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Educação em Revista

versão impressa ISSN 0102-4698versão On-line ISSN 1982-6621

Educ. rev. vol.37  Belo Horizonte  2021  Epub 02-Abr-2021

https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-469820854 

SCHOOL SPACES AND ARCHITECTURES

SCHOOL SPATIALITY, READINGS IN FOCUS AND DISPLACEMENTS IN THE (DE)CONSTRUCTION OF AN OBJECT

ALEJANDRA MARÍA CASTRO1 
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1004-6593

1 PhD in Educational Sciences, Full Professor at the School of Educational Sciences and researcher at the "Maria Saleme de Burnichon" Research Center, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, National University of Córdoba, Argentina. <alecastrosanuy@gmail.com>


ABSTRACT2:

The school space is a substantive dimension of school forms and cultures that needs to be approached in its complexity and (dis)articulations with pedagogical, social and cultural processes of educational institutions, educational policies and the social context. In this paper we present, in a first part, some theoretical-methodological perspectives and analytical categories with the purpose of broadening and deepening their knowledge. These tools were built with contributions from the social sciences, particularly from critical and post-structuralist geography, in a process that also includes interdisciplinary interventions and reflections among pedagogues, architects and industrial designers in the framework of research projects at the National University of Córdoba. In a second part, these analytical categories are put into play with the processes of schooling and some reflections and questions are raised about the challenges involved in the expansion of the right to education in spatial terms.

Key words: School spaces; production of space; right to education; school spatiality

RESÚMEN:

El espacio escolar es una dimensión sustantiva de las formas y las culturas escolares que necesita ser abordado en su complejidad y en las (des)articulaciones con procesos pedagógicos, sociales y culturales de las instituciones educativas, las políticas educativas y el contexto social. En este trabajo se presentan, en una primera parte, algunas perspectivas teórico-metodológicas y categorías analíticas con el propósito de ampliar y profundizar en su conocimiento. Estas herramientas se construyeron con aportes de las ciencias sociales, en particular de la geografía crítica y postestructuralista, en un proceso que incluye, asimismo, intervenciones y reflexiones interdisciplinarias entre pedagogos, arquitectos y diseñadores industriales en el marco de proyectos de investigación en la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. En una segunda parte, se ponen en juego estas categorías analíticas con los procesos de escolarización y se plantean algunas reflexiones e interrogaciones en torno a los desafíos que implica la ampliación de derecho a la educación en clave espacial.

Palabras clave: Espacios escolares; producción del espacio; derecho a la educación; espacialidad escolar

RESUMO:

O espaço escolar é uma dimensão substantiva das formas e das culturas escolares que precisa ser abordadas em sua complexidade e nas (des)articulações com os processos pedagógicos, sociais e culturais das instituições escolares, as políticas educacionais e o contexto social. Neste trabalho apresenta-se, inicialmente, algumas perspectivas teórico-metodológicas e categorias analíticas com o propósito de ampliar e aprofundar esse conhecimento. Essas ferramentas foram construídas a partir das ciências sociais e, particularmente, da geografia crítica e pós-estruturalista, num processo que também incluiu intervenções e reflexões interdisciplinares entre pedagogos, arquitetos y designs industriais no âmbito de projetos de pesquisa na Universidade Nacional de Córdoba. Na segunda parte do trabalho, essas categorias analíticas são articuladas e problematizadas com os processos de escolarização e levanta-se algumas reflexões e questionamentos relacionados aos desafios postos à ampliação do direito à educação considerando a dimensão espacial.

Palavras chave: Espaços escolares; produção do espaço; direito à educação; espacialidade escolar

INTRODUCTION

I think I am extremely nomadic. I mean, I quickly transform what I find in a room. If we want to talk about the idea of homeless personally and more philosophically, I immediately think of the Romanian Mircea Eliade... He has a definition of home that I like very much. He states that it is the point where a vertical line and a horizontal line intersect. The horizontal line is the line of exchanges in every sense of the word: it is geographical and it is what gives rise to the exchanges of the world. And the vertical line is between the dead and the sky. Whether the dead are there or not, the belief is in one. That is the little point we call home: exactly where the line of exchanges crosses the metaphysical and the eternal. (John Berger, 2007, p.50)

In this paper we present some explorations that, from research3, we have been building at a theoretical-conceptual and analytical level on the processes of schooling in the framework of compulsory schooling and the right to education. With the enactment of the National Education Law No. 26,206 in 2006 in Argentina, which recognizes education as a personal and social right, as a public good, non-transferable and guaranteed by the State, the extension of the compulsory nature of the educational trajectories is structurally modified, both in Early Education, being compulsory the 4- and 5-year-old classrooms, and in Secondary Education, compulsory in its entirety. As for Primary Education, the length of time students remain in school is extended through the Extended Day, which is implemented in counter-school hours.

