Re/assembling spaces of learning in Victorian government schools: policy enactments, pedagogic encounters and micropolitics

The significant public investment that has been made over the past decade in the educational infrastructure of universities, colleges and schools has prompted increasing interest in the re-consideration of learning and the spaces in which learning takes place. Set within policy interest in Australia in how spaces can contribute to the broader policy agenda of achieving an ‘Education Revolution’, this article takes as its context the Building the Education Revolution (BER) infrastructure programme. Promoting the idea of twenty-first century learning in open, flexible learning spaces, this programme embeds a particular view of pedagogic practice and the spaces in which it is performed. Deploying data from video case studies of how government schools within the state of Victoria are utilising these spaces to improve teaching and students' learning, I trace education policy in action utilising an analytic of assemblage. In the empirical complexity of the passage of BER policy in schools, learning spaces emerge as open and closed, flexible and contained, heterogeneous and homogeneous; pedagogic practices are similarly seemingly paradoxical – learner-centred and teacher-centred, individualised and directly instructional or whole-group. The argument is made that this ontological variability is a site of micropolitics through which the predilections of BER policy are substantially challenged.