Introduction

As a Deputy Principal of a New Zealand school which was experiencing significant roll growth in 2014, I vividly remember sitting in a meeting with the architect appointed by New Zealand’s Ministry of Education (hereafter MOE). It was an early planning meeting for a new buildFootnote 1 aimed at boosting the school’s capacity. He explained that the Ministry was only building modern learning environments (MLEsFootnote 2) when it came to new school buildings, before remarking that he found it interesting that architects rather than educators were driving pedagogy to be future-focused. In early 2015, a concerned parent asked me where the evidence was that pointed to benefits for children in MLEs. She explained that she could clearly see the benefits for teachers, but was struggling to find evidence of the benefits for students. She was sorry to bother me, but had visited the Ministry’s website and was no better informed. These interactions are but two of many that have piqued my interest in what the terms ‘Modern’ or ‘Innovative Learning Environment’ actually signify, and what this subsequently means for teaching professionals, parents, and most importantly, for students.

The chapter is written in two parts. Firstly, it explores a recently relaunched MOE website (ile.education.govt.nz) to interrogate and critique its imaginary of an MLE and its projected pedagogical implications for teachers. I use the term imaginary here to refer to the Ministry’s representation of an MLE-based approach to education, and the philosophical base which it reflects. Throughout, I argue that this imaginary marks a subtle yet significant departure from a previously progressivist hegemony in pedagogy formation towards an instrumentalist pedagogy. This site is the only such MOE site which deals exclusively with ILEs. Therefore, I contend that this website acts as a primary source for constructing an ILE mental space, as it projects the ILE imaginary of the MOE, and that a critical exploration of what this website communicates about MLEs is highly informative in understanding the intent of the MOE for New Zealand classrooms. In this first part, I draw on Lefebvre’s (2009) concept of mental space, a term which indicates the intersection of the State and citizen imaginary of a particular construct (in this instance, MLEs). Using document analysis as a method of inquiry, I argue that a critical reading exposes an underlying advocacy for placing the emphasis of pedagogic formation onto the physical environment and new technologies available to the practitioner. I contend that this amounts to de-centring the child in pedagogy formation, meaning that where once a child’s individual learning needs might be central to the framing of pedagogic and curricular learning sequences and selection by a teacher, pedagogic formation within the MLE imaginary of the MOE has been recast with a primacy placed upon the learner’s physical and digital environments.

Secondly, I offer an explanation of this phenomenon by suggesting that New Zealand’s progressivist tradition in education (Beeby 1986, 1992; Couch 2012) has cloaked an instrumentalist education agenda in the process of this shift to MLEs. Instrumentalism in education is seated within a neoliberal philosophical base, which “asserts that all behaviour is dominated by self-interest … [in] this view individuals are rational utility-maximizers” (Peters 2011, p. 103). Within this philosophical approach, education is seen as a means to an end, thus instrumental. It represents a sharp distinction from the progressive tradition’s humanist philosophical base to education, which understands education as an end-in-itself. I argue that this shift occurs as a result of the apparent similarity in the meanings of certain key terms which actually operate from markedly distinct philosophical bases. By retaining much of the progressive discourse, instrumentalist pedagogic approaches are gradually altering the meaning beneath these signifiers. Here, Bernstein’s (2000) theory of pedagogic identities is particularly helpful. Pedagogic identities represent a philosophical grounding which informs the regulation and management of change. In exploring how pedagogic identities construct a mental space, these concepts are used to argue that the de-centring of the child by MOE policy develops symbiotically with the adoption of an instrumentalist pedagogic identity. Rather than offering a singular explanation of these events, it is hoped that this chapter will promote further critical debate around the fundamental drivers of pedagogic formation in an innovative and modern learning environment, and what implications this presents for a national education system.

