Pedagogy, Culture and Society

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Making Spaces: teacher workplace topologies

Jane Mcgregor

To cite this article: Jane Mcgregor (2003) Making Spaces: teacher workplace topologies,
Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 11:3, 353-377, DOI: 10.1080/14681360300200179
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Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Volume 11, Number 3, 2003

Making Spaces:
teacher workplace topologies

JANE McGREGOR
Open University, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Studies of the workplace of teachers commonly focus on the

spaces of the classroom, staffroom and school as pre-given and bounded
entities. This article explores the possibilities of moving beyond such
topographies of enclosure, towards seeing space(-time) as recursively
constructed with social relations and so made and remade. Boundaries are
then far more porous than suggested by the egg-crate image of isolated
classrooms or the individual school embedded in its local context. This
article draws on an empirical study of two secondary schools in England to
illustrate the utility of a spatial perspective in explaining patterns of
association. We may see that the school is not fixed and static but the site
for intersecting networks of relations, technology and practice which extend
in complex interrelations beyond what is (variably) seen as the institution. If
space-time is constantly remade, performed and produced by
interconnecting social practices, then there are greater possibilities for
understanding the topologies of the school as a workplace for adults.

Introduction
Space makes a difference. Studies of the workplace of teachers, however,
take the spatial dimension for granted, either ignoring it entirely or
focusing on the spaces of the classroom, staffroom and school as fixed
and bounded. In advocating the importance of a spatial perspective for
educational research I argue that schools are not static self-contained
entities but institutions continually being produced by interconnecting
relationships and practices which extend in space and time.
This article suggests the need, not simply to foreground space in the
study of schools, but also to take the opportunity of looking at it in a
different way. I briefly survey existing work, moving through the common
understandings of space as either the physical environment or social

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space, to current work on spatiality as space-time, drawing on an

empirical study of teacher workplace interaction to illustrate the
concepts in play. Following Nespor (2000), I argue for a more dynamic
and open conceptualisation of space, using what could be called a
topological approach to the study of schools. This asks what kinds of
spaces constitute and are constituted by teacher workplace cultures and
practices: how are space and place (re)made? Schools as workplaces are
seen as constructed from multiple cultures and overlapping and
intersecting space-time relations which extend beyond the perceived
boundaries of ‘the school’.

New Understandings of Space in Relation to Schooling

The new understandings of space developing throughout the social
sciences and increasingly in education (Edwards & Usher, 2000) are that
it is not merely the physical backdrop to social action or a metaphor for
the social environment. Instead, space is seen as relational, both
producing and a product of interconnecting social practices. It is ‘a
moment in the intersection of configured social relations’ (Massey, 1994,
p. 265). The spatial and the social are reciprocally constructed through
materially embedded practices and performances that create and
maintain everyday social relations, including gender (Rose, 1999). Space
is literally made through our interactions.
Consequently, space is not pre-given, static or completed; it is
always in the process of becoming. In her influential work, Doreen Massey
(1999) uses the term ‘space-time’ to emphasise the dynamic interrelations
which comprise space. Social relations and processes form certain
patterns, reflected in persistent physical and organisational (and power)
structures such as the classroom. But if we take the perspective that
schools are particular configurations of socio-spatial relations, we see
that they are also therefore being continually remade. An understanding
of this openness is critical in imagining the possibilities of reframing
power relationships in the processes of education and schooling.
The empirical work used focuses on schools as the workplace for
teachers and other adults, with staff relationships constituted by and
constituting the workplace. The associational life of teachers ‘outside the
classroom’ is seen as having a powerful influence on what goes on ‘within
it’(McLaughlin, 1993).[1] I argue, however, that we need to go further than
this simple inside/outside binary by applying the concept of topologies
where (work)places are approached as intersections of a unique
constellation of relations ‘articulated moments in networks of social
relations and understandings’ (Massey, 1993, p. 66) which extend in
networks of interrelations and influences well beyond the classroom.
A second important theoretical perspective is provided by the work
of Jan Nespor. He conceptualises institutions as dynamic fluid spaces,