Our research project aims to study the schooling processes that are being deployed, since the enactment of the aforementioned legislation, to guarantee the right to education and compulsory education, specifically in secondary school, and to account for actions and decisions that collaborate, favor or hinder the guarantee of this right, both at the level of ministerial policies and educational institutions. To account for these processes implies considering the complexity at stake in the implementation of educational public policies. We conceive that the processes that are disaggregated to guarantee the right to education are varied, involve different scales and are crossed by tensions, conflicts, diversity of interests and power -negotiation and influence capacity- of the different social actors involved. In our research we propose to study in a relational way what is stated in the regulations, the policies of educational inclusion, and the aspects linked to the forms of organization of the secondary school in relation to this legal mandate of compulsory secondary education. The central hypothesis, which has enabled us to make a complex reading of educational processes, is that the study of educational policies and the changes induced by the State require a simultaneous analysis of the official regulations that are deployed for the system as a whole and of the processes of translation, resignification and assignment of meanings that the subjects of educational institutions produce on these regulations.

In this article, we share some reflections on the spatial dimension in these schooling processes. This dimension, is addressed in recent years in studies and research both in the educational and architectural fields (Castro and Oliva, 2020; Serra and Trlin, 2017; Cattaneo and Espinoza, 2018; Chiurazzi, 2007; Escolano Benito, 2000; Castro and Serra, 2020). Our approach is carried out from an interdisciplinary4 perspective, for which we are building a series of theoretical-analytical categories that allow us to configure an interdisciplinary perspective to read and analyze spatiality in school. With the results of our research we intend to contribute to the development of a perspective for the analysis and study of spatiality in education, considering in this process the contributions and debates of the social sciences, pedagogy, educational policy, as well as the records and interventions that we have been developing, as an interdisciplinary team of architects, pedagogues and industrial designers, in public schools in the city of Cordoba with which we are working and which are part of our empirical field.

In this sense, this article is structured in two parts. The first part, in which we recover certain theoretical and analytical developments from the social sciences, especially from geography and sociology, which constitute fertile inputs for the construction of our analysis. Taking ideas, concepts and categories produced in other disciplinary contexts and putting them into play to read and approach objects of study in different contexts, has the risk of producing linear readings and forcing meanings, we are aware of this possibility, however we assume the challenge because these readings have enabled us to broaden our theoretical and analytical horizon, because this intellectual and methodological operation has enabled us to open the field of view, ask other questions, look at other edges of our object of knowledge: spatiality in education, and more specifically the school space. In this intellectual operation, which implies demanding epistemological and methodological challenges, the commitment we assume as researchers is to build connectors, as a way of interlocution of meanings between these concepts and ideas produced in different fields of knowledge and the uses we give them in our empirical and conceptual field. The ideas and analytical categories that we recover from other fields, as in the case of geography, undergo mutations and displacements of their "original" senses, giving rise to other possible new senses, in the links and interactions with other analytical categories and the field work itself carried out in the framework of our research. This is what we are constructing in the first part of the article and it is deepened in the second part.

In the second part of the text, we approach the empirical field, which, as said, involves the schooling processes and the mechanisms that are put in place, both at the level of policies and educational institutions, to guarantee the right to education and the compulsory nature of secondary school, understanding that this is a social construction and one of the main objectives of educational public policy. In this part, we pose some questions around the link between these educational policies and spatiality, recovering and putting into play the analytical, descriptive and explanatory potential of the approach we are building in an interdisciplinary way in our research. We are aware that this is a task that needs to continue to broaden and deepen, however, we have started a path, our path betting on research and interdisciplinary work, not exempt of conflicts and disputes, but also of great power to account for complex realities that demand readings and analysis that do not reduce and impoverish that complexity.

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT SCHOOL SPACES?

There is a diversity of ideas, dimensions, planes that we can associate to the school space. In a first approximation, we will state some aspects that we understand to be edges, facets of the school space and that allow us to visualize the wide field of questions linked to the signifier "school space":

  • School space refers to the architecture, to the materiality of the school building, to the limits and interactions between the school and the neighborhood-city-public space context.

  • School space refers to the relationship between bodies, objects, buildings. To the relations of proximity, distance, hierarchies, differences, articulations and disarticulations. To the connection, disconnection between points, parts and trajectories.

  • The school space is a device that orders, channels, regulates, controls and produces bodies, representations and meanings.

  • The school space refers to a specific institutional place that society designates as a place for the socialization and transmission of knowledge and wisdom among peers and generations.

  • School space is a dimension, as the temporal, structural and structuring dimension of the school device that, in articulation with other components, discourses and practices, configure and consolidate the modern school form.

  • The school space is part of the organizational matrix of the school, it is a dimension of the ways of being and doing school. It is a constitutive element of school organization and of the daily life of schools.

  • The school space is what the subjects who inhabit that space make of it, it is not only the materiality of the buildings but the senses and meanings constructed by the subjects in relation to the spaces and spatiality.