Mental Space and Pedagogic Identities: A Conceptual Framework

Two theoretical constructs described above are critical for their explanatory power within this context: Lefebvre’s notion of mental spaces, and Bernstein’s discourse of pedagogic identities. According to Lefebvre,

the State occupies a mental space that includes the representations of the State that people construct – confused or clear, directly lived or conceptually elaborated. This mental space must not be confused with physical or social space; nor can it be fully separated from the latter. For it is here that we may discern the space of representations and the representations of space. (2009, p. 225, emphasis in original)

Teasing this concept out further, Middleton writes that mental spaces “occupy the interstices (the cracks) between representational spaces (lived, experiential, emotive) of its citizens and its official representations of space (the conceived or policy discourse)” (2014, p. 144, emphasis in original). This category in Lefebvre’s discussion of various spaces deals explicitly with the intersection between the lived experience and the abstracted projections of citizen and State. For instance, when considering MLEs, teachers, students, and so on experience a reality that interacts with the MOE conception of what an MLE ought to be. In this sense, I will argue that the mental space resulting from this ILE imaginary, or the manner in which this imaginary is experienced by its users and conceived by the MOE, represents a shift in pedagogic identities.

A “pedagogic identity is the result of embedding a career in a collective base … [Each collective base represents] different approaches to regulating and managing change, moral, cultural, and economic” (Bernstein 2000, p. 66). Of the four pedagogic identities in Bernstein’s model, those of most explanatory value for this chapter are embedded (see Middleton’s explanation of representational spaces above) through Prospective, and De-Centred Market bases. Explored further below, Prospective pedagogic identities “are formed by recontextualising selective features from the past to stabilise the future through engaging with contemporary change” (p. 68, emphasis in original). In New Zealand, education is largely funded by the State, and therefore, the State retains oversight and regulatory duties of education. De-Centred Market pedagogic identities are constructed by the absolute devolvement of oversight and regulatory duties to individual schools and educational institutions. These schools have “autonomy over [their] own position in the market: that is to optimise [their] position with respect to the exchange value of its products, namely students” (Bernstein 2000, p. 69).

Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic identities is not explicitly linked to Lefebvre’s concept of mental spaces. Rather, mental space is used here to encapsulate the interactions of the citizens’ experiences of an MLE and the MLE imaginary of the MOE. Pedagogic identities are used to determine what the citizens’ part of this interaction is, and conversely the part of the Ministry. In this way, mental spaces are constituted by the interactions of pedagogic identities. Key distinctions between the collective bases of Prospective and De-Centred Market pedagogic identities are offered shortly as an explanation to how this mental space is being redrawn by the new MOE ILE website. I argue below that this emerging mental space presents an underlying advocacy for the de-centring of the child in pedagogic formation.

A Web(Site) of Meanings

There are several websites which can be accessed for teachers and parents in New Zealand that help communicate not only what is meant by the term ILE, but also discussing their constituent parts and the subsequent implications for teachers and school leaders. For the scope of this chapter, I have selected the primary such website administered by the MOE and focus here on its homepage. Document analysis was especially useful for this inquiry. Considered by some as “the sedimentations of social practices” (May 2011, p. 191), documents play an integral part in knowledge construction and meaning making (Bowen 2009). When projecting a State imaginary, documents such as this website are highly formative in constructing a mental space. As Bryman (2004) illustrates through his purposeful avoidance of the word ‘text’ when explaining document analysis, documents are deeper than a sum of their physical elements. Document analysis enabled consideration of the MOE representations and communications (May 2011) of an ILE, consisting of images and video in addition to what might be traditionally considered as “text”, within the website’s homepage. Rather than an atomising examination of sentence structure and so on, these data are considered here in order to present an overall understanding of an ILE according to the MOE.

