Spatial pedagogy

Semiotics of space

Mr Keating is a model teacher. He inspires a love for learning amongst his students and his performance in the classroom has mesmerised many. Mr Keating’s skilful orchestration of his embodied semiotic modes reveals a thoughtful and careful design to engage students and arouse their interest towards the learning of poetry. In one of the more memorable lessons, Mr Keating demonstrates this through the semiotic modes of language, use of space and movement to communicate his argument convincingly. His discernible argument structure is expressed not only through language but reinforced through the use of classroom space and movement.

Mr Keating begins as he stands in the front centre of the classroom and presents his main argument, saying,‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.’ He then takes a step forward towards the students, and asserts,‘I see that look in Mr Pitt’s eye, like nineteenth century literature has nothing to do with going to business school or medical school. Kight?’ Expressing an ironic concession of the point by taking a step backwards to the front centre of the classroom, Mr Keating concedes, ‘Maybe. Mr Hopkins, you may agree with him, thinking, “Yes, we should simply study our Mr Pritchard and learn our rhyme and meter and go quietly about the business of achieving other ambitions.’”

Mr Keating then proceeds to advance his argument, by walking slowly towards the students, and stops in the centre of the classroom. He makes an unusual marked semiotic selection for a teacher, by squatting down. With the attention of the students all drawn to him, he delivers the coup-de-grace — the main thrust of his argument that

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

Dramatic no doubt. But this is not surprising, given that Mr Keating is a character played by Robin Williams, in the critically acclaimed 1989 film, Dead Poets’ Society directed by Peter Weir. Mr Keating’s deft co-ordination of the semiotic modes of language, use of space and movement, to express his message in the classroom is the reason why his classroom performance has captivated audiences then, and continues to be discussed today.

In the seminal book. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffinan first describes the theatrical and performative nature of human communication and interaction. Goffman (1959) extends the metaphor of a performance to the roles a social actor plays in the various areas of life. Through his work, he pioneered an approach known as the dramaturgical analysis for the study of selfpresentation. In the classroom, the role of the teacher is defined according to the pedagogic relations between the students and him. The teacher is expected to perform a role with many parts. Centrally, as discussed in this book, the teacher is a designer of learning for students. Just as a theatrical performer expresses meanings through the meaningful orchestration of the semiotic modes, every move of the teacher can be observed by the students and conveys meanings - intentional or incidental — as part of the learning experience in the classroom.

The use of the multimodal ensemble by Mr Keating, described in Lim (2010), may be crafted, directed, rehearsed, and staged, but its relevance to the typical teacher is no less. Teaching is a performance. The teacher takes on a persona, like any stage performer, and communicates with more than words. In the design of the learning experience for students, the teacher exploits the affordances of various semiotic resources to express different discourses and orchestrates the multimodal ensemble to reinforce the communication of the key messages of the lesson. In uncovering how the embodied semiotic modes of the use of space and movement in the classroom can express specific meanings, we invite teachers to reflect on their pedagogy and to adopt a more apt use of these meaning-making resources in their design of the students’ learning experiences.

And so, it is perhaps now rhetorical to ask, ‘Does where the teacher stand in the classroom matter? Is the way she moves from one space to another, and paces around the classroom part of the design of the learning experience of the students?’ In this chapter, we describe a typology' of classroom spaces and discuss the meanings made through the teacher’s use of space and movement in the classroom. We will explore the concept of ‘spatial pedagogy’, described in Lim, O’Halloran, and Podlasov (2012) and Lim (2011) to illustrate the semiotics of space and movement with examples from Lee and Mei, two teachers of General Paper, introduced earlier in Chapter 2. Finally, we explore the productivity of the concept of‘spatial pedagogy’ and the typology of classroom spaces for educational researchers through surveying the range of related research projects across the world in recent years.