Surely, we can continue to deploy other aspects that refer to school space, which could lead us to conclude that one of the characteristics of school space is the breadth and diversity of aspects involved and, in this sense, it poses us the challenge of building its specificity. However, we understand that the construction of this specificity or delimitation does not necessarily imply the reduction, understood as a tight identification and selectivity of the features that configure it, but rather -and this is our option- an analytical path that allows us to point out that the signifier "school space" refers, and has the power to refer, to a broad spectrum of issues, while it is the product of a set of interrelations and processes that we will try not to dilute, reduce, deny or make invisible in the reflection that we propose. Precisely, the invitation is to recognize that power and to build that thickness and density that we believe the school space has as an object of knowledge.

THE DENSITY, THE THICKNESS, THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SCHOOL SPACE.

To ignore the fact that, despite its sedentary appearance, education is a permanent nomadism of ideas, of people, of problems and conjunctures, would be to deny its own essence. (Carlos Skliar, 2018)

We propose to approach the category school space in a plot of senses, which contribute the social sciences, with the idea of opening the analysis and reflection and to account for the thickness, density and complexity that we understand entails the construction of this theoretical-analytical category. The social sciences allow us to broaden the pedagogical view and raise other questions, consider new edges, planes and relationships. The objective is to contribute to the reflection of the school space and try to produce readings of it that do not simplify its configuration nor reinforce its concealment and naturalization, but rather, from a critical and exploratory attitude, cooperate in its knowledge and study.

The questions that guide our search in the field of social sciences are: how do social sciences conceptualize space, is space that which is occupied, is it what contains things, is it a surface, is it a stage or backdrop where social acts or events take place?

The contributions of geography were central in this path, especially those studies that emerged after the epistemological revolution of the geographic field in the 1970s, which problematized space by characterizing it as a complex and dynamic social elaboration, giving way to what was called the spatial turn, characterized by its rejection, criticism and generation of alternative proposals to the conception of geography understood as a positivist quantitative theoretical science5. These are critical studies, which give recognition and visibility not only to the macro structure and its influence on social and geographical processes, but fundamentally to those that recognize the role of subjects and local contexts in the production of social and geographical events (Massey, 1994, 2005, 2008; Gregory, 1984; Harvey, 1998, among others). We also inquired into the contributions of humanist geographers, who consider in spatial analysis, subjective, affective, aesthetic and symbolic aspects in the relationships between human beings and their environment, in terms of place or lived space (Tuan, 1977, 2003).

A fundamental contribution in the approach from the social sciences was made by Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space, -historian, philosopher, urbanist- who makes a critical relational proposal, consisting of an articulation of different forms of spatialities: representations of space, spaces of representation and spatial practices.

The positions of geographers such as Doreen Massey, Derek Gregory, David Harvey, Allan Pred, Yves Lacoste, inspired and influenced by sociologists and urbanists such as Lefebvre and Castels, renew the debates and deepen the need to revalue the role of the spatial context in the explanation and interpretation of social, political and economic processes and phenomena6. They also criticize and distance themselves from positions that consider space as a kind of amorphous container where diverse social processes take place, as well as from others that maintain that space and its organization are a mere reflection of the social structure, determined by economic and social processes, where the category of geographic space would have little or nothing to say. These formulations can be interpreted as a response from geography to social theory, especially the reconsideration of the role given to agents in the structure. (Noguè i Font, 1989, p.66).

As can be seen, these theoretical and methodological productions problematized space, considering it as something more than a reflection of the social structure or a mere container of social relations, revaluing the spatial context in the explanation and interpretation of social, political and economic processes and phenomena. In addition, they consider certain particularities, until then excluded and ignored by positivist geography, such as space as a lived place, full of meanings for human beings, positioning and revaluing affective, sensorial, aesthetic and symbolic aspects of the relationships between subjects and their environment, as in the case of geography with a humanistic approach.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF A VIEW ON SCHOOL SPATIALITY

In the following, and recovering these social science perspectives, we make some reflections on school space and spatiality in education inspired by the contributions of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, which are valuable and powerful to broaden and enrich the analysis of our object.

The school space is a social production, which means that as a social construction it is linked to and traversed by the ideas, disputes, tensions and practices of the time and context in question. There is a permanent interrelation between the spatial and temporal dimension. In this interrelationship, time configures the relations and production of space and, at the same time, space produces subjectivities that translate into ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, intervening and being in the world. This spatiotemporal intersection is key to analyze the link between spatiality and school and how its configuration is explained by certain social, economic, political and cultural processes. If we consider for example the modern school, we observe a certain configuration of space as a product of educational ideas and pedagogical positions, prevailing in that context, which tends to specification, division and hierarchization. These attributes are translated into school buildings and their use. The places where teaching takes place are specified, differentiating them from other indeterminate spaces destined to the function of teaching in previous times. School spaces, classrooms, playgrounds, libraries, gardens, principal's house, etc. are divided and assigned functions as opposed to undifferentiated spaces. According to the pedagogy that is supported, the place of the teacher, the teacher, the monitor and also certain objects of the school device, the teacher's desk or table, the blackboard, the flagpole and the flag, etc., are hierarchized. These issues, together with others, such as the constitution of the pedagogical field, the formation of a group of specialists -teachers, professors- to teach, the determination of a set of knowledge and curricula, are shaping the modern school, as a machine for educating (Pineau, Dussel and Caruso, 2001) not without contradictions and tensions both within itself and with other contemporary ideas and practices.