Two explanatory notes concerning these data are important to make at the outset. Firstly, whilst I am critically engaging with the MOE imaginary of ILE, it is not my intent to critique individual teachers and principals whose interviews appear on the website. Therefore, quotes have been attributed to the MOE throughout, as the interviews have been used to construct its vision and interpretation of an ILE. The exception is in the case of a public news broadcast embedded in the homepage, where attribution is made to the original content producer. Secondly, the website contains four subpages. Due to the limitations of space, these subpages are not examined here. The reader is invited to visit the website and explore it in depth. With these provisos in place, it is time to turn attention to the layout of the website itself, before exploring its content in detail.

The homepage of the website is divided into four sections. The first, entitled ‘What’s it all about?’, provides a brief definition and description of an ILE, stating that “[i]nnovative learning environments are learner-focussed and emphasise valued learner outcomes. They encourage collaboration and inquiry, both for learners and teachers, and allow teachers to teach in the style that best suits the needs of diverse learners” (MoE, n.d.-a, Section 1, para 3). The second section encompasses four short video clips under the heading ‘School Perspectives’. One video explores an ILE that has been built within an existing school, with a second looking at an ILE as a new build. The third video looks into considerations one school made for digital technologies when building, and the final video in this section is a news article from a current affairs programme entitled ‘Bringing the Kiwi classroom into the digital age’. The third and fourth sections are explicitly labelled in terms of property. Called ‘The property component’ and ‘Core elements for property’, they detail the manner in which the material construction of an ILE differs from what is considered ‘traditional’ school buildings. ‘The property component’ consists of four videos. Two of these videos share before and after photos and plans in several existing schools. These show how either a set of classrooms or the whole school space has been updated into an ILE. The other two videos tour three recently built schools to demonstrate ILEs as new builds. The section headed ‘Core elements for property’ is a set of images which fall under eight subheadings. These core elements are listed as

  • Accessibility,

  • Air quality,

  • Heating,

  • Healthy and safe,

  • Lighting,

  • Insulation,

  • Sustainability, and

  • Acoustics.

Each is briefly described in relation to their role in an ILE.

The Child, the ILE, and the Technology

The MOE claims its holistic purpose and intent shares “the OECD’s holistic view of learning environments as an ecosystem that includes learners, educators, families/whānau,Footnote 3 communities, content, and resources like property and technology” (MoE, n.d.-a, Section 1, paras 1, emphasis added). ILEs are explained further: they are ecosystems which holistically embody a significant number of constituent parts; they are collaborative and extend beyond traditional school boundaries; they are future focused; they enable the intended expression of the National Curriculum; they are not solely about the content and resources such as physical space and new technologies (MoE, n.d.-a, Section 1, paras 1–3). Whilst some of these statements are vague, a link to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) publication, Innovative Learning Environments (OECD 2013), provides the reader with the full theoretical backbone and justification for the development and implementation of the MOE ILE imaginary. What becomes clear within this definition is the fact that ILEs should encompass more than their physical and technological elements.

The emphasis of each subsequent section of the page, however, is on the physical environment and technologies which constitute an ILE. These sections of the homepage appear to be in tension with the initial and holistic definition of an ILE in section one. Interviews with various school leaders in section two provide significant statements about the manner in which the physical and technological resources of an ILE directly influence pedagogical shifts:

For us as a school it was always about the pedagogy that came out of property, and the opportunities property offered for learning … Everybody [has been] doing some serious learning about space, and what space has got to do with children’s learning … How can you use that little rectangle in ways that allow children to have some sort of sense of agency in their own learning?… Physically, the space has done something at a deeper level in the school culture. I see an acceleration in the way teachers think about space as a result of this development. (MOE, n.d.-a, Section 2, video 1)

Further, interviews centre on the relationships between architects and school leaders in the process of building a new school:

Really early on we got our architects involved in the consultation process, where they facilitated sessions with our parents, students, and our teachers … They were heavily involved … and really challenged our thinking with what they presented back. So it was really great to have educationalists and architects to work to look for the best outcomes for kids. (MOE, n.d.-a, Section 2, video 2)

Technological considerations also feature heavily in this section. One video is solely concerned with the technological considerations made by one school leadership team when undertaking a new school build:

