VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Contemporary educational environments—particularly online and hybrid contexts—are often treated as neutral containers for learning, designed to optimize access, efficiency, or content delivery. This project challenges that assumption by framing learning spaces as active assemblages: socio-material configurations of people, narratives, artifacts, technologies, and atmospheres that shape how knowledge emerges. Drawing on a design- and arts-based research project situated across digital and physical sites, the presentation examines the co-creation of ThirdPlaceSpaces—spaces that exist between formal institutional learning and informal social interaction. Rather than positioning students as users of predefined environments, participants generated narratives, artifacts, and prompts that later inhabited multiple spatial contexts, including public installations, intimate transitional spaces, and digital environments. These spaces functioned not as representations of learning, but as spatial provocations—inviting encounter, reflection, and dialogue among audiences beyond the original learning community. Learning is understood here as relational and emergent, unfolding through encounters between bodies, materials, and stories rather than through linear instructional design. The discussion argues that ThirdPlaceSpaces offer a productive framework for rethinking educational space in postdigital contexts, where boundaries between online and physical environments are increasingly porous. By attending to atmosphere, narrative circulation, and co-creation as spatial practices, this work contributes to conversations across education, architecture, and spatial theory on designing learning environments that support belonging, epistemic agency, and collective knowledge-building.