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suggesting that schools are not just bounded containers for educational
practices and social relations, but intersections in space-time. Schooling
is then seen as ‘a web of movements spun from multiple flows of material
resources and representations’ (Nespor, 1994, p. 6). In a theorised
account of the ways the curriculum is spatially constituted, Nespor
proposes a ‘geographical’ view of knowledge which departs from the
psychological conception of the learner as a discrete entity, and looks at
actors rather as distributed, with shifting boundaries and compositions
across space and time. Learning and knowledge are represented as
organisations of activity whereby student’s spatial and temporal
practices are moulded by the different curricula in order to mobilise
them into the power networks of disciplines.
He argues that schooling or any other community of practice cannot
be fully understood simply on its own terms, but only by looking at how
its practices are enmeshed within much more expansive networks.
Teachers and teaching are viewed using the lenses of actor-network
theory (Latour, 1997; Law, 1999) and spatiality, as network effects,
constituted by the interaction of heterogeneous elements: people,
materials, the curriculum and technologies, in a ‘practice-relevant
configuration’. Drawing on a huge range of information from students,
parents, teachers, local communities, policy discourses and popular
culture, Nespor demonstrates that the school is a unique articulation of
flows and networks extensive in space and time. Schools as institutions
are then ‘an intersection in social space, a knot in a web of practices that
stretch into complex systems beginning and ending outside the school’
(Nespor, 1997, p. xiii).
What goes on ‘inside’ the classroom is therefore not at all separate
from what is conceptualised as ‘outside’. This is fundamentally important
in highlighting the political, economic, geographical and social forces that
shape schooling but are obscured by a focus on the school as a ‘spatial
and temporal island’ (Nespor, 2002). It also suggests possibilities of
moving beyond the view of schools as ‘modernist spaces of enclosure’
(Lankshear et al, 1996), which decontextualise and separate out the
school and teachers’ work from wider social practices, enabling the
‘reterritorialisation’ of social and economic problems as school problems
(Nespor, 2002). Drawing on the work of Mol and Law in actor-network
theory, Nespor (2000) further suggests that if topographies result from
the mapping in Cartesian space of the distribution of bodies, artefacts
and the movement of people, then topologies move beyond that fixed
location. A topological approach to the school as a workplace for
teachers must consider patterned forms and locations of association and
the meanings these have for people, and also the way in which the
workplace is linked with complex interconnections across space and
through time, or rather space-time.

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Jane McGregor

The Study
The empirical material used to illustrate these concepts is drawn from
case studies exploring the spatiality of the workplace, which developed
from earlier work on teacher collaboration. Two schools were originally
selected on the basis of the ways staff characterised the schools as
workplaces. At Brythnoth (a pseudonym) this was summed up by
comments such as ‘As a staff we don’t hang together’ (McGregor, 2000a),
whereas Kingbourn (also pseudonym) was described as a positive and
collaborative environment.
Brythnoth is a comprehensive Community College for 11- to 18-year-
olds, created from the amalgamation of two existing schools in 1986. The
staff and students of the secondary school moved to the present site
(where the other school was physically located) on the edge of a
cathedral town in a rural area. In the academic year 2000/2001 there were
around a thousand students, of whom 130 were in the post-compulsory
sixth form (16- to 18-year-olds), which is housed in a new building on the
site. As at Kingbourn, there are few students from ethnic minority
backgrounds, but the catchment area has pockets of significant social
and economic deprivation, particularly in the rural villages and housing
areas for conurbation overspill.
Kingbourn is a large and expanding comprehensive Community
College for 13- to 18-year-olds, with over 1,500 students in 2000/2001, one-
third of whom make up the sixth form. The students are drawn from
largely prosperous suburbanised rural villages. The proportion of
students entitled to free school meals is low and only 12% are recognised
as having special educational needs, with a greater proportion of
students being above ‘average ability’ than below it. Performance in
examinations is well above national averages and the statutory OfSTED
inspection report judged it to be ‘an excellent school’: It is also a
specialist college of Media Arts and a training school for student
teachers. Unlike Brythnoth, which has faced deficit budgets over the last
four years, Kingbourn is relatively wealthy, a situation enhanced by the
recent sale of surrounding land for new housing.
Micro-ethnographic methods of investigation included mapping and
documenting the physical space of the schools and observing patterns of
use and interaction (e.g. through photography, seating plans in the
staffroom and document collection). To elicit the subjective meanings
people attach to events and spaces – ‘the imagined social worlds that
they think they inhabit’ (Hammersley, 1998, p. 8) – some teachers were
asked to photograph their workplace as the basis for further discussion
(Prosser & Warburton, 1999), while others created ‘mental maps’ or
drawings representing their view of the school. Ninety-seven staff were
interviewed, and many conversations recorded. To provide more
information on associations between staff, an instrument was used which
was developed from an earlier study (McGregor, 2000a). Staff were invited

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to complete grids indicating the interactions they most commonly had

with colleagues at various locations in space and time (see Appendix 1),
and where they felt their strongest forms of joint work occurred.
The instrument was developed from Little’s research, which
suggested that patterned and situated interactions (or lack of them) had
an important effect on encouraging school-wide norms that supported
staff development and continuous school improvement:
In successful schools, teachers valued and participated in norms of
collegiality and continuous improvement (experimentation); they
pursued a greater range of professional interactions with fellow
teachers or administrators, including talk about instruction,
structured observation, and shared planning or preparation. They did
so with greater frequency, with a greater number and diversity of
persons and locations, and with more concrete and precise shared
language. (Little, 1982, p. 325)

A detailed discussion of the earlier study on collaboration can be read

elsewhere (McGregor, 2000a, 2000b). The findings demonstrated
differences in the frequency and type of reported interactions between
the schools and variations within them. The importance of opportunities
for informal interactions was highlighted and the salience of the
department and departmental office emphasised as a location for what
Little termed ‘critical practices of adaptability’ (Little, 1982, p. 332), likely
to lead to workplace learning and the development of productive joint
working relationships (see Appendices 1 & 3). Kingbourn exhibited higher
rates of interaction and these stronger forms of collaboration than
Brythnoth, and a spatial perspective suggested itself as a means of
exploring the differences between the two schools and the conditions
encouraging or constraining joint work: to see how space made a
difference.

