Studies in Learning, Evaluation http://sleid.cqu.edu.au Innovation and Development 3(1), pp. 52–54. July 2006 Engaging with challenging spaces Jen Webb, University of Canberra, Jen.Webb@canberra.edu.au SLEID is an international journal of scholarship and research that supports emerging scholars and the development of evidence-based practice in education. © Copyright of articles is retained by authors. As an open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. ISSN 1832-2050 The subtitle of this issue of Studies in LEID arrested me before I had even begun to read the articles “Challenging Spaces.” What space, what challenge? What speech part is represented by that present participle? Is it an adjective (“challenging” (adj); calling for full use of one’s abilities or resources) or a variant of an elided verb (“challenging” (v); call to engage; invite with defiance)? Who is doing what, and to whom? The journal contents go some way to providing answers; and the editors note in their introduction that both meanings have valence in the context of this extremely topical issue. In each of the articles the writers describe and analyse spaces that would challenge most of us to function with any degree of efficiency. Together they make up an issue that is absorbing and often intriguing, and deal with a concept that is currently very hot in intellectual circles: space, as actuality and as idea. This is not to suggest that space is a new concept on the academic circuit. It has been widely considered across the scholarly domain for as long, I guess, as people have been looking at where they live and wondering how it all works, and, given that (Euclidean) space comprises three of the four dimensions that make up the universe, it is safe to say that it will always attract research attention. In this issue of SLEID, space is invested principally as the page on which stories of communities are narrated. That is fair enough. Leave it to the physicists and the geologists to consider its phenomenological aspects, or to the philosophers to conceptualise its representational properties. These writers necessarily focus on educational space: how people occupy schools and educational communities, and how they negotiate or otherwise make claims on shared space. All space, of course, is shared and hence must be not only navigated but also negotiated. This issue goes some way to demonstrate the capacity of individuals and groups to navigate the spaces in which they find themselves, and also to negotiate for a slice of that space. But they do more. Each paper explicitly or implicitly points out that space functions not only as actuality and inhabited domain, but also as a communicative domain. It is within spaces that people negotiate their being-in-the-world; that they navigate, and seek to suture, the gaps between themselves and others. To this extent, the idea of space in this issue works metaphorically as much as it does materially. This would please writers such as Lakoff and Johnson for whom space is a central cognitive metaphor. They consider space a root analogy, one of those interlocking patterns of meaning making that makes the world for us, and our place in it. We “put down roots”, we “move forward”, we are “looking up”, or “feeling down”, and so on. All these analogies concretise our experience of the world in general and of particular spaces. I stress this here because space is experienced not just as itself in its materiality, but dialogically, in how we bump up against others. Communication, interaction – language, at base – is not experienced Page 52