The Empty Space

So little is required; why is it so hard to provide it?

We were talking about the theater. Whenever I do that, I think about the director, Peter Brook, and his 1968 book, The Empty Space, which was a seminal text for me as a young practitioner. He opens his book with this provocative sentence:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

That’s all he needs: someone to do and someone else to watch. Everything else is gravy—or, sometimes, a distracting nuisance. Even the stage itself may be unnecessary.

These days, I spend my time thinking and worrying about education and schooling. And so, today, I’m wondering: what would a Peter Brook say about the classroom? What is the minimum that’s required for an act of schooling to be engaged?

I think his answer would be pretty similar to his original formulation. As I said a few months ago, in a post about the learning triad:

Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires at least one kind of relationship—a bringing together of separate things so that those things can affect and change each other.

It’s not really that different, is it? Into an empty space come two people: someone willing to teach and someone willing to learn. Is anything else required?

I don’t think so. Not even a classroom.

What Do We Need?

Brook says this of the theater, which I think applies equally to schools:

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

The “something” can’t happen for only one of the two people involved. The mere existence of two people in an empty space is not sufficient. Interaction and relationship are crucial. In a theater, someone must be doing something and someone else must be watching. In a classroom, someone must be willing to teach something and someone else must be willing to learn. If you close your eyes, your ears, or your mind to the doer, then the magic cannot happen.

This magical space can be any place that creates room for interaction to occur. It does not have to be a purpose-built space, any more than a cathedral or a synagogue is required for prayer to happen. Plato established his academy in a grove of olive trees, after all.

My first teaching gig, at the Benjamin Franklin Academy, in Atlanta, took place in a small, one-story house, furnished with antiques, where kids sat around tables, drinking coffee and eating bagels (it has grown quite a bit since then). Some profound and purposeful learning happened in that little house, though, because the students had made a choice to come there and complete their high school education. They knew why they were there.

The empty space is a space of potential. We can fill it with anything. All we need are students who are willing to look and notice and wonder.

Is that a tremendously hard thing to ask for or expect? Do we assume that students have no curiosity about the world around them—that they take everything for granted with a bored shrug—that they are wet branches, incapable of catching fire?

Sparks Everywhere

What’s the blandest, emptiest, most yawn-inducing space you can think of? For me, it’s a hotel conference room. Definitely less engaging and compelling than a classroom. If you’ve ever had to sit in one of those rooms for hours on end, you know they’re not particularly conducive to intellectual engagement. But even here, if you had to, you could find something to explore, something to engage young minds with and make them go “huh.”

For example: look at one of the chairs. It’s an ordinary, unremarkable chair. There are hundreds of them in the room—arranged around tables and stacked up against the wall. But have you ever thought about a chair? Four legs, a seat, and a back? Who invented that? What’s our earliest evidence of a chair like this?

Well, here’s one from Egypt, used by Hetepheres I (c. 2,600 BCE), a queen of Egypt during the Fourth Dynasty. Over four thousand years old, and it looks like it could have been made yesterday:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_chair

There are depictions of backless chairs going back centuries before that, from China, Greece, and Mesopotamia. There are carvings of Aztecs sitting on chairs in Mexico, centuries before any encounters with Europe. Did everyone come up with the idea of a chair independently, because it’s just something we humans do? Is there some ancient, ur-chair that our ancestors invented, the idea of which was carried across continental migrations, even across the Bering Strait into the Americas?

What does it make us think about and wonder when we look around our world at the simple devices we take for granted? What does it tell us about human creativity?

And that stack of chairs…I don’t know about you, but it makes me wonder how many chairs you’d need to stack up in order to reach the moon.

I know; I’m weird.

Is that moon question a thing students could figure out, though, with a tape measure and access to the Internet? Sure it is. And while they’re doing that task, it might make them wonder how people figured out great distances before calculators or the Internet. Because they did—with pretty stunning accuracy.

