Educational Research: The Importance and Effects of Institutional Spaces

The chapters address various topics relating to the physical and geographical environment. How, for example, does geographical space shape researchers’ mental frameworks? How did the learning environments in which young children are taught today evolve? To what extent did parochialism shape America’s higher education system? How can our understanding of classroom practice be enhanced by concepts of space? The book acknowledges that texts themselves, as well as the research ‘arena’, are ‘spaces’ too, and notes the fascinating debate on the concept of space in the field of mathematics education. Indeed, as more and more students move online, the book analyses the rising importance of virtual spaces such as Web 2.0, which have major educational implications for researchers and students joining the innovative ‘virtual’ universities of the future.

This publication, as well as the ones that are mentioned in the preliminary pages of this work, were realized by the Research Community (FWO Vlaanderen / Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium) Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Faces and Spaces of Educational Research.