AERA 2004 – San Diego
Symposium: Spaces and Boundaries of Learning (M. Cole, Organizer)
Learning Across Multiple Places and their Chronotopes
Jay L. Lemke
School of Education
University of Michigan
Space, Time, and the Chronotopes of Learning
Space is made in time.
Our sense of place, whether immediate or virtual, is made cumulatively and progressively as we act in and move through spaces, affording ourselves of their opportunities to perceive, feel, use, act, and move.
Space is not a Kantian a priori category. Spatiality is the product of action, or more generally of material processes, through which we can construe relations we call spatial, as well as those we call temporal, among ‘moments’ of what we take to be the same on-going process.
Especially important among such processes, and setting the reference timescale and space scale relative to which others are perceived (and measured), are the processes of our own action and activity, beginning with physiological processes, famously the heartbeat rhythm, but also many more from the cellular-molecular scale to our diurnal and lunar cycles, and proceeding to simple acts such as saying a word, shaking a hand, climbing a stair, taking a step, and so on to more complex activities with multiple timescales and often multiple spatial scales as well: giving a talk, playing a game, making a journey.
We experience space and time as we make them, or as we participate in larger processes which do.
The chronotope is a notion developed by Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1981) to characterize the typical ways in which narrative genres move the scene of action from place to place, and less focally, the pacing of this movement and of typical scenes within it.
Bakhtin’s “time-space” has in common with Einstein and Minkowski’s “space-time” that spatial and temporal aspects of activity and process are considered completely inter-dependent. In both cases the root connection is the fact that it takes time to move from one place to another. For Einstein this is the principle of finite velocity, that we cannot travel instantaneously. For Bakhtin it is the presupposition that narratives which carry protagonists from place to place recount their travels and their stays as events which unfold in time.
What is important for Bakhtin, and will be relevant also for us, is the insight that particular cultures and historical epochs conventionalize the kinds of trajectories from place to place, and activity to activity, that form typical story patterns. In doing so, literary genres also frequently conventionalize the pacing of the story’s movement from setting to setting, and how time itself is presented by the story and felt by the reader, in different settings and movements between settings. Most generally, Bakhtin’s interest lies in how spatiality and temporality are constructed and used in narrative discourse, and particularly in how these constructions and uses are conventionalized differently by different authors, epochs, genres, etc.
As in art, so also in life. The cultural practices and norms of our society, or any society, and the ways these are embodied in the habitus of our bodies, our dispositions for action, the tools we are provided, and the architectures we live in also tend to conventionalize, if not routinize, the ways in which we act in different places, move from place to place and setting to setting in the course of a day, a week, or longer, and make use of place and experience space and time in and across these settings.
Consider the teacher or the student’s typical day in relation to school and home. There is the haste of preparation for the day ahead, activity at home afforded by the rooms of the house: kitchen for breakfast, bathroom for shower, bedroom for dressing, in whatever order, but often in the same order day after day. There are clocks and watches to pace us in relation to deadlines. There are relatively fixed conventional pacings for a shower or for drinking hot coffee, and these are difficult to change by very much, both from habit and for physical reasons. There are short-term moves from room to room and activity to activity at home, with their own transitional timescales. There is a sense of spatiality in terms of vision and motion: the size of rooms, the size and nearness of items and persons to one another, the time it takes to walk from here to there.
Then there is the larger spatial and longer temporal movement from home to school, by bus, by bike, by car. The time it takes, the sense of the distance of space traversed, the mobile setting of the vehicle’s interior. The pace set by the speed at which we pedal the bike or drive the car. The time available en route to talk or listen or answer a cellphone call. There is the sense of urgency or delay, or of time to kill.
At school there is a daily round, a traversal across settings and activities: the office, the homeroom, the hallways, the schoolyard, the first class and classroom. Again in each there are things to do, people to interact with, but there is in consequence of these activities always also a sense of pacing and timing, of duration and often of interruption and resumption, and there is the use and modification of the spatial affordances of the setting.
In the classroom, there is the timescale of the whole period between bells. There are routines and customary activities, for each of which we will have a sense of whether it is going faster or slower than usual, whether it is more hurried or more leisurely. We walk the space of the room when we enter and go to seat or desk. We feel our local, private space as either small and cramped, or large enough. The distance to the chalkboard or the screen matters for our eyesight; the distance between teacher and student matters to immediacy and intimacy, to surveillance and the sense of being under a gaze. We may gather into groups and re-apportion the available space in a new functional way. If we do, we also apportion available time and start a new clock to measure the pace of our progress in the task, relative to time allocated or time available.
