“Natural” Classroom Arrangements

What is the “natural” state for a classroom of tables and chairs? The answer, according to some in authority, is tidy rows, much like the arrangement Laura Ingalls Wilder endured in her one room schoolhouse. And that wasn’t last century, but the century before.

I received an email from above instructing me that after I finish teaching, I should return the chairs to their rightful places. Now, before I teach, mind you, I have to arrange the room into a suitable learning environment. Now it would seem that I have to move the chairs twice, once to set up a classroom that disrupts the power structure abiding in a room full of tables facing the front (whence the professor is to pontificate), and then again at the end of the class so that status quo-ers who teach after I do don’t have to trouble themselves to set the room to rights.

Transmission model teachers assume that their way is the proper, rightful, ordained state of affairs. All classroom arrangements are socially constructed and therefore can be de- and re-constructed. I just might start a movement–Circlular arrangements of chairs are more normal than rows. Want to join me?