We spent a lot of time looking at what type of environment we wanted to create digitally for the children: where the ports would be, how accessible they would be, where we would have floor boxes, how much wiring would go in, how we could future-proof it as much as possible … And that in turn informed the types of furniture we would put into those rooms that would facilitate that type of learning. (MOE, n.d.-a, Section 2, video 3)

This section of the homepage includes a current-events news item broadcast in 2013 which briefly visited several MLEs around New Zealand. Entitled Bringing the Kiwi Classroom into the Digital Age (Sellwood 2013). Several significant claims are made regarding the advent of MLEs in New Zealand’s education system. The narrator begins by describing MLEs as a “mix of the latest in student-focused architectural design, new technology, and collaborative teaching” (2013). In a later part of the short film, Professor Stephen Heppel highlights the relevance of MLEs by stating that they are “absolutely about [the students’] world, their life, their century, their technology. We need to let them get on with it” (Sellwood 2013). The upshot of all this, explained by another school leader, explicitly implicates MLEs in the formation of pedagogy. “Modern learning environments are going to be stunning. They are going to be an amazing opportunity. But to make them effective, our teachers, our great teachers, are going to have to teach in different ways” (Sellwood 2013). Each video clip in section two represents undeniably critical considerations and discussions when building a new school, or modernising an existing space. What is particularly striking is that, in each clip, the association between physical space and technologies, and pedagogy formation pervades. Coupled with the overall imaginary of the ILE projection by this website, the narrative constructs an ILE mental space which emphasises the recasting of pedagogy relative to these new spaces and technologies, reinforced further as we scroll down the page.

Sections three and four of the homepage are expressly concerned with the physical elements which make up an ILE. From videos taking viewers on a tour of newly built schools, to the ‘before and after’ images and floor plans of school buildings which have been modernised to ILEs, and the list of eight property elements which contribute to an ILE, the bulk of the content conveys messages about property and technology. This creates a significant tension between the opening holistic definition of an ILE in section one, and its subsequent elaboration. Throughout these sections, learning is framed as future-focused and innovative when it takes place in digital or non-traditional spaces. The opportunity for students to exercise their agency as learners is afforded by these very same spaces in ways hitherto unavailable to these learners. Pedagogy is centred on these spaces, and the learner is conceptualised from these spaces. This shifting location of pedagogy formation, from student to space/new technologies, underscores this chapter’s initial argument—that ILEs, according to the MOE, advocate for a redrawing of pedagogy relative to physical and technological developments, de-centring the child in pedagogy formation in the process.

As a first encounter with this imaginary, the homepage conveys several significant messages that explicitly associates space and new technologies with pedagogic formation. The advocacy within this ILE imaginary for pedagogy formation relative to new physical environments and digital learning tools marks a distinct and significant departure from New Zealand education’s long-term de facto relationship with a progressive and child-centred pedagogy (Couch 2012; McPhail 2016; Mutch 2013), to an instrumentalist pedagogy formed from physical and digital spaces. The following section offers an explanation of this phenomenon, by suggesting that it represents a subtle assimilation of New Zealand education’s progressive heritage into an instrumental future.

Instrumentalism in Progressivism’s Clothing? The Schizoid Pedagogue

MLE emergence and accession into mainstream MOE mind-sets has been promoted by the rising “rhetoric of ‘twenty-first-century learning’ … [which calls for schools to prepare learners for] the fluidity, unpredictability and complexity of a complex and dynamic world deeply influenced by globalisation and the revolution in digital technology” (Benade 2015, p. 10). Theoretical justification for the introduction of MLEs as set out by the MOE on its ILE website rests upon an OECD report published in 2013. Heavily informed by a preoccupation with the unpredictability of future markets and industries for which we prepare our students, the report “is focused on innovative ways of organising learning for young people with the view to positively influence the contemporary education reform agendaFootnote 4 with forward-looking insights about learning and innovation” (OECD 2013, p. 3, emphasis added). Has this report radically altered the hegemonic conceptualisation of the child, as was experienced in New Zealand education during the 1930s and 1940s? Has it radically altered the hegemonic conceptualisation of pedagogy? In attempting to explain this de-centring of the child in pedagogy formation, I suggest here that New Zealand’s traditionally progressivist tendencies in education have cloaked a neoliberalist undercurrent at work within this ILE imaginary, altering both the conceptualisation of the child and a pedagogy to match.

