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Aspiring to Aspirate: Learning in Foams

Tue, April 21, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Virtual Room

Abstract

In educational research, one finds often passing and latent remarks about air. For example, Kate Rousmainere (1997) writes about ‘the stale, airless tomb of the modern urban classroom’ (p. 81), while Jonathon Zimmerman (2009) documents the problems with heating one-room schoolhouses: ‘Students sitting near the stove were often too warm, falling off to sleep—and off their benches—as temperatures rose. But those at the periphery were too cold, donning mittens and struggling to turn the pages of their textbooks’ (p. 24). Yet the air hasn’t thus far been given theoretical or pedagogical consideration in education.
This presentation links 21st century aspirations to the desire for air and air-conditioned spaces, the pedagogical implications thereof, and the educational components that co-produce these spaces. Based on Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy, Bubbles (2013), Globes (2014), and Foams (2016), I show how the air-demarcating spaces of education have shifted over the course of the 20th century and the educational and political implications that follow from the current aerial formations in which we find ourselves.
Part of this entails placing education within a grand spatial narrative that begins with Heidegger’s interest in being-in-the-world by asking what it is that humans are in when they are in the world. The history of globalization thus begins not in the 20th century with communications or transportation technologies, but with the first movements to understand human being as being contained within globes of varying levels. Globalization’s end is when the failure of the project of one all-encompassing globe is acutely and irrefutably felt across the world. From this moment on, the aerial-spatial formations turn to foam containers; temporary bubbles that share walls with other bubbles, that absorb and resorb each other, that live toward their own popping, dissolution, and merging.
Sloterdijk hints at the educational conditions of these processes, when he writes at one point, “learning means participating in processes of constant pattern revision. Each learning point constitutes a temporalized micropoint in the foam that learns” (p. 285). I’m interested in fleshing out this brief remark (and the other few references to learning and education in the book). I do this by linking learning-in-foams “post-industrial” and “post-fordist” educational discourses. The foam pedagogical theory articulated in this presentation reframes these discourses in that it shifts the focus from flexible economies and labor demands to the desires and needs of students to, for example, share walls with others and negotiate their own participation in foam-formations. I do this by looking at student activism and classroom architecture.

References
Rousmainere, K. (1997). City teachers: Teaching and school reform in historical perspective. New York and London: Teachers College Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2013). Spheres I: Bubbles: Microspherology (trans. by W. Hoban)/ Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Sloterdijk, P. (2014). Spheres II: Globes: Macrosphereology (trans. by W. Hoban). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Sloterdijk, P. (2016). Spheres III: Foams: Plural sphereology (trans. by W. Hoban). Los Angeles: Semiotexte(e).
Zimmerman, J. (2009). Small wonder: The little red schoolhouse in history and memory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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