Seating Arrangement as Social Metaphor

"You Are Where You Sit: Uncovering the Lessons of Classroom Furniture" by Tom McKenna

Rethinking Schools, Fall 2010

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_01/25_01_mckenna.shtml

Summary: McKenna discusses using a unique lesson in his regular class at Portland Youth Builders, a "high school completion school" here in Portland. He uses the surprise of a novel chair setup one day to launch into an activity in which his students consider how the arrangement of furniture might contribute to how they feel about each other, and how power is spread around the classroom.

Intended Audience: educators, general public

Key Points:

• something as simple as the layout of a classroom, a thing we might take for granted, can have wide-ranging implications when one considers how it casts roles of both power and class
• opening students' eyes to these taken-for-granted paradigms can help them begin to understand the world around them, and the idea that certain arrangements in society might be so arranged for more reason than "just because"

Relevance: It is always valuable to call into question one's assumptions about how the world operates, especially with regards to things taken for granted. Just like we will be doing with the personal biases identification exercise, prompting students to consider what the arrangement of chairs in a classroom might mean for how they interact with each other and with their teacher -- with the idea that this can be extrapolated to the broader world -- can be a fun, eye-opening social awareness exercise. Teachers serve to benefit from it just as much as students.