arrange us to sit on the floor. Tullio De Mauro, 
speaking of Mario Lodi, argued that "the most incisive lesson comes from 
the account of his teaching: Mario enters a first-grade classroom on the 
first day of school and proposes using the teacher's desk as an 
excellent coop in which to raise chicks.
The teacher descends among the desks, arranges them in a circle, sits 
down anywhere, and begins to speak. This is worth several volumes of 
theoretical pedagogy." Comenius,(1) considered the forerunner of 
Pedagogical Activism, was the first to argue, in the mid-1600s, that 
"knowledge must necessarily begin through the senses, and only when this 
observation of things has been made can words intervene to explain it 
effectively."
Only a thought that restores the entire body to awareness can counteract 
the tendency to believe that the entire world can be contained behind a 
screen to be watched while sitting.
On the contrary, faced with the enormous amount of content available 
online, we need our entire body and our senses even more, to practice 
different expressive languages, and to encounter nature and the city, 
treasuring non-virtual explorations and experiences.
From this perspective, let's reflect on what the demeaning experience 
of Covid, which relegated us to screens to ensure we weren't infected, 
has meant for all of us. But let's ask ourselves how much we are still 
victims of this legacy, which has instead led our governments to 
discover new forms of control and power, preventing us from restoring 
the idea of school as a "great gathering place," a meeting place where 
the thoughts and images of an individual are reflected in an image of 
shared community, through the ability to explore and push ourselves 
imaginatively beyond our usual horizons, to change our destiny by 
seeking and affirming the humanity within us.
In my opinion, working in preschool should be experienced by all 
teachers for a period of time, perhaps even by those who teach at 
universities, because at that age, in their spontaneous way of playing, 
children transform spaces and invent worlds that don't exist. They are 
utopian, but imagining new possible worlds and prefiguring with 
imagination what doesn't yet exist are truly human ways of relating to 
nature and society.
We were born to tell stories, to create and nourish ourselves with 
poetry, music, and theater, and all of this helps us make sense of the 
world we live in.
Let's begin to transform the spaces of our schools with conviction, 
knowing that the entire world needs to be revolutionized, but we can 
only begin with the places we inhabit and with ourselves.
Notes:
1) John Amos Comenius

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