Rhythmanalysis as method for understanding the social complexity of school spaces

Despite the recent ‘spatial turn’ in education, there is still much work to be done to take seriously the opportunities that spatial theory might afford educational research. While education research is always done somewhere with people situated in place in particular ways, the concept of space is rarely taken up beyond the notion of background or context. When space is taken up in education, it is commonly applied to physical and material architectures and rarely accounts for the relational and social production of school spaces not only as spaces for particular kinds of teaching and learning, but as spaces constitutive of the activities and interactions that take place. Yet, spatial theory offers a productive conceptual foundation for describing and analysing complex educational problems in new ways.
This paper reports on Lefebvre's (1994) production of space and methodological approach of 'rhythmanalysis' as a productive tool to understand the complex social constructions of school spaces. Schooling is founded on relationships. These relationships exist in mobile, multi-directional and multi-layered networks between teachers, students, school leadership, parents and carers, the school and local community, and official Departments of Education; but also between education policy, official curriculum, and official assessment regimes; and between the material spaces of schools such as school buildings, classrooms and outdoor spaces. These relations are complex and multidimensional, and often characterised by movement. By examining the nature of relations in school spaces across three domains - conceived, perceived and lived space - and grasping the kinds of rhythms these produce, it becomes possible to examine in close detail the complex and mobile nature of relations that shape teachers' work.
This paper draws on a recent ethnographic study based at a comprehensive high school in the outer-east of Melbourne, Australia to describe and demonstrate how Lefebvre’s production of space and rhythmanalysis was applied to better understand the way relations in and across school spaces shaped teachers’ intercultural work at this school. The application of spatial theory allowed me to grasp the complexity of entangled relational spaces to better understand how powerful discursive practices that sustain dominant imaginaries of what it means to be from and belong in the Hills shapes curriculum translation and enactment and teachers’ intercultural work at this site. I argue that spatial theory offers new possibilities to understand and explain complex educational problems.