Conceptions of Space in Relation to Schools

As part of the ‘spatial turn’ in areas of social science, there is increasing
interest in studying institutions as ‘precarious geographical
achievements’; not ‘pre-given entities, but accomplishments whose
temporal and spatial co-ordinates are far from incidental to what can (or
not) be accomplished’ (Philo & Parr, 2000, p. 192). However, as indicated
earlier, the notion of space being created by social interaction is almost
absent in literature on education with the most common understandings
of space being the fixed material environment (a container for social
processes) or as social space.

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Jane McGregor

Space as the Physical Environment of the School

Considering that it is almost axiomatic that space as the physical
environment of a school will affect the teaching and learning within it,
there has been relatively little research on this in the United Kingdom
(Clark, 2002). There have been various studies focusing on functional
issues such as health and safety, and recently more ethnographic work
providing insights into the different ways boys and girls use space in
schools (Thorne, 1993; Gordon et al, 2000). Although there remains a
paucity of evidence, there are now indications of increased interest in the
relationship between the physical environment and performance in the
classroom. This has been signalled through increased government
funding, following reports that as many as one in five schools has
accommodation so unsatisfactory that the curriculum was affected
(Younge, 2001).
Empirical work (mainly in the USA) indicates that student academic
achievement improves with improved building condition (Fisher, 2000).
For instance, the School Design and Planning Laboratory in Georgia
(Kenneth-Tanner, 2000) details 29 designs significantly related to student
achievement. Desirable patterns include the entrance area as a friendly
and age-appropriate space connecting the ‘outside and inside world’;
supervised private places for students; and public spaces such as media
centres and common rooms that foster a sense of community, with
attention paid to the influence on behaviour of the colour of paint in
classrooms. Such studies, however, while useful for certain purposes, are
substantially located within a positivist environment-behaviour paradigm
and thus fail to critically examine the role of space and place in schooling,
as they ignore the mutual construction of the spatial and social.[2]
There are, nevertheless, signs of a growing awareness of the need to
explore spatial behaviour further through studying patterns of
association and the meanings ascribed to locations. The Schoolworks
project, set up with the Architecture Foundation (Annesley et al, 2002), is
using a participatory approach to the redesign of a Southwark school,
noting : ‘We ask how the school building itself represents a hidden form
of curriculum, and how behaviour is affected by design’ (Schoolworks,
2001, p. 56). The role of the physical environment as a context for
teachers’ work has also received little attention, despite surveys of
workplace conditions suggesting its importance. Studies rarely go beyond
suggesting the need for more decent space in order to improve
motivation and job satisfaction and enhance teachers’ ability to work
effectively. A recent empirical study, however, concluded that:
The arrangement of space has immediate and far-reaching
consequences for teachers ability to effectively and efficiently
accomplish daily activities, the formation of social and professional

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relationships, and the sharing of information and knowledge. (Siegel,

1999, p. 4)

Beyond the Physical Environment: buildings and power

If we look more closely we can see that the way that space is organised in
schools clearly produces particular social relations: ‘There is no a-spatial
society and no a-social space. Society is organised in a way which can be
described in the abstract but which, in the material world, is embedded
in space’ (Markus, 1993, p. 13). Power relations are inscribed into the
buildings and material practices of the school. In a historical analysis of
the role of space in school as social production, Markus (1996)
demonstrates how space in 19th-century industrial schools was
organised to produce hierarchical relations based on strong ideologies of
religion, order, surveillance, discipline, hierarchy and competition,
reflecting in microcosm the new socio-economic relations emerging in the
rapidly industrialising wider society. Structures (notably classrooms)
created in this way have been substantially reproduced without question
in our schools over the last two centuries, and Markus argues that
‘asymmetries of power in society and impediments to the bonds which
are so subversive of such relations, were kept intact in such buildings’
(Markus, 1993, p. 317).
Studying the evolution of the physical arrangement and use of
buildings and reading what is described as ‘the spatial syntax’ (Marcus,
1996) can provide considerable insights into the relations constructing
institutions. As Soja reminds us:
We must be aware of how space can be made to hide consequences
from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the
apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies
become filled with politics and ideology. (Soja, 1989, p. 6)

