I was invited to give a talk with a colleague's small class yesterday. When I entered the room, I was taken aback by the way the students were seated: all were against the walls, spread around the room. I felt this was bizarre and so I immediately took a seat in the middle and with the encouragement of my colleague, pulled them into a tighter circle so we could talk. But that image of the students -- spread as far away from the lecturn as physically possible -- really struck me as an anomoly.

I'm very conscious of spatial dynamics in the classroom. I don't mind students sitting in the back, but when I lead a conversation, I'll walk the rows and often speak right next to them. I want it to be clear that everyone is expected to participate and pay attention -- often because my classes are highly interactive spaces where participation matters.

Currently I work a very WIDE room for my freshman composition class. I'd estimate it's about four seats deep and ten seats wide. When I lead a standard class discussion, I have to march the length of the room -- from the door to the window at the far end -- and project my voice rather loudly when I'm on one side or the other. But that doesn't bother me. What's troubling is that it spreads the students far apart from each other. It divides them; and there is a sort of "faction" mentality that seems evident to me when debates get hot: one side argues against the other, from the comfortable distance of the double-wide trailer sized room.

You don't have to be a communications theorist to recognize that students tend to territorialize their space in a learning environment. If you teach, you see the same students in the same seats virtually every day -- as though some invisible seating chart were put in place even though you didn't assign it. It's predictable: students sit in the same seat each class, claiming it as their own. Some consciously choose to sit where they can better hear, better see, better learn. Others consciously choose places where they can better hide, better doodle, better sleep. Some have stock preferences -- conscious or not -- that they carry with them throughout their college careers, built long before they ever stake a claim to a chair in the room: the back row slacker, the teacher's pet in the front row, the loner who prefers not to have anyone in a three seat radius. There are myriad motives behind a student's choice of seat (one source (.pdf) even suggests that students sit based on whether they're left- or right-brain dominated). And I think that it's fine to allow students to choose their locations, actually, so that they can find a "home" site where they can feel comfortable in the classroom. It's human nature to return to the same place, time and time again. It reduces the anxiety-producing stimuli that an unfamiliar position can generate. This is, perhaps, why no one likes to have their seat taken (and everyone's heard of students getting into fights, even, about "taking my seat" -- in fact, some might claim specific seats time and again out of a fear of intruding on another student's turf).

But I wanted to mix things up a bit today. I like to try to get students to break out of their habits and to more consciously make choices about their own learning. Calling attention to a student's "situatedenss" can really open their eyes, and I like to use the classroom as a means toward that end. In the past, I've done things like rearrange the desks before the students arrive, or asked everyone to turn their desks around so I could lecture from the opposite wall of the room. This can have a "renewing" effect, sometimes.

Today I tried an experiment to consciously raise the class' awareness of their seating habits and to point out the limitations of the overly "wide" classroom. Borrowing an exercise called "The Dynamics of Sitting" (from John Suler's site for Teaching Clinical Psychology), I reported to the students what their seating preference might suggest about them ("people who sit by the window are daydreamers, like the 'freedom' of having wide-open space next to them (but often pay the price of being far from the door") and asked them to think about the subtle messages that such structures send to their teachers and classmates. Then I asked them to all pick up their books and coats and stand up by the blackboard. I gave them the opportunity to pick a new seat, just to try it out...and stipulated that, a) they could sit wherever they like next time; this wasn't necessarily permanent, and b) that they couldn't sit on the sides of the class (so that the center columns would be filled and I wouldn't have to march the length of the room anymore). It was like playing musical chairs, because many raced to grab the chair they had their eyes on. And when the dust settled, the dynamic instantly shifted: some seemed relieved that they could get a "better" seat, closer to the board or closer to their friends...while others were visibly uncomfortable and even a little upset by the changes. I asked them to talk a little bit about what was different, what was unfamiliar, what was upsetting. Then, sadly, before we really got anywhere, it was time to end class. I recommended they perform an experiment and for a day try to consciously sit in a new chair in each of their classes, just to see what kind of difference it made.

We'll see what happens...whether they'll have interesting conclusions to report about these experiments, or whether they'll choose to go back to their trusty territorialized chairs when we return on Monday. For now, I feel like this broke some students out of a comfort zone that was actually a blockage to open dialogue and I'm hopeful that they've learned something new about their "situatedness" in the classroom. There's an old line that's become something of a mantra for me as a teacher: sometimes you have to take a fish out of water to make it see the water.

I'm going to try to change the seating in my film studies class next week, as well. In that course, which is located in a very large media room, students almost HAVE to sit in the front row if they want to see the subtitles on a foreign film. But inevitably, a large number of them choose to keep their distance (which is odd to me, since half the seats aren't filled). For some students, I think it's hurting their grades. Time to grab another fish by its tail....

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