Dwelling in the space of Windsor House School: expanding the imagination of what is possible.

Sarah Anne Mills
UBC

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     Last modified: December 19, 2006

Abstract
The way we inhabit structures and spaces is a politicized activity with embedded lessons that link to ideology, pedagogy and what we imagine as possible. This paper explores this dynamic in the context of Windsor House School, which occupies a boxy 1970's building widely recognizable as a school. However, the way in which they inhabit the school building reflects that their theory of schooling is shifted from standard understandings of schooling.
Windsor House is a publicly funded, academically non-coercive, parent-participatory, democratic, free school. This paper looks how this school lives its shifted approach to schooling in terms of, student self-regulation of mobility, authority, participatory governance, and negotiation of space. It argues that through the act of dwelling at Windsor House participants learn shifted expectations about institutional space.
This paper emerges from the author's varied experiences with this school; these include both an internship and a detailed ethnographic study. The author positions herself as a feminist, sociologist and advocate for radical pedagogy.
Windsor House School serves as a reminder that aspects of schooling that are commonly assumed to be inevitable, are not. It is an important story and it is an important space because it can expand our imagination of what may be possible when it comes to how we occupy our school buildings, and what lessons may be embedded in our practices.