Brythnoth and Kingbourn had broadly similar architectures, with

separate blocks having developed over time on sites surrounded by
playing fields. The fabric and facilities of Kingbourn (such as the new
Media Arts centre) reflected its enhanced funding. Certain individuals
were intensely aware of the inscription of power and meaning in spatial
arrangements that were taken for granted, and this was often represented
in ‘mental maps’. For instance, on being asked where he saw decisions
being taken in the school, a Head of Department at Brythnoth
commented:
In ‘the corridors of power’, the SMT corridor, between [the Head’s]
and [senior teachers’] offices. It is a significant location. Out on a
limb. The heart of the school? I don’t think so. It has always been
there although they have moved everything else round ... The new

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Jane McGregor

witchdoctors are now finance at the end there and we have a

sequestered principal’s office. The staff has been sent to Tibet. (Head
teacher for humanities)

Space as a Container of School Culture: social space

‘Social space’ is a familiar term to many. The importance of ‘my space’ is
commonly referred to, and spatial metaphors such as journeys are
frequently used in describing work in schools (Edwards, 1999; Gordon &
Lahelma, 1996). The social relations which constitute the school as a
workplace for adults are often approached in educational literature
through the concept of school culture, or climate, ethos, etc. (Prosser,
1999). In the school improvement and school effectiveness literature,
culture has been commonly represented as monolithic and
undifferentiated, a reified medium for engineering change and
improvement within the school, which is itself substantially
decontextualised. However, the importance of school subcultures (e.g. of
student and teacher groupings) has been increasingly recognised over
the last decade of research in schools (Hargreaves, 1994; Siskin & Little,
1995; Angelides & Ainscow, 2000; Harris & Bennett, 2001). Staff at both
schools commonly referred to three or four reference groups in the
workplace, with the department, pastoral team and friendship group
usually figuring most highly. In both cases sixth-form involvement was
important and at Kingbourn the cross-curricular school improvement
groups were mentioned.
The workplace in school was initially identified by teachers as ‘their’
classroom and then the department office. The teachers who recorded
their workplace on film took pictures of their classrooms, department
offices and their desk space in that office. Interestingly, the English office
at Kingbourn and the Humanities office at Brythnoth were both
nicknamed ‘the goldfish bowl’ because of their corner location and large
areas of glass enabling students to have a clear view inside. The
department offices were seen to be a significant dimension of the
workplace, to positive or negative effect (McGregor & Hammond, 2002).
The importance of the department offices for a variety of forms of
communication was often recognised and valued. The Head of
Department noted of the Expressive Arts resource area: ‘A lot happens in
passing in this room. In fact a tremendous amount is informally
discussed, overheard, questioned, answered, etc.’ (Header teracher for
expressive arts, Kingbourn). Such spaces are particularly important as
practice-relevant configurationsof subject specialist staff, technicians,
objects, technologies and ideas (Nespor, 1994).

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Staffrooms
Staffrooms are also distinctive spaces where professional culture and
(gendered) power relations are played out. Following ethnographic
studies of teacher interaction (Hammersley, 1984; Ball, 1987; Nias et al,
1989), the importance of the staffroom in perpetuating dominant
discourses and facilitating or obstructing different forms of social and
professional interaction has begun to be documented (Kainan, 1994;
Paechter, 1998a; McGregor, 2000a). Ben Peretz et al (1999) found a
reciprocal link between the quality of teacher relations and the strength
of ‘local teacher community’ to student learning, whereby in ‘high
achievement’ schools staff were more aware of the potential influence of
staffroom interactions .
Teachers at Brythnoth and Kingbourn identified the staffroom as the
most important place for talk about social/personal life (Appendix 2). At
Kingbourn the majority of the large staff came over to the main staffroom
at break time as well as briefing meetings. This had been encouraged by
the head teacher, an advocate of cross-curricular collaboration, who
deliberately had the staffroom remodelled to include a social as well as a
work area. A Kingbourn teacher noted of the staffroom kitchen:
Here you tend to come across any member of staff and the
conversations tend to be either a common ‘moan’ about a topic of
general concern (too many meetings, the new chewing gum rule, etc.)
or a joke. Only 25% of the exchanges would (I think) be related to
professional issues: student progress, department plans etc. (Head
teacher for expressive arts, Kingbourn)

At Kingbourn clear locales could be identified in the staffroom at break,

where department staff still commonly sat together. The area occupied
by the Expressive Arts faculty was referred to by them as ‘the shallow
end of the pool’.(Media arts teacher, Kingbourn) While departments
gathering in their offices had previously been discouraged, an outcome of
the enquiry-based, cross-curricular school improvement groups was seen
to be enhanced collaboration in departments, which influenced decisions
about office space. As one administrator commented:
There became this developing body of researchers that people,
actually teachers, shared a lot of information and felt free to talk
about teaching. It wasn’t just social time when they were in their
department, they were actually talking about teaching and it was a
really strong way of developing teacher knowledge and confidence
about teaching and learning. And so we gradually eased up a little bit
and developed, not social areas for staff, but work areas for staff
where they could be social, where they didn’t have to come across
here [staffroom] at break time or lunch time and work. (Bursar,
Kingbourn)

