Thinning Space: A Conceptual Framework Inspired by the Virtual World of Gaming

• In Event: Collectivist Curricular Approaches to Construct Communal Ways of Knowing and Belonging

Abstract

We present a conceptual framework of thinning space for reimagining how education might unfold in future worlds. Our framework emerged from becoming entangled in teaching amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, when teachers and students alike were thrust out of classrooms into in-between spaces mediated by digital technologies. This capricious co-inhabited space functioned as a body without organs emerging from centrifugal intra-actions among human, non-human, and inorganic entities and energies—or a thinning space. It called for becoming shapeshifters together through resisting crystallized roles and (re)claiming a multiplicity of vulnerable thin-skins. To inform our theorizing, we draw from existing virtual gaming spaces and ask what a thinning space towards freer learning might do for us beyond the spaces of our immediate present.

Authors

• Bianca Licata, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Catherine Yanan Cheng Stahl, Teachers College, Columbia University