Kraftl, Peter. Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People, Policy Press, Bristol, 2013, 304 pages, £70 hardback, ISBN 9781447300496.

Peter Kraftl’s Geographies of Alternative Education is a book with two main aims. The first is to reveal the spatialities of alternative learning, a task that contributes uniquely to both educational and geographical research. The second is to ask "What is alternative in these learning spaces?".

The book looks specifically across a broad range of alternative learning spaces, including care farms, forest schools, homeschooling, democratic / human scale schooling, Steiner and Montessori schools. Although some of these terms may be new to readers, all the case studies in the book come from a British context. The UK Education Act of 1996 defines the parents, not the state, as ultimately being responsible for their children’s education, hence the choice to educate otherwise. Comparatively, the amount of British children educated in such spaces is quite high. Two million children in the country are estimated to be in homeschooling and more than 70 alternative schools, educating over 20,000 young people. This diversity makes the UK an ideal place to research.

Kraftl’s analysis, however, is not limited to the individual sites, but it shows how these diverse alternative spaces for education interact with mainstream education and connect with each other. The book begins with a justification for the need for an attention to spatial processes within education, specifically where they intersect with social processes. One of the fundamental questions the book explores is how our understandings change when we understand spatial and social processes to be mutually productive. Why investigate alternative learning through a geographical frame? Beyond the obvious layout of a site, Kraftl draws on multiple theorisations of space. The book leaps off from this point, as it considers how the social processes that characterise a ‘good education’ might be understood in spatial terms. The main concepts  explored by the author are dis/connection, mess/order, movement/embodiment, inter/personal relations, life-itself, and finally, the meaning and value of autonomous learning spaces. Organised thematically, the book conveys a feeling of careful distillation in how the author navigates these concepts, which tread a different path, a complex path that carefully lays out a rhizomatic integration of the social and spatial.

There is no space to do each concept justice here, so I will touch on Chapter 7, which explores the role of family and friendships and interpersonal relations. Kraftl looks at the scalar spatiality of interpersonal relationships, particularly at “smallness”, implying more than physical space. He upscales the scalar argument beyond the small or local and shows how intimacy, empathy and love spill over into outward facing relationships and habits, into an intermingling of spatial scales, demonstrating the connectedness within autonomous learning spaces. These habits and relations can be spatialised in how they connect outwardly. This links with how autonomous social spaces and diverse economic spaces have been theorised, embodying an attempt to show the role of autonomous learning spaces in terms of visions of life-itself, in contrast to other neoliberal versions of life-itself. The work of Gibson-Graham (2006) is a significant inspiration in Kraftl’s linking of political and philosophical convictions within social movements, communities and economies. The author considers his subject from the perspective of the diverse and local, and asks questions that offer a fresh epistemological and affective orientation to educational and geographical enquiry.

Kraftl’s key contribution is developed around the idea that alternative learning spaces can be viewed as autonomous. To title the book “Autonomous Learning Spaces” may have thrown some readers off the scent, thus Kraftl has made an apt choice in using the “alternative” in the title instead, which will seem more familiar to readers as a form of schooling. Yet not all alternative learning spaces are autonomous. Kraftl investigates the different levels of autonomy that he finds present in these spaces and explores why it is important to consider autonomy within them. One might ask the author what he defines as autonomous in such spaces, and why he places such importance on the term. Chiefly, I believe, the importance lies in their relationship to the mainstream, that is in their dis/connection, a fundamental concept that Kraftl introduces and returns to frequently. Autonomy is presented as a more inclusive and dynamic form of relationship, rather than being simply alternative. It is made through a persistent engagement with the mainstream, whilst doing things differently on a human scale.

Throughout the book, Kraftl plays with expanded theorisations of autonomy. He disassembles the dichotomy between mainstream and alternative spaces with the focus of dis/connection as an autonomous act. The focus on dis/connection, or more so interconnection, is important, as it renders the analysis useful to practitioners and researchers in both alternative and mainstream spaces. A binary view, Kraftl argues, is present in educational studies, and it is reinforced by a literature gap within geography on alternative education. He highlights the assumption that alternative learning spaces are closed off to the mainstream, by presenting case studies, and concepts arising from those, which demonstrate the multiple ways they interrelate. Key features of autonomous learning spaces include practices of de-schooling spaces, engaging in dialogue and engaging with mainstream regulatory frameworks. This conceptual framing of autonomy provides much food for thought. Kraftl disabuses a perhaps popular view of independence as something cut off, disconnected. Autonomy conceptualised as an interconnected, relational process challenges a more neoliberal notion of individualisation. My mother often said “There is no freedom without responsibility”. Reading into what makes autonomous spaces, I am reminded of my regular childish retort, “But I want to!”

It is hard to find criticism in such a thoughtful and complete work. What is perhaps missing are some visual representations of how the concepts connect together. The photos are descriptive to an extent, yet the text would have benefitted from an overview of Kraftl’s analytic contribution. Admittedly, herding abstract and messy concepts into diagrammatic form can be challenging, yet it would have helped clarify some of the key concepts of the book.

Furthermore, Kraftl mentions playwork, yet play spaces per se do not feature among his case studies. He highlights that this is an important research avenue to pursue. It would have been useful to include something further of the playworker’s perspective, and the value of play spaces, such as adventure playgrounds, as autonomous learning spaces. Much of the learning in the research presented is playful. However, to continue this line of enquiry is perhaps too big an ask. Play is often yoked as an instrumental value to the aim of learning, rather than for the intrinsic value of play itself. Exploring the dichotomy of play and learning aims within theory befits a thorough foregrounding and focus on the subject. Yet I sensed the sentiments of play research within Kraftl’s investigation of visions of love, learning and life-itself.

In summary, the book opens an understanding of alternative learning spaces in new ways, engaging with a spatial awareness fused with the mess and feeling of social relationships. This challenges a shorthand use of the meaning of spatial processes with resonance within geographical and childhood research. In literature on outdoor play, in some cases, space might simply refer to landscape design and kinaesthetic exploration, rather than intimately connected with the social. Kraftl shows how spatial processes infuse the social and therefore the whole of alternative education, and carefully unpicks how they interrelate and interlocate, drawing out its diverse character.

By bringing together a number of different case studies, the book has a broad range, useful as a way of scoping the field. Alternative education is poorly funded, out of the media glare, and easily misrepresented. It lags behind in educational research priority and the margin for research areas is smaller. All the more reason for other disciplines to look at alternative education and to bring fresh eyes to it as a subject of research. If alternative education widens our perspective of what learning actually is, and this includes Kraftl’s concepts of life-itself as a context for learning, it can help the ongoing debate on the purpose of education itself.

There are strong contemporary voices of concern over the direction of mainstream education. This book, the author and the research participants might belong to what the UK State Secretary for Education, Michael Gove, recently called “a powerful and misguided lobby” (The Independent, 2013). His statement was in response to criticisms of his attempt to bring in statutory testing for under-fives. In 1958, Kwame Nkrumah, the founder of modern Ghana stated that “we prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility” (quoted in Addo, 1999: 87). As UK education shrinks in seeming possibility, autonomous learning spaces are an important consideration within mainstream education. 

References

Gibson-Graham JK (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, see also: http://www.communityeconomies.org.

Editorial (2013) The Independent, 12 September. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/tests-for-fouryearolds-are-counterproductive-8812439.html

Addo EO (1999) Kwame Nkrumah: A Case Study of Religion and Politics in Ghana. Maryland: University Press of America.