A Place for Stupidity: Investigating Democratic Learning Spaces in the Diorama Marike Hoekstra Abstract This article explores the possibilities of the diorama medium as a method to investigate educational realities and ideals. Contemporary artistic examples of dioramas deconstruct traditional associations of the diorama as a form of explanatory storytelling and critically contest the problematic reproduction of existing hierarchies, which seem to occur when dioramas are used in museums and schools. In contemporary dioramas, the gaze of the spectator is instead invited to engage and contribute to multiple interpretations of spatial creations. The article explains how dioramas have been employed in a doctoral research project on artist teachers and democratic pedagogy and how making dioramas as a research method in arts-based educational research has been adopted to engage in a dialogue with visitors to a contemporary gallery to collaboratively investigate the spatiality of democratic learning spaces. Keywords diorama, arts-based educational research, spatiality, artist teacher, democratic pedagogy Introduction My work with the diorama investigates the spatiality of embodied aspects of artist teacher practice, as part of a doctoral research on the artist teacher. The artist teacher is a concept working from duality, embracing both the diversity and ambi- guity of contemporary artistic practice and frames of educational realities. The argumentation focuses on significant relations between practice and the ideals of progressive education in order to find ways in which the artist teacher as a model for teaching could contribute to educational change. Knowledge construction involves subjectivity and lived experience. Memories of image and space and identity inform my position as an in-sider researcher in the DOI: 10.1111/jade.12240 iJADE 38.3 (2019) © 2019 The Authors. iJADE © 2019 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 38.3