And how about this terrible hotel coffee? Coffee beans come from a lot of places around the world, but who first came up with the idea of making a drink out of them? And how on earth did they figure out all the steps needed to make this addictive, hot drink? (And why on earth would they have been tinkering around enough to figure those things out?)

And forgive me, but while I’m thinking about all of this, what’s the deal with the hotel itself? How ancient is the idea of a hotel or an inn? Did something dramatic have to happen in history, to allow or encourage people to travel long enough distances that they needed to spend the night somewhere far from home?

Would students find it interesting to connect their local Motel 6 with an ancient caravansary from Turkey? Would it blow their minds to know that something like a hotel has existed since at least the 9th century, BCE—eleven thousand years ago? Would it change their assumptions about life in the ancient world? Would it lead them to ask their own questions—questions that branch off into a hundred strange side streets and shadowy byways? And if it did…would you be willing to go there with them?

If there is this much to explore in the blandest of rooms, why should any classroom be a place of drudgery and deadness?

Preventing the Spark

Some of the problem might be our unwillingness to follow students where their curiosity leads them—our need to restrict learning to what’s on the pacing plan, because we have to race to the next thing we’re required to “cover,” or because we’re afraid of where unpredictable, open-ended questions might lead us.

Some if it might be the space itself.

The empty space is a space of potential, as we said. We can fill it with anything. Sometimes we fill it with too much.

Does a thousand-page textbook engage student curiosity, or does it deaden it by overwhelming students with too much content, deciding for them what’s important, making no room for them to say, “tell me more” or ask their own, weird, tangential questions? Does the text make them want to turn the page, or does it communicate to them in the blandest possible language, in order to be equitably accessible to millions of kids?

Does an abundance of technology in the classroom engage student curiosity, or does it deaden it by providing too many distractions, too many windows, too many flashing lights—maybe even too many invitations to engage in social media nonsense during class time? Do we give them so many fancy tools to do things with that they never learn how to do things on their own?

Even before we had technology mandates, we had a habit of creating sensory overload in our classrooms by plastering every inch of wall space with colorful posters shouting trite messages, with sparkly mobiles dangling from the ceilings that caught and reflected the fluorescent lighting.

We blast stimuli at our students and then complain that they can’t sit still and focus. Why do we feel that the teacher—the single, human, teacher, expert in her field and committed to her mission—is suddenly, uniquely in this historical period, insufficient?

I think again of Peter Brook. He describes four varieties of theater. The first, he calls, “the deadly theater.” This would be, for example, a Shakespeare play dressed up in leggings and ruffles and hats with feathers, delivered with fake English accents because “that’s how it’s meant to be done.” It’s a dull, dead, and mindless adherence to tradition for its own sake, which buries the urgent, beating, heart that can speak to us across centuries.

What is Brook’s solution to deadliness? Strip it all down. Get rid of the clutter. Build a rough, or a holy, or an immediate theatre, which focuses intensely on the thing that must be expressed. the person who must express it, and the other person who has a genuine, human need to hear it.

Do I even have to paint a picture of what “deadly teaching” looks like? No. Sadly, we’ve all experienced it.

Mission Critical

The difference between the deadly and the holy is not simply a removal of clutter. It’s also a sense of urgency, a sense of mission. Actors—and teachers—are more than people performing a job. They are driven by a sense of mission. They are driven by love.

Yes. The actor and the teacher must love what they do. They must love the story they came to tell and the knowledge they came to share and the questions they came to spark. And they must love the people they came to speak with—individually or in the aggregate. They are not speaking into a void. They are not speaking simply to hear their own voices. They came here to connect. They came here because they care.

It’s the power of their love that makes the audience or the students wake up, sit up, lean forward, and attend. Love imparts a sense of urgency and necessity. They have to be there, saying what they’re saying. It matters.

Or…you know…it doesn’t.

“Because it’s going to be the on the test,” or “because it’s next on the pacing plan,” or “I don’t know, but it’s required” will not make the magic happen in a classroom or in an olive grove. Neither will a new textbook. Neither will the bells and whistles of technology.

We make it matter with our love. That’s what fills the empty space.