3.1 Institutional and personal spaces
Everyone involved in a school situation will be inhabiting a different institutional and personal space. A key component in any taking-a-lead will involve negotiating a place within such institutional and personal spaces. The production of these spaces is achieved through human practices, through representation, regulation and organisation, as well as through social, cultural, political, and economic practices and their associated meanings (Lefebvre, 1991).
A valuable tool for exploring spaces is the notion of ‘boundaries’. This is partly because we come to understand who we are by comparing ourselves to others and other groupings, but also because boundaries are the spaces in which different practices, values, knowledge and resources come together. It is at boundaries that we bring together different interpretations of multi-faceted tasks and can gain insights into the ways of others so as to enable collaboration (Edwards, 2011).
Activity 7: And the same to you?
Let’s consider an example of how these different world views can influence our practices and our capacity to collaborate.
Read the following pdf which is an extract taken from Waitoller, F. R., & Kozleski, E. B. (2013) ‘Working in boundary practices: Identity development and learning in partnerships for inclusive education’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 31, pp. 25–45. (Sections 3.3–3.6 – pp. 19–29 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .)
In this paper there are two acronyms:
- UITE – This stands for Urban Initiative for Teacher Education, a project involving 3 schools and a University in the United States.
- CHAT – This stands for Cultural Historical Activity Theory, an approach that explores the socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts of partnerships; allowing researchers to focus on rules, divisions of labour, and the tools that orient participants towards objects or outcomes.
As you are reading consider the following questions. Make notes about your thoughts.
- What aspects of the boundary (or boundaries) does this paper draw attention to?
- What is the importance of consensus around boundary objects for co-operation?
- Can you think examples of these aspects of boundaries that you have experienced in your own life?
- Why do you think it is useful (or not useful) in finding ways to lead, to think of boundaries as socially created?
Comment
The authors of this paper focus upon four aspects of the boundary: practices, brokers, identities and objects. The coming together of services to provide support is an excellent example of boundary practices with overlapping activity systems; while the practitioners can be seen as boundary brokers who are trying to deal with the ambiguities of their different systems. Another example occurred around identities, and how the process of studying a course such as this one, serves to enable people to reform themselves around cultural tools that come from other arenas. In this latter context, the paper you have just read is serving as a boundary object. It exists between different social spaces with varying interpretations and functions; for instance, it is functioning as a means of reporting research, as a tool for teaching, and potentially as a tool to effect schools practices.
Viewing the boundary in this way provides a focus to reflect upon experiences, and different socially-situated perspectives. Exploring boundary objects seems a particularly rich focus for such reflection since experience of them depends upon the use of them. These objects exist between different social spaces with varying interpretations and functions; they do not come with an inherent nature. Groups working with an object will frequently need to shift back-and-forth between their different interpretations. In scaling an object up, however so that a standardised approach is taken to that object, there seems to be a danger of dominance around one group’s interpretation of any given object, reflecting the relative importance of that grouping in the wider social space. For example, medical labels (such as autism, down syndrome, PMLD: profound and multiple learning disabilities, PTSD: Post-traumatic stress disorder) carry with them a particular power which arises from their function both in medical and administrative spaces. But the power allotted to these functions, carries over into educational or family spaces where alternative interpretations and responses are equally in evidence. These interpretations might, for example, be associated with advocacy and relational understandings of learning (and labelling) which have less influence than the dominant interpretation from the space beyond.
The originators of the notion of boundary object stated in their first paper (Star and Griesemer, 1989) that boundary objects are both robust enough to maintain an identity across sites but fluid enough to adapt to local needs and constraints which arise from several parties using them. In the school context you could consider such objects as: a school library, a timetable, a lesson plan, or a formalised support plan. These may serve to structure or support communications and the development of practices, but how we understand them (their form, their value to us and how we interact with them) will vary hugely across spaces and contexts.
A leading role everyone can play when thinking about marginality and people’s membership in different social spaces is to reflect upon the objects associated with these spaces and to use these reflections to inform practise. There are, for example, tensions between multiple membership across group, alongside problems of identity and loyalty, which can be experienced through our uses of objects across those spaces.
Meanings attached to objects are fundamentally uncertain. They do not neatly transfer across different systems and arenas of use. For example, understandings of an impairment, a religious symbol, a type of food and so forth; as they move across boundaries (between spaces), particular interpretations come to dominate, and minority interpretations can create vulnerabilities. Consequently, people can easily find themselves oscillating between ways of presenting themselves and their understandings. They can feel a pressure to compromise their other interpretation or to take a risk in revealing their own interpretation.
Such responses are particularly significant in a diverse learning space such as a classroom, where students and staff can have a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and widely varying responses to everyday boundary objects. The role of leadership in this context, would seem to be about raising possible other interpretations. It is about challenging presumptions about standardised or residual categories and advocating for other people’s understandings and experiences.