Therefore, we say that space is not a precondition, but the result of an activity and, as we have argued, it has a temporal dimension. Space is social production, it does not remain static, but is the creator and creation of a set of relations in permanent transformation in which it intervenes in an incisive way7. This temporal dimension allows us to consider interactions, connections and resistances of school spaces in relation to ideas, social and cultural practices beyond the school, but which influence, cross and configure spatialities in education.

For Henri Lefebvre (2013) conflicts and social contradictions are embodied in the urban structure, hence there is an intimate relationship between politics and the everyday life of subjects. He analyzes the link between space, power and the uses made of space, which often seems to naturalize a state of things, a situation that prevents seeing the ideologies and positionings in certain spatial configurations and representations.

In his Reflections on the Politics of Space (Reflexiones sobre la Política del Espacio), Lefebvre (1976) argues that space is not a scientific object separate from ideology or politics, but has always been political and strategic. If space has the appearance of neutrality and indifference to its contents, and thus appears to be purely formal and the epitome of rational abstraction, it is precisely because it has already been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident in the landscape. Space is political and ideological. It is a literary product full of ideologies. (Lefebvre, 1976, p.31 in Oslender, 1999, p.4).

To think that different spatialities exist and interrelate in a territory, as Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space (La producción del espacio) (2013), is from our point of view, one of the most outstanding contributions to build an analytic of school space. This enables us to think of the school space as a place where different types of lived, perceived and represented spatialities coexist and intertwine. This analysis of school space considers interrelated and simultaneously the discourses, representations and practices of the educational space in the daily experience of living and passing through it.

The idea that there are different spatialities at play, sometimes interconnected, sometimes distanced, with ruptures and tensions between them, we redefine it to argue that in the analysis of school spatiality there coexist discourses and representations that model, give meaning to school spatial forms, both material and symbolic, that operate by highlighting or making invisible certain processes and configurations of schooling. But that in turn these configurations, which are practices of spatiality, influence the ways of thinking and perceiving space. Lefevbre will say that the history of space coincides neither with the inventory of objects, nor with representations and discourses, but that a history of space must consider spaces of representation and representations of space, the links between them, as well as spatial practice8.

We take these three forms of spatiality and relate them to the field of education, to the processes of schooling and to their potential for thinking about school spatiality.

A first form of spatiality is constituted by representations of space. According to Lefebvre (2013) these refer to the conceived space, to the "space of scientists, urban planners, technocrats and social engineers" (p.97), they are representations of space that derive from a particular logic and from technical and rational knowledges. These knowledges are linked to the institutions of dominant power and to the standardized representations generated by a hegemonic 'logic of visualization', represented for example in maps, statistics, etc., producing standardized visions and representations that exist in state structures, in the economy, and in civil society. This legibility functions as a simplification of space to a transparent surface. In this way a particular normalized vision is produced that obscures struggles, ambiguities, and other ways of seeing, perceiving, and imagining the world. It authorizes itself as the 'truth' of space. Indeed, there are multiple forms of challenges and re-appropriations of space by social actors. However, what this conceptualization of space does is to consolidate the growing importance of dominant forms of this logic of visualization and the relations of power and knowledge that reproduce it and are reproduced by it. (Oslender, 1999).

In the educational field, this form of spatiality refers us to ideas, stories and theories that in different historical moments configure the ways of looking, conceiving and acting in the educational spatiality. An example of this is the normalist pedagogical discourses of the late nineteenth century on school space with its power distribution systems in which we recognize central positions (occupied by adults) and other peripheral ones, the monumentality of buildings as forms of communication of the meaning socially assigned to education, and hygienism as the hegemony of the medical approach in the validation of the construction of school buildings. Other examples closer to our times are the entry into the agenda of school infrastructure policies of discourses on accessibility, universal design and safety in school architecture that imply specific forms of educational inclusion and regulate positions and effects regarding the care of bodies in institutional spaces; likewise, another example can be observed in the architectural design of typical schools, buildings identical to each other, implanted indistinctly in central or peripheral, rural or urban spaces, without considering climatic, territorial, cultural and social issues.

These are some examples that throughout the history of schooling functioned and some of them still function as dominant visualization discourses with effects on the representations of the school space. Each one of them was consolidated, supported by scientific arguments, specialized knowledge and appealing to a 'true' representation, which in many cases acts and has effects of naturalization and concealment of the ideologies that sustain it. Sometimes the naturalization of school space is such that it acts as a "true" ideology that prevents thinking about other ways of configuring the space itself. This is a performative effect of these representations on other possible representations.

The second form of spatiality is constituted by the spaces of representation. Lefebvre defines spaces of representation as "...lived through the images and symbols that accompany it" (2013, p.98). These spaces have history as their origin, they contain the places of passion and action, those of lived situations, they are qualitative, fluid and dynamic.

