Making sense of school learning environments as infrastructures of care and spatial typologies

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership was established in 2010 to support teaching quality and leadership in schools and initial teacher education programs. Early on it produced seven Australian Professional Standards for Teachers affecting professional knowledge, professional practice, and professional engagement. Standard 4 is part of professional practice and requires teachers to create and maintain supportive and safe school learning environments. We propose that Standard 4 has implications geographers have yet to fully consider, and here our aim is to surface and examine its latent spatialities. We conceive of supportive and safe learning environments as crucial infrastructures of care that can be made more legible using established spatial typologies. To support this proposition, we draw on empirical evidence from a study of literacy teaching practice in Tasmanian government schools and of initial teacher education programs. Here, we focus on how participants described the importance of school learning environments for students' educational attainment and social and emotional wellbeing. We conclude that spatial lenses are important in thinking about these environments and could effectively support teachers to demonstrate career-long and increasingly sophisticated capacities to perceive, use, create, and help others make the most of such spaces for diverse learning outcomes.