In the research presented here, the aesthetic design of the educational space becomes the key factor that makes visible the pedagogical conceptions that guide teachers’ daily practice. The decisions they make in relation to space design tell us about how they understand and develop the teaching and learning process. That is, these spaces become explicit messages of their practical knowledge, understood as the set of knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and emotions that operate automatically and that condition our perception and performance (Peña Trapero & Pérez Gómez, 2019).
The school spaces show in this way the gap between the automatic actions derived from the whole entrenched school culture, and that which teachers verbally support and defend. In other words, they evidence the distance between their actions and their intentions, between doing and saying, between their theories in use and their proclaimed theories (Argyris, 1993; Schön, 1994). Even though this distance is almost inevitable, it is increasingly necessary to make it conscious to try to transform it.
This case study, financed by the University of Malaga and an FPU contract (04/17106) granted by the Ministry of Education of Spain, aims to understand the experience of reflection and pedagogical-spatial transformation lived by the group of teachers of Early Childhood Education of the public school “Frida Kahlo”, in a coastal town in southern Spain. And with this it intends to understand how this complex process of transformation from practical knowledge (action) to practical thinking (reflection) (Pérez Gómez, 2017, 2020) of these teachers in relation to the educational space is developed.
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