Curating the Pedagogical Scene

Perhaps the level of ease and enjoyment with which a reader is likely to move through Elizabeth Ellsworth's book Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy depends on the extent to which the title itself makes sense. On one hand, the innocuous main title, contrary to convention, is not elucidated by the subtitle, but rather obfuscated. It's common enough that learning is situated in places, but the distinct and varied disciplines of media, architecture, and pedagogy might not suggest any obvious link, and without an idea of what particular elements of media, architecture, and pedagogy interrelate, the overall premise of the book would be unclear.

On the other hand, from the perspective of cultural criticism, the title and subtitle are quite clear, provided that we recognize that no disciplinary boundary is hard and fast and that sense and meaning don't necessarily reside in making distinctions. After all, on that basic level of learning as an activity done by people in places, these disciplines are experientially merged. This critical reading of the title suggests the essential argument of the book is, in a sense, to redefine the terms in the subtitle. Ellsworth reimagines the role of the teacher as more a curator of a learning environment than a pedagogue, and consequently she argues that we must strive to think of pedagogy not as some curricular craft whose goal is the transferal of knowledge, but rather as the production of conditions that make movement to and from bodies of knowledge possible.

The aim of this book is therefore quite ambitious—nothing less than the unseating of a common and widespread definition of a field and practice. Perhaps the definition of pedagogy that Ellsworth struggles against—pedagogy as a "model that teachers use to set the terms in which already-known ideas, curriculums, or knowledges are put into relation" (27)—has only become more entrenched by policy initiatives like No Child Left Behind that propose greater standardization of curricula as the goal of education itself.

As though in anticipation of resistance, Ellsworth undercuts what I characterize as the book's ambition, by stating that the "purpose of this book is to invite interested readers into an experiment in thinking about pedagogy in terms that are quite different from, say, an ethnography of various individuals' reported and observed learning experiences" (5). This plea to withhold judgment also carries with it the implication that who you are as a reader matters in terms of how you'll receive the book. In particular, the interested reader who is most likely to accept the book's premises is probably one who is invested in a socially progressive view of pedagogy, since the hallmarks of that viewpoint, the need to critique existing social relations, the utopian hope for education as a tool for greater democratization, are also justifications for accepting key concepts in Places of Learning.

One such key concept is the transitional space, which Ellsworth adapts from the work of psychologist D. W. Winnicott. Ellsworth summarizes the transition in a transitional space as the move "from a state of habitual . . . compliance with the outside world, with its expectations, traditions, structures and knowledges, to a state of creatively putting those expectations, traditions and structures to new uses" (30). At first gloss, the transitional space seems to depend conceptually on a division between inside the self and outside, and between habit and newness. But what Ellsworth clarifies is that the actual transition is not on the level of new content so much as new uses. This means that what might be thought of as old content can be put into a new context and then be considered new. Essentially, the transitional space suspends the division between self, other, old, and new; or, in Ellsworth's words, "Both real and imagined physical boundaries . . . are put into play" (32). Ellsworth means "play" in a literal sense: the transitional space works when the subject feels safe enough to try out new relations, when experimentation is open ended.

Ellsworth goes on to supplement her discussion of Winnicott...