The spaces of representation refer to the mental dimension of space, to how individuals perceive, imagine and value space. The set of these perceptions and valuations produce space, hence the importance of considering it in the analysis. The spaces of representation are linked to the daily experience of living in space, they are the lived spaces. Oslender (1999) would say that they are forms of local knowledge, less formal; dynamic, symbolic and saturated with meanings, constructed and modified in the course of time by social actors. Resistance, the production of counter-hegemonic spaces, are located in this dimension of the triad. Lefebvre will call them "sites of resistance". In these spaces we find a great variety of 'counter-discourses', in Foucault's sense, presented by actors who refuse to recognize and accept hegemonic power. (Oslender, 1999, p.7).

For his part, anthropologist and geographer David Harvey characterizes representational spaces as "mental inventions (codes, signs, spatial discourses, utopian projects, imaginary landscapes, and even material constructions, such as symbolic spaces, specific built environments, paintings, museums, etc.) that imagine new meanings or new possibilities for spatial practices." (Harvey, 1998, p. 244).

Thinking about this form of spatiality in the school enables us to recognize, highlight and analyze the school space as a space imagined, valued and intervened by the subjects, through symbols, images and exchanges of everyday life. Representational spaces have among their features fragmentation, a certain disconnection and laxity typical of discourses or configurations in formation, which is undoubtedly the possibility of the appearance of other spaces, other registers, other (dis)connections.

In school spatiality, spaces of representation are ideas and materializations that imply other modes, other ways of conceiving and producing space, they are productions that question the naturalized forms of the traditional normalized and reified school space, in turn, these spaces of representation are also questioned, crossed, tensioned by cultural transformations and experiences of contemporary subjectivation. We read the spaces of representation in the school in the (dis)articulations and tensions with the visualization regimes of the spatial -which we developed in previous paragraphs- and also in the experiences and positions of the school itself in its teaching and learning proposals and curricular definitions, in the interactions with the neighborhood, the community, the cultures, the beliefs, the values and the practices. We have known some school experiences that mean a displacement or dislocation of the traditional meanings and uses of the school space, some of them involve experiences that leave the materiality of the school building and circulate in other spaces, either in the open public space or in other institutions. These experiences have a common feature: the appropriation of space by the actors involved as a possibility of constructing other senses of spatiality. However, the forms of representation spaces as other spatialities are difficult to make visible, to register. This issue is addressed by the pedagogue Silvia Serra and the architect Margarita Trlin when they state, as a result of extensive research in the province of Santa Fe, that at different times in the history of provincial education there have been innovative and avant-garde pedagogical experiences, but that it is very difficult to account for and recognize to what extent the school buildings where these experiences took place were questioned and modified. We agree with the authors that this opens a line of inquiry that aims to know "why space operates conventionally in the implementation of avant-garde pedagogical proposals" (Serra and Trlin, 2014, p.28).

The third, and last form of spatiality are spatial practices. These are associated with perceived space, everyday reality and urban reality. "Modern spatial practice is thus defined by the everyday life of an inhabitant" (Lefebvre, 2013, p.97). For his part, David Harvey posits that spatial (material) practices are the physical and material transfers and interactions that occur in and across space to ensure social production and reproduction, which "are never neutral on social issues. They always express some class or social content and, in most cases, constitute the core of intense social struggles" (Harvey, 1998, p.265). For Oslender (1999) spatial practices refer to the ways in which we generate, use and perceive space. On the one hand, there are the processes of commodification and bureaucratization of everyday life, a phenomenon that Lefebvre considers symptomatic and constitutive of modernity and that has colonized social space. However, on the other hand, these spatial practices are intimately linked to the experiences of everyday life and the collective memories of different ways of life. They therefore carry a potential to resist this colonization of concrete spaces. Lefebvre will say that spatial practices have a double modality, domination and appropriation.

Thinking about the practices of spatiality in school spaces, in this double register of domination and appropriation, enables us to analyze what happens in schools in terms of domination and appropriation of spaces, to focus on the spaces and times that have territorialized and territorialize school space, supported by knowledge, powers and hegemonic forms, not only in the pedagogical field but also in the social, political, cultural and economic fields, and the ways or forms of appropriation of these spaces that the actors construct, in opposition, differentiation, or translation and re-signification in the attempt to make other use/s outside the instituted one.

As we have already said, we consider Lefebvre's proposal a valuable contribution to the effects of an analytic of space, a powerful perspective for the study of space in general and, in our particular case, of school space. Within the framework of his relational model between different forms of spatialities, we ask ourselves: what is school spatial practice like, is there a dominant style in this practice of material space, how is this practice or practices of school space structured and arranged, how is school space configured as a representational space in the daily experience of the subjects, what relation or relations can be established between spatial practices and the daily experiences of the subjects?

Another contribution, in this case from geography, is that of the critical Marxist and feminist geographer Doreen Massey. In an article published in 2005 and entitled "Philosophy and politics of spatiality: some considerations", the author proposes a way of defining space and recognizes that it is one of the most obvious things that are mobilized as a term in an infinite number of different contexts, but whose potential meanings are rarely thematized or made explicit.

