Material Matters – Toward an Educational Turn

15.7.2025 0 Like 0 kommenttia

In this blog post, docent Hannah Kaihovirta explores how materiality, space, and artistic practices are not just background to learning, but central to it. Drawing on experiences from the SMIL project, she invites us to rethink schools as dynamic, aesthetic, and ethical environments where matter itself participates in the educational process.

What if the walls, the floors, even the chairs in a school didn’t just hold bodies, but shaped minds, feelings, and relationships?

Too often, schools are treated as neutral containers for knowledge: buildings with structured classrooms, designed for efficiency and teaching. But what happens when we instead see the walls and floors as flexible, creative spaces, as active participants in learning?

This is something we’ve been exploring in the SMIL project, where performing arts and drama education open possibilities for new ways of thinking about education and the spaces in which it unfolds.

At the heart of SMIL is a simple yet radical idea: performing arts do not just fit into learning environments, they transform them. With clear curricular pathways and practical tools, the project invites educators to turn schools into stages of exploration and co-creation. Classrooms become drama studios, corridors become scenes for movement, and even the schoolyard transforms into a stage.

We can imagine that the architecture itself starts to breathe with learning. The line of inquiry that involves exploration of imagination as a core practice in learning has gradually shifted how I see my research approach. In the early 2000s, I approached education through a postmodern lens, interested in imagination as a a learning practice on language, diversity, and social construction. But over the past two decades, I have moved increasingly toward posthumanist research thinking, particularly the new materialist turn. Surprisingly, this shift has brought me closer to my artist origins. As a sculptor, I’ve always worked with matter, space, and form, with the idea that material is not inert, but expressive. Posthumanism, with its emphasis on entanglement and agency, aligns with how I have long understood the world through art.

In education, materiality is often overlooked, seen as background rather than foreground. Yet if we begin to see matter as agentic, as something that does, learning spaces no longer appear passive. They become collaborators in learning, empathy, and care (cf. Ahmed, 2006). As research in educational environments shows, emotional safety and inclusion aren’t just created through policies or pedagogical models; they’re embedded in the surfaces, textures, lighting, and spatial flows as material-human assemblages of a school (cf. Bennett, 2020). A well-planned school does not need a luxurious budget. What it needs is intention and care.

Aesthetic, thoughtful environments signal respect. They foster belonging. They shape atmospheres where empathy is more likely to flourish, and where alienation, including bullying, can begin to recede. In this sense, architecture and interior design are not decorative, they are deeply pedagogical.

Karen Barad (2003, 2007) and Jane Bennett (2010), who remind us that learning does not happen despite the material world, but through it resonate with sustainable ducation practices and place-based education. Barad’s concept of intra-action describes how humans and nonhumans constantly co-produce meaning in dynamic, entangled ways. Matter is not passive. It is performative. Agency does not belong to individual subjects; it emerges in relation.

In primary education, this is especially visible. Children are continuously forming themselves not only in relation to teachers and peers but also in relation to their surroundings, to objects, spaces, materials, and atmosphere. A toy, a rug, a beam of light, these are not just props; they shape emotion, thought, and social life.

How do we design for learning in this complexity?

One way is by inviting imagination as learning and arts-based play into the learning spaces. When a chair becomes a mountain or the floor turns into an ocean, children engage with the world in profoundly ethical and aesthetic ways. Fiction and material blend — and this shared meaning-making becomes an opening for deeper learning, beyond predictable outcomes.

Another pathway is through pedagogical documentation, not as a checklist or record, but as a living practice. When children participate in reflecting on photos, videos, drawings, or sounds, documentation becomes a site of inquiry. It provokes new questions. It generates wonder. Following Barad (2003; 2007), it becomes a space of intra-action where children and educators co-create understanding through and with matter (Gamble & Hanan, 2022). It stops being a retrospective act and becomes a future-oriented one. A way of asking what else is possible? Seen through this lens, documentation is not just a method; it is a relational, material, and affective practice. It teaches us to slow down. To pay attention. To think with, not just about, our environments.

In this light, designing a learning space is not just logistical or aesthetic, it is ethical. We could call it an educational turn in how we relate to materiality: one that values attentiveness, co-creation, and care over standardization. Aesthetics combined with ethics are not superficial, they are foundational to how we relate, how we feel, and how we learn in school.

When we center material design and artistic practices in education, we create conditions for new forms of solidarity. Schools become more than sites of instruction, they become spaces of transformation.

We do not need extravagant architecture to get there. What we need is a shift in mindset: to take matter seriously, to reflect together, and to stay with the questions that emerge when we rethink the relationship between pedagogy and place.

Material matters. It always has. Now we are ready to act on it.

Writer

Hannah Kaihovirta
Docent at the University of Helsinki

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, and Others. Duke university Press.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.
https://doi.org/10.1086/345321

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Duke university Press.

Gamble, N.C. & Hanan, J. S. (Eds.) (2022). Figures of Entanglement. Diffractive Readings of Barad, New Materialism, and Rhetorical Theory and Criticism. Routledge.