Abstract
Educators have long been rightly concerned about the risk that schools themselves can produce profoundly unsettling and potentially ‘unproductive’ emotional and physical states among children and youth. This chapter examines two moments in the attentive regimes and engagement paradigms that have been manifest in the material design of schools and classrooms in the United States in the twentieth century. The first part looks at a temporary classroom constructed as part of a demonstration of Montessori pedagogy at the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, California. The second section examines the classrooms the Crow Island School built in 1940 in Winnetka, Illinois, a wealthy Chicago suburb renowned for its progressive schools. In both these instances, architects and educators linked design with affect and connected design to strategies for managing boredom. Drawing on scholarship from architectural history and the history of emotions, I treat the ascription of affective effect to school design and architecture as itself a shifting historical artifact worthy of examination. The chapter argues that the confluence of emotional modulation, classroom design, and engagement/boredom management forms an important site in the governing of individuals.
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Notes
- 1.
For discussion of affect and emotion, see Sobe (2012).
- 2.
For additional information on the demonstration classroom, see Sobe (2004).
- 3.
A minor but revealing textual difference appears in the version of the text that was published in the official NEA proceedings, where the “problem of education” is rendered as the “problem of its education,” thus referring more specifically to the individual child rather than the problem of education in general. However, if we assume that the NEA proceedings are more accurate to what Montessori said, the editing of this declaration in the popular press can be seen to reveal the insertion of a narrative of social salvation.
- 4.
See the discussion in Sobe (2007).
- 5.
For a thoughtful discussion of what explained the success of progressive education in Winnetka, see Zilversmit (1993).
- 6.
See the discussion in Burke (2016).
- 7.
The label “Unit School” appears in several early descriptions of the school, including a full-page headline in the 18 August 1940 Chicago Tribune Metropolitan Section announcing the opening of Crow Island.
- 8.
In these respects, Crow Island designers appear to have drawn on Richard Nuetra’s work in California in the 1930s, as well as been influenced by Dutch and other European “Open Air” school models. See Ogata (2013).
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Sobe, N.W. (2018). Boredom and Classroom Design: The Affective Economies of School Engagement. In: Grosvenor, I., Rosén Rasmussen, L. (eds) Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance. Educational Governance Research, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97019-6_8
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