We walk the school, and as we do we experience its spatial heterogeneity: special purpose rooms and corridors, places filled with people and those that are relatively empty, places where we can choose among multiple activities and those where there are fewer options. Places filled with tools and those not. And we make these places as much as encounter them. We can choose to re-purpose a place, briefly or for a longer time, once-off or recurrently. As space it may remain unchanged, but as place it now becomes very different. In urban schools there are one-time toilets and book closets that have become teacher offices, there are one-time gymnasiums become open-plan teaching areas. There are corridors become student gathering-places, cafeterias become science labs, playgrounds become parking lots. And as the uses change, so do our trajectories as we traverse from setting to setting in the course of a day.
The typical patterns of organization of and across activities in space and time are described by chronotopes. Chronotopes are defining features of a culture or a subculture, and of communities of practice. Chronotopes inform our design choices in shaping social-institutional spaces for particular uses. Conflict between chronotopes can make us, or them, feel uncomfortable with place or with pace, can aggravate our sense of the rightness of the flow of life. There are institutionally sanctioned chronotopes for learning in schools and classrooms. There are emergent new chronotopes for daily living in our ubiquitously mediated society. There are chronotopes for making meaning and experiencing feelings in literature, cinema, digital games, and our use of educational media. An understanding of these chronotopes is fundamental for effective design of educational environments and interactive educational media.
Critical Questions for Educational Research
Discourses of Space, Time, Place, and Pace
We are not in the habit of thinking about space and time as resources, in the way that we think of matter and energy as resources. We have been taught and we have learned with the very structure of commonplace metaphor in the discourses of our culture that Space is a Container, or that it is emptiness itself. And we are accustomed to thinking of Time as immutable, flowing uniformly independent of our lives and actions. But this is not how a novelist thinks of time, nor how an architect thinks about space.
We do have alternative vocabularies. When space is filled with social meaningful affordances, it becomes place. But we still think of a place as being defined merely by what it contains. Or perhaps by the disposition of its contents in the more abstract space. We can take some guidance here from Bakhtin and our notions of time as a resource. Our alternate vocabulary for time speaks the language of duration, of pacing, cyclicity, interruption, resumption, initiation and termination, completion, sequentiality, and rates of motion and of change. How long? How fast? How often? Starting and stopping. Pausing and continuing. Enduring. Slowing and accelerating. We may think, more generally, of pace as the complement of place, as the materialization of time: time as resource.
We make space in time. It is action and activity that are the generators of the sense of space, the spatial qualities of places, and also of the sense of time, the temporal qualities of events and narratives. As Bakhtin saw for lived space and time, and Einstein for abstract space and time, these two parametrizations of events and activities cannot be defined separately from one another. We know time, we feel temporality, only in the pacing of activity: activity that must take place in space, that traces out the spaces of our lives even as it utilizes the spatial qualities of particular places as resources for shaping action. We feel the availability and limitations of space only as we act in and across places, our actions accelerated or hampered in time as in space by the qualities of place, leading to briefer and longer durations, more or less frequent repetitions, gaps and pauses, suspensions and resumptions, diversions and returns, delays and digressions.
Chronotopes describe the typical trajectories and pacings of our traversals through and across places. Our traversals are activities seen in relation to space and time, place and pace. We act our way through a scene and a place over some rhythm of pacing in time. We act and move our way from scene to scene and place to place, pacing ourselves within and between, feeling the meaning of time and space for the conduct of activity.
This conception of chronotopes and traversals runs along the knife’s edge between semiotics and phenomenology. We take up the categories of social semiotics, where activities and places are of a type in a system of meaningfully related types, and we search their meanings experientially, to feel the patterns of pacing and the affordances and obstructions of filled-space. We take from social semiotics the notion that every element of a meaning system is a resource through which to create further meanings, and we elaborate this notion with the phenomenological qualities of experienced space and time, to begin to see them not as empty containers and inexorable uniformity, but as pliable experiential resources in the construction of felt, meaningful activity.
Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1972) criticized Levi-Straussian structuralism (Levi-Strauss, 1963) for models of exchange that were indifferent to the haste, timeliness, or tardiness of the return. Meaning arises not just in the fact of action, and the type of action, but also in the how. How is that action or activity performed: more slowly or more quickly, rarely or often, all at once or in fits and starts, in a small space or across a large one, in one place or in many, with the grain of the place or against it? Bourdieu sought to add to practice theory a notion of meaning-by-degree in addition to the classical structuralist and semiotic notion of meaning-by-kind. He did not carry this idea forward.
How can we carry it forward to better understand the chronotopes of living and of learning? In part through ethnographic study certainly, but here we come again to the practical difficulties of “following the actors” (as Latour, 1987 advises us) across all the places of their lives and across the many timescales of those lives. We can trail them, but not everywhere, and not forever. We don’t know how people create the traversals of their lives, with or against the grain of the typical chronotopes of multiple cultures and settings. We don’t know what kinds of meanings we make as cross from place to place, from setting to setting, from role to role, from institution to institution. For these are not just meanings made in each place, nor meanings transposed from place to place, nor overlays in one place from meanings made in another: they are also meanings made along the traversal itself, taking each local or briefer meaning and feeling and cumulating them, integrating them, wrestling across their lacunae and contradictions – making a life from many moments, or a day from many minutes.
How do we make a world from many places? Lived worlds are not the worlds of official cartography. Like the original inhabitants of Australia, we make our worlds along tracks: the course from place to place to place, scene to scene to scene. On many scales. Not just the tracks through our neighborhood or town, walked or driven daily and weekly. The tracks we walk again and again, or once only, through our school or office, through our house or apartment, and from one book to the next, one website to another. Our spaces and places are visual and ambulatory, tactile and auditory; they are integrated, cumulated or catenated, collected, and by not by sequence alone. The sequentiality of a track defines a scale on which we must leave one place behind to come to the next. But on shorter scales, we can see many places at once, hear other places than the one we see, array the micro-resources of place and re-make the space of that place through our use of it.
We do know something about the deliberate use of space in the construction of meaning: in urban planning, in architecture, in interior design, in the ways we arrange and organize things on shelves and tables and on the computer screen, in printed page layouts and webpage designs, in the use of space to allow writing to express temporal and logical relationships, and in the fine and decorative arts. Across all these scales, space is taken as a resource for meaning. The virtual spaces of film montage point us toward the more dynamic uses of space in design: to afford, suggest or compel a movement, a change in spatial viewpoint. We also use space to construct a scenic walk or journey. The Japanese garden makes an art of how each mini-vista looks from each point on a particular pathway, seen from a particular direction, or several. In each of these cases again there is a chronotope: a way of making and seeing space in time. There is pacing, there are multiple timescales, expected durations.
We know, in all these cases, that meaning-by-kind is important, but not enough. Relative position on the canvas or the page can vary significantly by degree, so too relative size of compositional elements, degrees of light and dark and shades of the color palette, the pace of quick-cutting in cinematic editing and montage. In an architectural space, or a virtual one, the ratios of distances, apparent parallax motions in relation to our own proper movement, and the curves and angles of visual and movement space, where we see and where we can go, all function as resources for meaning, both for the architect and for users of the space. If meaning-by-kind depends on a semiotics of categorial typologies, then we also need its complement: a semiotics of meaning-by-degree that depends on the topology of continuous variability in signifiers and signifieds (Lemke, 1999, 2000). Our sense of the rightness of place can depend on mere degrees of difference in the angle of the picture hanging on the wall. How much more must our sense of the rightness of a learning environment depend on significant ratios in the relative pacing of events and challenges, on the scope and scale of the spatial affordances of realistic places and abstract canvases for inscribing signs (words, diagrams, graphs, etc.)?
Chronotopes and Educational Design
What is the relevance for education and education research of paying attention to the use of time and space as resources for meaningful activity?
