Chapter 4: Spatiality and Teacher Workplace Cultures: The Department as Nexus

Although much schooling is clearly spatially constituted, studies of schools tend to take the spatial for granted, either ignoring it completely or interpreting the classroom, staffroom or school as fixed and bounded “modernist spaces of enclosure” (Lankshear et al., 1996). For instance, recent education policy is informed by an almost global discourse of school effectiveness where large-scale surveys de-contextualise schools, reducing them to a series of multivariate factors. While school improvement writing acknowledges the importance of culture(s), this is represented within the container of the institution. Schools are constructed as discrete, uncontested entities existing as circumscribed “spatial and temporal islands.” This enables wider social and political problems to be “re-territorialized” as school problems (Nespor, 2002) with teachers, pupils and “the community” easily blamed.