To construct a definition, the author presents three propositions of how space could be conceptualized. A first proposition holds that space is a product of and is constituted by interrelationships, from the global immense to the intimate of intimacy. The second proposition holds that space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity, it is where different trajectories coexist, it is the sphere that makes possible the existence of more than one voice. "Without space, there is no multiplicity; without multiplicity, there is no space...they are co-constitutive" (Massey, 2005, p.105). The third proposition expresses that, precisely because space is the product of relationships, relationships that are necessarily implicit in the material practices to be carried out, it is always in the process of formation, in becoming, never finished, never closed.

His contribution enables us to construct some reflections on the questions posed at the beginning of this article, such as whether space is a surface on which social subjects go about their lives or a backdrop against which social events unfold. From what has been said in the previous paragraph, it is obvious that he disagrees with this characterization of space. Massey, rather, brings us closer to a definition of space as an open configuration, containing existing and future relationships, always changing and yet to be realized. He will say that space is the sphere of the (dis)encounter between trajectories, a place where they co-exist, influence each other and come into conflict, hence space is always in the process of realization, it always has something chaotic about it - that which is not yet prescribed by the system. "It is the sphere of the potential juxtaposition of different narratives, of the forging of new relationships. Spatiality is also a source for the production of new trajectories, new stories" (Massey, 2005, p.121).

We can advance in this line of conceptualization of space and propose that it is an existing and potential formation, that is, a set of interactions that are being, and also the sphere of other potential linkages. This means that we are dealing with a conception of space as openness, potentiality and permanent formation of relations. From a critical perspective, which we are interested in sustaining, we recover the idea of the chaotic, as that which has not yet been captured by the system and the norm, and in this sense is the possibility of creating something new, of dislocation of the existing. If we think of school spatiality from this perspective, we inscribe it in a tradition that recognizes those gestures, elements, links and ideas that, however minuscule they may be, produce a displacement of the consolidated and hegemonic configurations.

In the light of these contributions, we conjecture that the school space is not a mere reflection of the social structure, nor a stage where a social game is played or represented, but rather, a specific spatial context, in permanent movement and configuration. It is materiality as well as power, social construction and subjectivation. It is a configuration of interrelations, at the same time as a product of those interrelations, which implies multiplicity, connection and disconnection, the overlapping of trajectories, histories, stories and experiences that are produced in relation to the society of which it is a part, but it is not the mere reflection of what happens in it. Because school space as a place implies considering the senses and meanings that subjects construct around it in a specific social and historical context. In this specific spatial context, we can recognize a multiplicity of spatialities, in terms of materialities, representations and experiences, which allows us to think of the school space as a specific social reality crossed by discourses, materialities, powers, interests, ideologies and practices in dispute and tension, in its reification and attempts to denaturalize it.

EDUCATIONAL INCLUSION POLICIES, THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION AND THE PRESENCE OF THE SPATIAL IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THAT RIGHT IN ARGENTINA.

If a story is going to have any kind of authenticity, it will have to be dangerously close to what it is telling. And, at the same time, it will have to be astonishingly far away because otherwise what it is describing will not find its measure on the human scale. So, we have this continuous back and forth, intimately close and very distant. (John Berger, 2007, p.52)

In Argentina, similar to what has happened in other Latin American countries, in the last decades legislation has been passed and public education policies have been implemented to extend the schooling of the population, either by extending the number of compulsory years at different levels of the education system or by increasing the number of hours of the school day and the school time. The National Education Law No. 26.206 (LEN) passed in 2006 in Argentina, extends the compulsory nature of the initial level to more years, extends the compulsory nature of secondary school to its entirety and increases the number of hours in elementary school with the extended school day modality.

These public policy proposals, which are aimed at extending and guaranteeing the right to education of the population provided for in the law itself, make use of a set of measures, strategies and actions called educational inclusion policies9. One of the main challenges is the inclusion in the schooling processes10 of sectors that have historically been excluded (Nóvile, 2016), so the actions and decisions, within the framework of what is foreseen in the regulations, revolve around how to guarantee this right. Thus, we ask ourselves: what actions and decisions tend and make possible the realization of the right to education, what conditions are necessary to guarantee the exercise of this right?

We understand that these are structural and structuring questions of educational policy in the current context. It is in this sense that we recover them to link them to our reflections on school space and spatiality. In our research, we consider as part of the empirical field, the political texts that express educational policies and also what happens in the construction of meanings and translations operated, at different scales of the educational system and schools, by the social actors involved in these processes. This theoretical-methodological option, as stated at the beginning of the article, is carried out from a relational perspective, which tries not to simplify these processes, attending both macro-political spheres and the analysis of micro-policies present in different instances of the policy disaggregation process.