The chronotopes of schools and schooling reveal the dysfunctionality of a design long out of date and ever more out of keeping with the chronotopes of postmodern life and its leading generations. Classrooms are very small, cramped, over-crowded spaces that can afford not much resource of place for more than conversation, reading, writing, and a few simple activities with not very interesting materials. They were designed for mass education on the cheap at a time when education was mostly about basic literacy and not much else. Each room and subject and age-grade is cut off from the others, and all are cut off from the authentic communities of practice in the rest of society for which education is said, not very credibly, to prepare us. In time, each lesson is divided from those logically connected to it by at least 24 hours, the duration of any activity is limited to 40 minutes, topics change radically every few weeks, extended projects cannot continue beyond a few months, and the critically important relationships between teachers and students are arbitrarily terminated after much less than one year. This design and its familiar chronotopes works against everything we know and value about significant learning.
Contrast this with the emerging attentional economy of new generations of students.
There is a change taking place in a key aspect of the chronotopes of modern society. We are moving more and more away from a sequential approach to activities and a unifocal attentional strategy (concentrate on one thing at a time), and towards a montage or juggling of multiple attentional foci over shorter and shorter timespans (Lemke, 2003, in press-a). This is most evident in our multi-tasking: driving, walking, or shopping and talking on the cellphone or listing to your Walkman, Discman, or iPod; doing email during meetings; doing multiple IM or CHAT sessions, while doing email during meetings. As communications and computing become more ubiquitous, we have the opportunity to do more such multi-tasking. Younger, more privileged members of our society are growing up with multi-tasking habits, and they are bored with and do not function optimally when restricted to a single focus of attention, a single attentional space for extended periods of time. Perhaps it began with channel-surfing and web-surfing, doing your homework and listening to music or watching TV at the same time, perhaps it includes our expectations that we will switch jobs and careers more often, or have more than one job or major occupation at a time. In any case, classroom education, except perhaps for the movement towards more groupwork by students (which gives an element of freedom to work and converse at the same time), has not taken into account these profound changes in the attentional economy.
A conservative bias leads us to believe that there is only one best mode of functioning (unifocal, sequential); the human brain however is very good at multi-tasking, and certainly at rapidly cycling attention among various foci or attentional spaces. Students in ordinary classes in fact do often have to cycle their attention among teacher voice, writing on the board, projections on a screen, notebooks, handouts, calculators, textbook pages, other students, events seen out the window. But there is no systematic research on such processes and no systematic effort to optimize them for learning in classroom or other environments. We only try to hem them in toward our unifocal “ideal”.
Research such as Lave’s work on tailor apprentices (Lave, 1988) or Hutchins’ studies of ship navigation (Hutchins, 1995), show clearly that we learn and perform effectively in complex, multi-attentional environments. If the apprentices did not eavesdrop on the master tailor’s conversations with customers, while doing their other work, they would miss a key part of their induction into a community of practice. The ship’s mates need to rapidly inter-coordinate multiple tasks and communications, keeping aware of the actions and messages of peers, superiors, and supervisees. In both cases what is being learned or enacted is an activity system, not a single isolated task. What to the unifocal perspective seems only irrelevant distraction is in fact relevant system-integrating information, short-term or long-term.
We have the beginnings of an understanding of how people make meaning in specific activities, on single timescales, in fixed settings, primarily immediate or real settings.
We have very little understanding of how we make sense of things and cumulate our understandings as we move from one setting to another, one attentional space to another, one activity to another. We don’t know much about how what we learn in a moment or an hour does or does not add up to something that influences our thinking and behavior months and years later. Or even hours or days later. We don’t know much about how we overcome the differences between settings and setting-specific activities by creating trajectories and traversals of integration across settings and activities.
I began by talking about how space is made in time, how we follow out the typical chronotopes of our communities in moving from place to place. Bakhtin foregrounded for us the sense in which, at least in literature, and in life as well, these chronotopes represent expectable and repeated patterns, characteristic of a culture and a historical period, which do bridge and integrate, in very particular ways, across places, settings, and activities.
I believe that there are implicit chronotopes to be revealed by studying meaning trajectories across spatial sites of activity. What is difficult about such a project is more widely known today as the problem of multi-site ethnography (e.g. Eisenhart, 2001). Ethnographers, and the new geographers of social space (e.g. Carlstein, Parkes, & Thrift, 1978; Thrift, 1996), have long since recognized that we cannot make sense of the lives of others if we do not see how they live through their days, weeks, and years across many settings. We cannot simply observe them in each setting separately, and in many settings not at all.