New Zealand education has a well-documented progressive heritage which emerged in its mainstream during the 1930s and early 1940s (Abbiss 1998; Beeby 1992; Couch 2012; O’Connor 2014). Progressive education in New Zealand has long been characterised by “child-centredness, experiential learning, an emergent curriculum, a holistic pedagogy and the fostering of creativity” (Mutch 2013, p. 99). The neoliberal turn in New Zealand education is equally well documented (Mutch 2013; Peters 2001; Roberts 2009), and was ushered in during the 1980s through wide-reaching education reforms entitled Tomorrow’s Schools [reviewed in-depth after a 10-year period by Wylie (1999)]. These reforms saw responsibility for schools devolved to locally elected boards of trustees. Whilst this presented a radically different education structure and introduced quasi-markets into primary and secondary education nationally, pedagogy formation remained progressive and holistic, if restricted by the introduction of market-based principles (Mutch 2013; Peters 2011). Gradually, an increasing emphasis was placed on students themselves to mirror the self-managing, enterprising, innovative traits expected of their schools and teachers (Peters 2001; Robertson 2016). Education informed by neoliberalism conceptualises the child as self-managing, emphasises entrepreneurialism and innovation, and firmly considers the child relative to future enterprise and industries. “In essence, this is suggestive of emerging and increasingly pervasive neoliberal pedagogy where the ethos of state education is arguably being transformed to one of free market fundamentalism” (Mccafferty 2010, p. 542, emphasis added). These developments point towards a shifting pedagogic identity within the New Zealand education space.

Prospective and De-Centred Market pedagogic identities (Bernstein 2000) are both evident within New Zealand education. “The management of prospective identities, because of the emphasis on performances which have an exchange value, requires the state to control both inputs to education and outputs” (Bernstein 2000, p. 68, emphasis in original). Within New Zealand’s context, the Prospective pedagogic identity was embedded during education reforms in the 1980s. As a result of these reforms, “governance and management was decentralised to individual schools through elected boards of trustees. Whilst schools could make day-to-day decisions, the Ministry retained control over curriculum and assessment” (Mutch 2013, p. 106). A significant difference between Prospective and De-Centred Market collective bases lies in the role of the State in resourcing education. Whilst both neoliberal by degree, the De-Centred Market collective base seeks to resource education from the private sphere. “Whereas the centring resources of … prospective identities recontextualises the past … de-centring resources construct the present” (Bernstein 2000, p. 68). Education reforms in the 1980s were highly neoliberal in the organisation of education; however, the State retained its resourcing role. Recent developments have seen a neoliberal philosophy further permeate funding structures nationally, with the advent of Public Private Partnerships; including the funding and building of ILEs [for instance, Hobsonville Point Schools (MOE, n.d.-c)], opening professional development to private providers (MOE, n.d.-b), and 2013 legislation enabling the introduction of Charter Schools. This is a clear response to neoliberalism’s call for a reduced role of the State, and where “markets do not exist (in areas such as … education …) then they must be created, by state action if necessary” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). Whilst New Zealand’s traditionally progressive child-centred pedagogy was somewhat restricted within a Prospective pedagogic identity (Mutch 2013), they were still within the primary control of the teacher. A teacher’s selection of pedagogic practice is located externally to the teacher within a De-Centred Market pedagogic identity. “[P]edagogic practice will be contingent on the market in which the identity is to be enacted” (Bernstein 2000, p. 69).

