On Brene Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, she interviews Celeste Ng, author of the novel (and now the Hulu miniseries) Little Fires Everywhere. Commenting on the setting of the novel, Ng reflects on the power of place, and how in both this novel and in our lives, place becomes more than a setting: place becomes a character.
This is true in education. Each semester, I take a field trip to my assigned classrooms. I notice lighting, whiteboards, door placements, and seating. I wonder how the shape of the room will inform teaching, how this character will come to life.
The places where I teach unravel like fiction characters whose personalities are leveraged for pedagogy. If the room has two doors, I lock one on the first day of class to force students through the entrance where I wait, dressed in a smile and an outstretched hand.
Tables and chairs speak: You will be with each other often.
Rolling seating says: Get ready. She’s gonna move you around!
Large rooms are extroverts, inviting grouping varieties and active learning, encouraging students to fill up space with each other. These rooms thrive on people, and open themselves to the possibilities of knowing each other.
Most rooms start out shy, quietly holding students who back against their walls.
Like church, no one wants to be near the front.
Our walls become adventure and information, with wire-rimmed glasses and untied shoes.
But we have all been migrants lately.
We were brought here–to these online classrooms–from somewhere else, and it’s shaping us like an unexpected visit from a ghost in the middle of the story.
If place is a character in our teaching story, these remote and online spaces can be unsure, afraid or surprised, some days brilliant, barely smug, mostly tiptoeing through the hall past curfew.
This character of place looks out at dusk from the inside, when the window reflects back the room instead of trees beyond the glass. I keep looking into the digital landscape of my classroom, but I can’t yet see beyond my limited perspective. I need this character to stay awhile, to teach me new rhythms.
They say the best way to learn a new culture is to experience it, to become bathed in its practices, language, nuance, backstory. So I will stay awhile and get settled, because I haven’t yet learned how to write this character round.
