Before my class starts, when the room fills with students still waking up, I am moving around tables and chairs. Usually the chairs and tables are scattered around the room, sometimes they are in lines or pods.
I start every class in a circle. Every class.
Social architecture
Creating a circle of chairs is my little exercise in social architecture before I teach.
A sitting circle is a small arena where everybody is actor and audience. Everytime someone speaks, fidgets, laughs it is visible to everyone else. The circle makes all hierarchy flat. Not because we are equal, but because we are all visible. Visibility is scary, it implies accountability. But it also holds tenderness and vulnerability. Every presence has weight.
WDKA (the academy I teach at) had as it’s motto for a long time that it was a learning community. A learning community to me is a place where we learn from each-other, by being a community. A community is not sitting chaotically spread out over a room or in tight lines.
A community has the opportunity to see every participator directly in the eyes. To see their expressions. To be on the same height as the others, to hear the others speak directly in to their face. Sitting in a circle also means facing away from the outside world, turning inward together. Focussing on the fire, sharing stories, the warmth of the fire warming each person equally.
Social choreography
When someone arrives late and the circle expands to let them in, the group has to perform the choreography of welcome. It is a little painful sometimes, there is no way to enter the group without acknowledging you are late, and the whole group has to physically accommodate for the new member. This is not to shame, but to make aware, and also to show how important your presence is, you shift the whole circle! It also show how safe you are when you are in the circle.
The circle also directs our behaviour to focus and radiation. We focus on what is in the middle and what is in the middle radiates outwards through all participants.
Of course every teacher chooses their own landscape to teach from. There are many other seating shapes—lines, horseshoes, clusters—and many educators have written about them. But i just think, why even talk about these others? The circle is clearly the the best! My learning style relies on dialogue, on the way ideas bounce and ripple through a group. We work on collaboration, on impact, on how a piece of art, illustration, performance or animation communicates—and that kind of learning works best when we can actually see each other doing it.
Even when students break into smaller groups, I still ask them to turn toward each other, to make a tiny circle.
Spheres
I do have to say though that there is one seating arrangement I would love to sit in even more. It is the ultimate shape, the 3 dimensional circle. I want to sit in spheres!
All jokes aside, the circle also has a lot of other interesting meanings in the subjects I teach.
Endlessness, boundaries, the hero’s journey, the snake eating it’s own tail, the walkcycle, the colorcircle, the animated loop. The circle of life, the wish to draw the perfect circle, the echo, the eye, it’s realtion to human proportions.
Every time we form a circle, we create a community.
A community with a shared centre, a space that holds us while we learn how to see each other, and ourselves, a little more clearly
Let’s hold hands and talk about it 🙂