One partial solution, not to the general problem of multi-site trajectory-based research, but to the consitituent problem of uncovering chronotopes of meaningful integration and cumulation along trajectories, at least on some relevant timescales for learning and education, is to follow actors through the spaces of their activities under conditions where their traversals can be fully recorded and re-played for commentary, interpretation, and analysis. In virtual worlds.
New Media, New Chronotopes
Suppose we could learn much more about how people make meaning across multiple media, multiple attentional foci, multiple sites, and multiple timescales? How could we use such knowledge? Clearly we could make use of such knowledge in the design of new generations of educational environments and educative media.
Future educational environments can and hopefully will be more open: allowing students to learn in classrooms and outside schools, in short activities and long-term projects, in communication with peers, younger students, older students, teachers, and experts, with access to information in many media, coming via many channels, more or less simultaneously (Lemke, in press-b). Call it “open education”. Its chronotopes will be very different from those of traditional classrooms and schools.
Among the media students will use will be interactive, immersive multimedia, combining the complexity and computational power of realistic simulations of complex natural and social systems with the affective engagement of a sense of presence in a virtual reality where activities are adventures not unlike those of the best computer games. In using these media, students will practice all the multi-tasking of the open education model, replicating (and perhaps innovating) its chronotopes, and those of the new networked society, in computer-media virtual worlds.
In educative virtual worlds they will learn to see what our culture and its science and scholarship have identified as important features and relationships to notice and pay attention to. In the world of immediate reality they will learn how much more there is to phenomenal experience than is portrayed in any representation, whether realistic or abstract.
In virtual, as in real, worlds, students will move and act in space, using the affordances of places, making space real for them by using it as a resource for action and for learning. They will do so according to typical chronotopes that impose or afford various pacings of their space-utilizing activity along traversals across sites and uses of diverse media and channels of communication.
How do we learn more about how people use space and place, time and pace in activity and learning?
It is in these virtual worlds, already today, that we have a new opportunity to study how people act, learn, and learn to learn across sites, media, genres, and timescales. Inside these virtual worlds, across the multiple attentional spaces and activity spaces that are all co-mediated by the computer network, we can record, track, and trace every keystroke and mouseclick, every virtual action and activity, all communication and collaboration: verbal, gestural, graphical. Whatever meaningful action the system affords, and on every relevant timescale.
That is not so easy to do in the ordinary world. Just try making an audio-video record, and collecting all the relevant documents and artifacts, with which people make meaning across tasks and sites over timescales of the order of days to weeks. Including all the relevant participants, including those on the other end of phone conversations.
Of course even in research on activity in virtual worlds, we do not capture everything of interest automatically. We still need to interview participants outside the virtual environment, including while re-viewing events in that world. We can do ethnographies of virtual communities, but they remain embedded in the value and belief systems of real communities, values and beliefs shaped by conditions in the ordinary world (economics, power relations, conflicts, etc.) that may not appear in the virtual ones. Embedded also in their histories, even as virtual communities begin to accumulate histories of their own.
The technical tools of usability research on end-user computing applications are available to us to study learning in virtual worlds. The data obtained from such studies will consist of records of human actions, including communications, and it will need to be analyzed by interpretive methods of the kind that have recently been developed for the study of dialogue and interview transcripts, films and videotapes of naturally occurring human activity, and ethnographic records of all kinds (cf. Lemke, 1998; Lemke, in press-c). Some of this research has already begun, but relatively little in the context of educational concerns.
We learn from research on learning in community settings more open than schools, and from research on expert performance in such settings, that we must take a very broad view of “learning” if we are to make use of research on activity in virtual environments. We cannot define learning by pre-determined outcomes. We are not interested, at this initial stage, in whether or not a student learns X. We are interested in what they do learn, and how. In how they learn to learn more efficiently. In how they learn by doing, by interacting with artifacts, tools, artificial agents, and other human beings. We are interested in how they make meaning, and experience feelings, across media, sites, activities, and timescales. We are interested in processes of integration and cumulation, the sorting out and the adding up. We can see evidence of these in performance, but outcomes alone cannot be reverse engineered to determine mechanisms. We must also look at what was done that could have led to outcomes becoming possible. We must talk with participants about strategies and meanings as they see them and recall having seen them at the time of action. We want to know the how, because that is the knowledge that will enable us to improve the design of learning media that can support the more open educational arrangements our society needs to develop.
References
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