In this section, we share some reflections that, in a relational way, we have been building between the mandates of educational inclusion and the construction of spatiality in school institutions. The objective is to elucidate how and in what ways the spatial is articulated or disarticulated with these purposes of educational policy. Therefore, if we translate the questions posed in a previous section into a spatial key, we can express them as follows: How is the extension of compulsory education resolved spatially in schools? What are the implications of educational inclusion at a spatial level? How is the extension or extension of the elementary school day resolved spatially? How can we think of secondary schools for all?

In the first approaches made in our research, we opened the game to the social sciences, in dialogue with the contributions of pedagogy and educational policy, in their potential contribution to read and analyze the spatial dimension in educational and school processes.

As has already been pointed out, Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, speaks of spatial practices and says that in the relations that human groups establish with the spatial environment there are always power relations, which have two modalities: domination and appropriation. The domination of space is characterized by the link with knowledge and political and economic influence, that is, a technical and practical transformation of nature that ends up territorializing power in space. And, in contrast, but in dialectical relation, are the practices of appropriation, which are associated with a more subjective, cultural and symbolic aspect of the same, to the use of space, to the symbols and times generated by the subjects who construct their territoriality (Haesbaert, 2004). Likewise, Lefebvre states that to inhabit for an individual or for a group is to appropriate something. To appropriate is not to own, but to make one's own work, to model it, to shape it, to put one's own stamp on it.

In our study we maintain that to inhabit is to appropriate space. Therefore, we try to identify in this process the creation of particular uses, as well as traces and marks that denote those particular uses.

We believe that the ideas of domination and appropriation of spatial practices, such as that of inhabiting, are powerful for thinking about the questions we ask ourselves: what are the actions and decisions of educational policy to guarantee the right to education and what conditions of the spatial dimension favor its exercise; how do these purposes of educational policy translate into the key of school spaces?

One conjecture we put forward is that the extension of the years of schooling (both at the initial and secondary levels) or the permanence for more hours in school (extended school day in primary schools) as actions for educational inclusion, disembark in schools with the force of territorialization, that is, the force of the law that recognizes and expands the right to education for all. However, we note that the law alone does not guarantee the exercise of the right. Obviously, the sanction of the law is an important and crucial milestone in the universalization of rights, but it is not enough. It is necessary to create the conditions for the exercise of this right. In other words, it is to make it possible for the law to begin to be incarnated, to be embodied in the different agents, groups and institutions at the different levels of the bureaucratic-state apparatus, the educational system and the schools. It is about the construction of territoriality, on the part of the social actors, of these political decisions in schools. That is to say, to enable and make possible their appropriation, understood as a process of assigning meanings by communities and actors in the construction of territoriality, of habitability, to produce particular marks in the appropriation of the extension and compulsory nature of schooling.

Conceiving the passage from the right to education as a mandate (as a force of territorialization) to its appropriation (as a construction of territoriality by the subjects), opens the possibility of thinking about the inclusion and permanence of students in schools as a construction of habitability, as a process of appropriation, of use of space, which is conceived, felt and lived as one's own. At this point, it is interesting to rethink educational inclusion, understanding it not only as the inclusion of students in a school system, in a given school format, but also inclusion as a correlate of the construction of this habitability, in which the subjects have an active role and participate in processes of production and transformation. This habitability does not only imply thinking about educational inclusion as the entry, permanence and graduation of students in the existing school, but also modifying that which, in many cases, has been part of the problem of the educational system in its exclusion effects, such as rigid school formats in their times and spaces, the conception of an ideal student distant from the diverse realities of real girls, boys and young people, evaluation systems that prioritize only the results, among other aspects that need to be analyzed and modified.

Between the two spatial practices mentioned, that of domination and that of appropriation, there are a series of intermediations that we can identify as actions of resistance, translation, assimilation and transformation on the part of the subjects in the processes of schooling and inclusion in the school, which would make it possible to inhabit, to make their own, these new circumstances and school practices that are configured under the modality of obligation as of the sanction of the law.

From our perspective, which is in defense of public schools and the commitment to improve schooling processes, one of the challenges is to build and enrich the habitability of the school to ensure the exercise of the right to education of the population. According to Lefevbre (2013), in the game between territorialization and construction of territoriality by the subjects, the tension between constraint and appropriation is played. In our case, constraint would mean reproducing the traditional forms of the school format, limiting oneself, sticking -both in action and in thought- to what is given, while appropriation, without ignoring the weight of this tradition, risks and explores other meanings and uses of the school format, of this organizational device, from a critical position of denaturalization and creative and situated thinking. The tension between constraint and appropriation is permanent, it is not solved once and for all, but they are forces that act, embodied in projects, devices and social actors and that depend on the relative power and force relations deployed in each situation and context.