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Jane McGregor

As suggested by Ball (1987) & O’Boyle (2001), staffrooms may be where

social relations most clearly embody the present and past micropolitical
structure of the school intersecting with wider influences and discourses.
When a new staffroom was built at Brythnoth, apparently more centrally,
despite its pleasant physical aspect and facilities it was rarely used by
staff, except for weekly briefing gatherings, visiting pigeonholes and using
the photocopier. A couple of women teachers had started what they
called a ‘Tea and Sympathy’ gathering one lunchtime and after school to
encourage more interaction. The negative reverberations of the merger
fifteen years previously were regularly invoked by older members of staff
as contributing to the emptiness of ‘the staffroom’. Teachers from the two
merged schools had to apply for one post of responsibility, which seemed
to have led to a particular emphasis on role descriptions and hierarchy
by some individuals. A senior teacher voiced the feelings of many staff
when he said, ‘One thing undermines anything we do, we have so many
departmental offices. The staffroom is the most underused room in the
school; that has its consequences’(Senior teacher, Brythnoth). The
spatiality of the Brythnoth staffroom was sustained by the lack of
cohesion between the staff, and teachers were sometimes isolated in
their departments in the absence of a broader group with which to
interact:
No one goes into the staffroom to sit for lunch and so departments sit
together, sometimes in their offices, to moan and whinge and get
upset and all they can think of is the lessons they’ve just taught, not
seeing other people who have just done a really positive good thing,
not hearing about other things. (Music teacher, Brythnoth)

The Location of Teacher Interaction

The importance of the subject department in influencing the curriculum
and the use of space, time and resources in secondary schools is well
documented (Siskin & Little, 1995; Gutierrerez, 1998; Grossman &
Stodolski, 1999). This level of school organisation is also suggested as an
important ‘missing link’ in school improvement studies (Hannay & Ross,
1999; Harris, 2001). Subcultures may lead to balkanisation – competition
over resources – and a lack of cross-curricular work (Paechter, 1995;
Hargreaves & Macmillan, 1995), but the department, as an important
reference group and source of professional identity, may be a major
arena for practice-relevant collaborative work (Talbert, 1995; Ball &
Lacey, 1995; McGregor, 2002).
In the study here, the department provided the primary location for
all interactions reported, with the highest percentage being with
individuals in the department and then in department meetings (see
Appendix 2). The departmental office was cited as the most important

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‘place’ for these, and 58% of respondents at Kingbourn and 52% at

Brythnoth stated that this was where the strongest forms of joint work
occurred. However, this focus obscured significant differences between
and within the schools. At Brythnoth the Science department, in contrast
to Art, was fragmented and unhappy with little joint work occurring,
whereas in Kingbourn, the ‘Science curriculum area’ was socially
cohesive and highly collaborative, and Expressive Arts was both highly
interactive and particularly argumentative.
Seeing schools as composed of apparently internally homogeneous
regions such as departments, whether physically or socially located,
makes sense to individuals on the basis of their daily experience in
secondary schools and the taken-for-granted structuring around separate
curriculum areas. Teachers generally recognise the existence of
subcultures within the workplace, but the physical environment is seen
as a container for this social space. If we move beyond such relatively
static landscapes to see space as reciprocally created by interrelations,
then cultures are enacted and mutually constituted with the material and
technological. Taking a topological perspective means looking beyond the
department as a context (in the orthodox understanding of context as a
nested hierarchy of separate ‘boxes’ for teachers’ work) to exploring how
it is constituted and reconstituted by ongoing everyday actions in a
heterogeneous network of people, objects, ideas and technologies, with
links extending beyond the institution itself.
The faculty or department in secondary schools is also potentially a
prime location for the development of ‘communities of practice’, where
learning as a situated activity allows individuals to develop their
understanding of their work (Lave & Wenger, 1999; Wenger et al, 2002),
and this perspective is beginning to be employed in relation to teacher
workplace learning (Harris & Bennett, 2001; Hodkinson & Hodkinson,
2001; McGregor, 2003), adding a further dimension to understandings of
social space in secondary schools. Nespor (1994), however, argues that
this approach, while useful, fails to take account of how such
communities are maintained and connected to one another in space-time,
drawing on different discourses and enmeshed within networks of
material technologies and social and cultural relations: in short, their
spatialities.

Beyond Social Space

Spatiality and Schools
Spatiality (or space-time) is more than physical or social space. It is the
recursive interplay between the spatial and the social, the product of
complex ongoing relations:

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Jane McGregor
Relations which are active practices, material and embedded
practices which have to be carried on (so) space is always in a
process of becoming. (Massey, 1999, p. 283)

Thus spatiality is a more powerful and dynamic articulation of ‘context’.