Pedagogic identities, then, construct or embed the MOE’s mental space for ILEs. Tracing educational reform in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, Bernstein (2000, p. 71) employs these categories to illustrate the emergence of a “pedagogic schizoid”; operating from a Prospective pedagogic identity within an institution accountable to a De-Centred Market pedagogic identity. When an instrumentalist conceptualisation of the child—self-managing, entrepreneurial, and innovative—is set against the previous hegemony of progressive educational tenets—holistic teaching, contextual, and relevant—one can see that the concepts and language espoused by the instrumentalist pedagogue can be conflated with those espoused by the progressive pedagogue. For instance, child-centred pedagogy and curriculum are embodied in the self-managing student. Acknowledging the child’s context and existence outside of school walls is conflated with an advocacy, and in some instances urgency (MOE, n.d.-a), to fixate on the child’s future economic self through a preoccupation with potential industries and enterprise. This apparent similarity of language used to indicate two markedly different philosophical bases has been instrumental in the reorientation of pedagogic identities within the Ministry’s imagination of ILEs in New Zealand, and when tensions go unacknowledged and unresolved, can present a schizoid pedagogue.

Conclusion

This volume makes a significant contribution to the discourse which this global shift in education demands. Due to limitations of space, this chapter can only begin to acknowledge the complexities represented by New Zealand’s MOE ILE imaginary, and these complexities are by no means confined to New Zealand.Footnote 5 ILEs, the aspirational gold-standard for learner-centred education, constitute and are constituted by a complex and dynamic set of agendas influencing education reforms globally. The meaning behind terms such as ‘learner-centred’, ‘self-managing’, and ‘innovative’ are all being continuously redrawn and repurposed, and the subsequent education mental space is an ever more overwhelming space to try to understand. New Zealand’s national education system is increasingly being opened to new forms of private intervention, steering educators’ pedagogic formation towards the neoliberal child and instrumentalist pedagogy, necessarily reducing the space for a holistic progressivist pedagogy. Whilst an ILE is being presented as child centred, a critical exploration in the MOE imaginary of an ILE exposes a deeper undercurrent of instrumentalism at play which dramatically reorients the term from its humanist foundations towards a neoliberal philosophical anchor. The construction of New Zealand’s children to be flexible, adaptable, self-managing, and innovative is justified through the rhetoric of having to prepare learners today for an uncertain global economy tomorrow.

My observation here that education is afloat upon the ever-rising tide of neoliberalism is nothing new. What is important to consider, however, as Bernstein (2000, p. 71) pointed out within British education reforms, “is the official institutionalising of the [De-Centred Market] and the legitimising of the identity it projects”. This chapter has set out to call for a careful and critical response to the projection of neoliberal pedagogic identities into the New Zealand teacher mental space, hitherto a final frontier of a progressive hegemony. Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic identity has been used to offer an explanation for the shifting collective base projected by the ILE imaginary of the New Zealand MOE. That neoliberal pedagogy should be taking hold in New Zealand is perhaps unsurprising, given its embrace of a neoliberal education system in 1989. “Based on a relatively pure neo-liberal model of structural adjustment … the ‘New Zealand experiment’ has been touted by the World Bank and the OECD as an example for the rest of the world” (Peters 2001, pp. 212–213). Grinding away at curriculum reform and school leadership (Robertson 2016), and teacher pedagogy (Mccafferty 2010), neoliberal creep into the classroom is underpinning what was once a predominantly progressivist mental space. As Robertson cautions, “neoliberalism has transformed, albeit in both predictable and unpredictable ways, how we think and what we do as teachers and learners, and it is therefore important we make these things evident to ourselves” (2008, p. 12, emphasis in original). The implications of this transformation are profound and necessitate further and critical inquiry into both fundamental drivers of pedagogy in our schools, and the mechanisms by which they spread. Too much is at stake for such critique to be absent.