Therefore, it is necessary to sustain a view that denaturalizes, that questions the effects of inclusion/exclusion of traditional school forms and how to reverse the effects of exclusion of these instituted formats that have been and in many cases are highly effective. But we must also be alert so as not to reproduce exclusion mechanisms in the new forms. Educational inclusion implies the incorporation of those children, adolescents and young people who have not had access to primary and secondary school or who have dropped out. For a long time, there was, and still is, the conception that dropping out or not attending school was a consequence of the children's and young people's own difficulties, either due to their belonging to certain social and cultural sectors and/or to individual problems. The educational system, the educational policy and the school itself were little questioned as participants in and responsible for this situation. It is in more recent times, with the growing concern for the inclusion of the population in secondary school, and with legislation that guarantees the right to education, that the educational system and the school itself, its format and school culture, have begun to be questioned as participants in exclusion. This is a transformation in the way of thinking about the problem that impacts, although not necessarily, on the formulation, approach strategies and possible solutions to the problem. This mutation in the approach is taking place, but much remains to be done, and in this sense the social sciences have much to contribute.

Hopefully with this text we contribute, from research, to the (re)conceptualization and analysis of the spatial dimension in educational policies and in schools. Surely there is still much to be done and produced in this interdisciplinary field of educational and school spatiality.

FINAL REFLECTION

I would like to end this paper with a metaphorical idea, which condenses some of the meanings we have tried to deploy in this article around schools and spatiality. Conceiving school spatiality as a palimpsest11 implies considering the multiplicity of interactions that take place in the school, the connections and disconnections between past and present, the porosity of boundaries with social and cultural processes, and the effects of erosion and preservation that these exchanges produce and have the potential to produce. School spatiality is in a constant process of rewriting, in constant movement of configuration and reconfiguration of its forms and modes of existence. In these modes and forms we perceive traits and signs of other times, which we can call spatial anachronisms, but which are not preserved unaltered, but exist in tension and intersection with other current modes of spatiality. There are diverse spatialities, of different senses and meanings constructed by social subjects, who produce spatiality and in turn are affected by these same spatialities in their representations of space and in the production of knowledge about it. Thinking of school spatiality as palimpsest also implies recognizing nomadism as a form of spatiality in the school that challenges and reconfigures the modern enlightened conception of school space as fixed, closed, standardized and rational that characterizes the emergence of the school and modern educational systems. It is not a question of denying or ignoring the presence of this fixed conception and its effects on school spatiality, especially in its effects of channeling, reification and naturalization, but rather of recognizing the multiplicity of layers and interactions that configure spatiality in school forms.

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3We are currently developing two research studies that include researchers, teachers and students from the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities and the Faculty of Architecture, Urbanism and Design of the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. One of the studies is entitled "The right to secondary schooling. Contributions to the (de)construction of schooling conditions and school format.", and the other study is a program entitled " Education and spatiality. Interaction between pedagogy, architecture and policies in the construction of educational spaces". Both studies have been approved and have a grant from the Secretariat of Science and Technology of the National University of Córdoba, 2018-2021.

4The team includes graduates in education sciences, architects, industrial designers, psychologists, geographers and students of these careers.

5For these critical studies, which are referenced in the spatial turn, space emerges as a social product configured through the juxtaposition of paths, displacements, discourses, practices, etc., configuring at the same time social dynamics. The spatial turn would not imply an inversion or transformation of the terms, in which a geographical neo-determinism or an extreme spatialization of social thought is proposed. Rather, it would imply "beginning to understand space as a constitutive part of collective life and not only as a static framework" (Garzón, 2008:95).

6Michel Foucault, in his 1974 lecture "Des espaces autres", at the Cercle des études architecturals, states that the "epoch of history", marked by time as a central theme for philosophies and social sciences, would have shifted, during the second half of the twentieth century, to the "epoch of space".

7Henri Lefebvre formulates the theory of the social production of space, which constitutes a great contribution to urban studies. These writings and reflections of the author coincide with the rise of Fordism, a phenomenon that, along with others, transforms the capitalist territory giving rise to intensive urbanization in the central countries. In this sense, the author makes a contribution to understand the emerging problem of intensive urbanization in a developed capitalist world.

8It is a relational analysis proposal between the perceived, the conceived and the lived, based on the conception that space is both material and mental representation.

9"Guarantee educational inclusion through universal policies and pedagogical and resource allocation strategies that give priority to the most disadvantaged sectors of society." (LEN, Art. 11, inc. e)

10It is important to ask ourselves about the meanings and forms of educational inclusion processes. To expand on this aspect, we can consult Dussel (2004) who recovers Popkewitz (1991, p.4), when he argues that the issue of inclusion is a fundamental political project in societies that have systematically and categorically excluded social groups. As this author says, the way in which we have conceived inclusion is perhaps the "crime" that we must investigate, and not only the lack of "access" of some populations to the school institution. Thus, says Dussel "I consider that the questions that should guide our reflection on educational exclusion in our societies are the following: in which school system do we want to include everyone? Is it not perhaps the current organization of the school that has produced a good part of the exclusions? How can this institution be re-examined, preserving the dream of educating everyone but avoiding reproducing the same injustices?"

11A palimpsest is a manuscript that still preserves traces of a previous writing on the same surface, but expressly erased to make room for the one that now exists.

2The translation of this article into English was funded by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais - FAPEMIG - through the program of supporting the publication of institucional scientific journals

Received: July 17, 2020; Accepted: September 08, 2020

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