Spatialisation in schools reflects the construction and mediation of power
relations between different groups (e.g. student and teacher subcultures)
where individuals may be seen as differently positioned within a ‘power-
geometry’ (Massey, 1993). The very organisation of the school through
the timetable imposes rhythms and constraints on all bodies within a
repetitive cycle. Many school rules and practices are connected to
spatiality and embodiment, determining the use of space by students (for
example excluding them from areas) and regulating their movement and
expected actions in particular space-times: the classroom before and
during ‘break’ is quite a different space/place. Teachers draw upon this
production of space to demonstrate their authority and maintain
particular power relations, for example in terms of who is allowed to
move around the room (Shilling, 1991; Gordon & Lahelma, 1996). Space
may also be used by students to construct their own resistances, as
expressed through smokers’ haunts (Willis, 1977).
The articulation of space through time is powerfully manifested by
the timetable. This locates staff, students and curricula. Teachers in
secondary schools in England are generally categorised by subject
specialism, teaching across years or grades, which, alongside notions of
‘ability’, is a common method for differentiating students. It is this
compartmentalisation that leads schools to be characterised as ‘loosely
coupled systems’ (Weik, 1988; Jackson, 2000) apparently made up of
bounded, functionally specific spaces which are conceived as internally
homogeneous. Insofar as timetables instantiate competing curricula, and
the values they represent, as well as competition for resources and
students, they may be investigated as maps of power (Paechter, 1995).
The spatiality of the workplace then becomes an analytic lens through
which to view the construction (and meaning) of, for instance, subject
departments.
Schools as organisations also clearly shape a distinct environment
of gender relations and the space for playing them out. They are major
sites for the negotiation of gendered, sexual and other identities. Shilling
(1991) argues that the study of social space is integral to analyses of
educational differentiation and social reproduction. Space is mobilised as
a resource in the production and reproduction of power relations
between males and females as well as teachers and students. For
example, some boys tend to ‘take up more space’ through their physical
movement, appropriation of resources including teacher attention, and
domination of informal and recreational areas (Askew & Ross, 1988;

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Thorne, 1993; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Paechter, 1998b). Space thus both
produces, and is produced by, gendered power relations (Shilling, 1991).
Specific spatial locations such as classrooms and the staffroom can
be active in the construction of sex/gender discourses, notably a
compulsory and hegemonic, heterosexual, masculinity (Mac an Ghaill,
1994; Martino, 1995). Holloway et al (2000), in a geographical study of
gender and the use of Information Communications Technology in three
schools, showed how the same technology can mean quite different
things in different time-spaces. Cultures of computing were negotiated,
(re)producing gendered differences and providing an arena through
which particular gender and sexual identities were developed. The
importance of technologies in constructing particular kinds of space is a
major consideration in the study of topologies of the workplace and is
usefully approached through actor-network theories (Latour, 1997; Law,
1999), which trace the relations of heterogeneous networks of people,
ideas, objects and technologies.

Topologies beyond the Boundaries of the School

A spatial perspective enables a broader analysis of the relations that
constitute the school as a workplace than is typically found in the
educational literature on teachers’ work. In North America, the United
Kingdom and Australia, these relations have been predicated on the
modernist ‘egg-crate structure’ described by Lortie (1975) in his
sociological text, The Schoolteacher’ He suggested that in the USA, the
modern structure of schools developed as additions were made to the
one-room schoolhouse, to which children could be allocated by age as
the population grew. School managers’ desire for a flexible workforce
reinforced the use of this cellular structure. This in turn led to physical
and task separation among teachers, encouraging an occupational culture
emphasising independence and privacy.
This particularly spatial metaphor has been influential in casting
teachers and classrooms as closed to influences from ‘outside’, thereby
supporting norms of individualism, autonomy and privacy (Little, 1990;
Timperley & Robinson, 1999) and impeding school-wide systemic
approaches to reform efforts. Acker (1999), however, notes that
classrooms and schools have far more permeable boundaries than this
model suggests. Lortie (1998) now agrees there may have been an over-
emphasis on isolationism in his work, although he is largely
acknowledging the physical presence of people such as classroom
assistants rather than other influences.
In my study, the workplace of teachers extended well beyond the
physical limits of the institution or the temporal boundaries of the school
day, as seen in the photographs of home (and cars) taken by the teachers
illustrating their workplace. In both schools, staff talked of the consuming

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nature of their work and the intensification created by government

initiatives and changing school developments and priorities: ‘There is
very high pressure and expectations at Kingbourn, it really is a career,
something which pervades your entire life, especially in term time, there
is not much else except school’ (science teacher, Kingbourn). The
boundaries between school and home were, then, permeable but largely
in the direction of the former to the latter. However, in contrast to the
high-tech enterprises studied by Massey (1998a), families did have some
presence in school. At Kingbourn there was a nursery on site and the
young children of some teachers were occasionally brought over to the
staffroom for a walk, and at Brythnoth sick children were brought in
when childcare arrangements collapsed. There were also several married
couples on both staffs, with teachers having their own children enrolled
in the school and these relationships creating their own tensions.
In the offices of some of the most collaborative curriculum areas,
such as Science at Kingbourn, in addition to the official documents there
were displays of photographs, showing members of the department at
past celebratory events such as end-of-term picnics. Following Rose
(2002), I suggest that these displays produced a space-time stretched out
beyond the limits of the room, articulating a sense of the department as
social, even familial, as well as professional. Thus, the workspace was
constructed as more porous and dynamic but with a shared history.
Observation of the language and interchange at break reinforced this in
the assemblage of storytelling, dialogue and debate (see my field notes
below). Science also reported most links ‘outside’ the department
through cross-curricular or subject association groups.
At breaktime in the small Science Office a huge number of interactions
are going on, an assemblage of social talk and humour, interchanges
about workschemes, lessons and resources, also students (but
noticeably not much storytelling). There is a lot of talk about the
curriculum. I later mention this to the Head of Department: how
everything seems to lead to that and he says ‘Well, it should,
shouldn’t it? It should not be separate’. (Field notes, Kingbourn, June
2001)

Employing a spatial perspective, it becomes more obvious that ‘the

school’ is a variably constituted place for different people and agencies.
For the parents, students and adults working there, school begins and
ends at different times and places. In discussing the relationship with the
immediate local community the site manager at Brythnoth noted:
With the neighbours it is debatable where the school [boundary]
finishes. If kids are smoking it’s one inch before the gate. To the
parents it’s all the way here [into the building] and if you are clearing
rubbish from people’s gardens it’s one mile.

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Students and teachers obviously bring to school their prior education,

experiences and identities, which are constructed partly in relation to the
communities in which they live or identify. The concept of social capital
is useful here (Bourdieu, 1977; Nespor, 1990; Shilling, 1991). The majority
of students in Brythnoth and Kingbourn took the bus to school. For the
poorer Brythnoth students the lack of public or private transport meant
that times on the bus, at registration and break were intensely social and
often made them late for lessons:
Friends can be 15 miles apart; they finish a conversation and go off on
separate buses ... They need to be sociable and meet, to be accepted
back into the community that is school. But it is so fragmented. It
would help the teachers to be part of that group. The teachers come
from outside, there is hostility. You don’t see this in [the city]. I am
not sure how many teachers like the […] area and the children. (Head
teacher of re-integration unit, Brythnoth)

Where the ‘multiple and embedded contexts’ of school cultures are

recognised in education literature, they are commonly conceptualised
and represented as a ‘nested hierarchy’ with concentric layers from the
classroom to the department, school, local community and policy
environment (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1990). I would suggest that this was
the way many teachers saw the relationship between the school and local
community. Most teachers at Brythnoth lived either in nearby towns or
the more prosperous villages and few came from the poorer socio-
economic groups. For them, particular students from the distinctive and
isolated farming area or the housing overspill areas embodied values and
outlooks with which they had little empathy. They saw these bringing
into the school a powerful influence on the expectations of students and
gendered relationships, for example, in the construction of particular
masculinities. There was a consensus that older women teachers were
often less respected, particularly by boys:
The [agricultural] families have to work colossal long hours at £35 a
day they are earning. Once they get to any size [the students] can be
used to work or to look after kids so somebody else can work. Some of
them live on smallholdings and their fathers drive trucks, the boys are
essential to be there because the mothers can’t help hoick the stuff
about in quite the same way. If you go to Luton, where I worked 35
years ago, the women there can earn as much money as the men
because brawn isn’t the issue. But they can’t here and therefore if the
bulk of the money is coming in with the men, they have the bulk of the
rights for spending it. And the boys are treated by the mothers as if
they were household pets. The girls will have to do the work and the
boys will be indulged because one day the boy will be bringing the
money in and the mother will want it. She knows what side her bread
is buttered. (Head teacher, Brythnoth)

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Jane McGregor

Expectations of students and parents at Brythnoth were generally

perceived by teachers to be low, in contrast to the majority at Kingbourn:
I find it very difficult to understand why the young girls see
relationship, marriage and children as a career move ... Not that there
are opportunities, there is very little light industry, very little office
work ... Expectations are very low. I sometimes think that they don’t
want their kids to compete with them. I have had Mums say ‘Of course
you are not doing A-levels when CSEs were enough for me, kids with
grade A GCSEs. (Arts teacher, Brythnoth).[3]

These kids are from the affluent middle class, they are motivated and
well-supported and there are few students with big behaviour
problems, with that goes expectations of achievement. There is an
arrogance in the sixth form: ‘You’d better deliver the goods’ ... If you
are at Kingbourn you will do well by osmosis, there can be
complacency. (Head of individual needs, Kingbourn)

As Nespor (2000) demonstrated in ‘Topologies of Masculinity’, it is likely

that the students drew on wider influences , particularly from popular
culture, with its global reach, to construct their gendered identities. They
were certainly quick in taking up new technologies where possible.
Mobile phones were increasingly used for text messages (generating
worries about bullying) and during the time I visited Brythnoth, the local
newspaper carried the headline ‘Pupils in Internet Class War’. Students
thought to be from the prestigious independent school in the city were
trading insults with students from Brythnoth on the city website: ‘This is
the Rich Kids ... I don’t know what they teach you at ... but all I see is
pupils doing a paper round. Can you people not do anything else?
Sometimes I even see your Mums doing it’. The spatiality of Brythnoth as
a school, constructed from these influences and interrelations in an
ongoing fashion, was quite different from that of Kingbourn, although the
physical environment, administrative and social organisation were not
dissimilar.

Conclusion
A topological approach to the study of teacher workplace culture
employs the new geographical conception of spaces and places as
contested and shifting, constructed through complex interacting social
relationships operating at a variety of levels and extending in space-time.
‘It is socio-spatial practices that define places and these practices result
in overlapping and intersecting places with multiple and changing
boundaries, constituted and maintained by social relations of power and
exclusion’ (McDowell, 1999, p. 4). What we call ‘the school’ is more than a
physical building within which relationships are enacted. It is the product

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of interrelations and materially-embedded practices, connected in space

and time to wider flows of ideas, technologies and discourses in society.
Seeing schools as more than isolated ‘spatial and temporal islands’
(Nespor, 2002) or even as elements in a nested hierarchy of context
allows a more powerful evaluation of the influence of socioeconomic,
political and social factors which operate within education.
I argue that the view of the school or classroom as a discrete entity
is related to the common conception of ‘the local’ as a place with a stable
and bounded identity. Places do not have to have boundaries which
enclose homogeneity and divide them from somewhere else; instead,
places and spaces can be seen as processes too. The specificity of place
comes from the juxtaposition of wider and local social relations which
have a particular effect. The uniqueness of a (work) place is then:
constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulation of
social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in
a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those
relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on
a far wider scale than we happen to define for that moment as the
place itself. (Massey, 1993, p. 66)

If we see school cultures as enacted, they are then the dynamic creation
of complex interconnected processes of social interaction. Such a space
is the product of relations and interconnections from the very local to the
global, although we should remember that ‘The social relations which
constitute space are not organised into scales so much as constellations
of temporary coherence’ (Massey, 1998b, p. 124). Such conceptions allow
us to move away from notions of cultures being ‘local’ and ‘closed’ and to
disrupt notions of scale which separate the microcontext of the
classroom or school from the macrocontext of the wider social, economic
and political processes that shape it. It then becomes possible to disrupt
binaries such as structure/culture, inside/outside or home/school.
This perspective is particularly important in view of present UK
government reforms and policies informed by what Fielding (1997) has
described as the ‘hegemony of school effectiveness’. This body of work
has arguably dealt with decontextualised school effects and structures,
rendering local conditions and the lives of teachers, students and the
community invisible and social and political conditions apparently
irrelevant (Slee et al, 1998; Stoll & Fink, 1996). However, the importance of
school cultures ‘with their reciprocal relationship with context and
structure’ (Stoll, 1999, p. 47) is beginning to be recognised in the process
of school improvement (Joyce et al, 1999; Busher, 2001). Real
improvement cannot come from anywhere other than within schools
themselves, and ‘within’ is a complex web of values and beliefs, norms,
social and power relationships and emotions (Stoll, 1999, p. 47).

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A consideration of the spatiality of schools further disrupts notions

of ‘within’ and enables us to extend our understanding of context. The
school is not fixed and static but the site for dynamic and intersecting
networks of practices which articulate in different configurations of
power relations. The importance of studying the topology of workplace
cultures lies in providing a perspective on the multilayered dynamic and
reciprocal influences on and between teachers and schooling in order to
imagine different spaces for a more equitable and emancipatory
education. Space makes a difference, not only to the way we work but
also to how we conceptualise schools and education.

Acknowledgement
I should like to thank Dr Carrie Paechter and Professor Doreen Massey for
their continuing guidance and inspiration, also the anonymous referees
whose comments on this paper were helpful and thought-provoking.

Correspondence
Jane McGregor, 12 Bishop’s Road, Trumpington, Cambridge CB2 2NH ,
United Kingdom (J.McGregor@open.ac.uk).

Notes
[1] For the importance of the associational life of teachers in relation to
school reforms, see Rosenholz, 1989; Louis & Kruse, 1995.
[2] Personal communication, Kenn Fisher, March 2001.
[3] State schools in the UK are broadly required to follow the National
Curriculum in compulsory education until the age of 16, when public
examinations such as GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education)
may be taken.The ‘sixth form’ commonly caters for the 16-18 age group,
who may take ‘Advanced Level’ (A-level) examinations. GCSEs replaced
the end of compulsory schooling GCEs and CSEs, the latter being judged
of less academic worth.

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APPENDIX I

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APPENDIX II
Location of interaction % totals
reported from grids (respondents = 120)

APPENDIX III

Percentage total interactions reported from grids.

Respondents = 120. Critical practices of adaptibility = bold

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378