Reading the school entranceway: What “no skateboarding” signs reveal about who and what schools...
Transcript of Reading the school entranceway: What “no skateboarding” signs reveal about who and what schools...
Reading the school entranceway:
What “no skateboarding” signs reveal about who and what schools value
Dan Grassick
University of Alberta
Department of Secondary Education 347 Education South, University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2G5
Phone: (780) 492-3674
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Growing out of pools, ramps, and skateparks, modern skateboarding terrain involved anything encountered in the modern city. ... The new skateboarding sites are not private houses or suburban roads, hidden from public view, but university campuses, urban squares, public institutions, national theatres, commercial office plazas, as well as the more public quotidian spaces of back streets, main roads, alleys, sidewalks, malls and car-parks. ... Compared to the suburbs, city cores offer more opportunities and concentrated heterogeneous social spaces. (pp. 179/186) Kelvin Ho Skateboarding: An Interpretation of Space in the Olympic City
Thus where the decentralized suburb promotes life as divorced from the city, isolating people from participatory creativity, skateboarders related individual life to the form of the city, reintroducing the city as creative and active oeuvre and thus conceptually moving the suburb closer to the complex contradictions of the city core. (p. 54)
Iain Borden Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body
‘No Signs’ & ‘Accidental Skateparks’
A few years ago, I noticed an interesting feature that seemed to be a part of the design of
all of Calgary’s schools. Posted near the multiple entranceways of hundreds of schools, a sign
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was affixed to the brick facade. This sign didn’t bear a welcome to the school, a brand extension
of the school board’s mission statement (such as “future leaders at work and play”), nor even a
courteous reminder for guests to please register at the office on their way into the school. No,
the message found ubiquitously on all of Calgary’s school reads as follows: No Skateboarding,
No Scooters, No Rollerblading (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The sign affixed to all Calgary Board of Education schools. Although hard to see at this resolution, the sign is also the canvas for two different types of graffiti: stickers from a nearby skateboard store (including one crossing out the word “no”), and pencil writing (written over top of the word “no” so the sign reads “go skateboarding”). (Grassick, 2013).
I have taught in Calgary for almost ten years and it is only recently that these ‘No Signs’
have emerged from the urban background to the forefront of my attention. This occurred when I
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was visiting a school for an after-hours meeting. When I pulled up in front of the main office
and got out of my car, I stopped and laughed. At the base of the walls leading toward the front
doors, the bottom of the outer school walls were angled concrete ramps. The walkway to the
school’s entrance had these ramps on both sides. Although the grade and angle were not exactly
consistent with the smooth transition found in skateboard and snowboard terrain parks around
the world, there could be no doubt; I was standing in a half-pipe. Looking right, I saw that the
school was ringed in asphalt and that rest of the school’s walls ended in more ramps and raised
concrete benches. This was no schoolyard; it was a skatepark! As I walked into the school,
shaking my head at the folly of the school’s architects, the No Sign caught my gaze. ‘If you
don’t want kids to skateboard on your school grounds,’ I thought to myself as I entered the
school, ‘don’t build them a skatepark.’
Figure 2 shows three ‘accidental skateparks’ outside Calgary middle schools. The one
that I mention above is the bottom-most series of images (3A-B). Even in these low resolution
photos pulled off of the street view mode of Google Maps, it is easy to see how school
entranceways carefully designed by architects to provide a gradual flow from the sidewalk to the
school doors could obviously be read as something entirely different to even a novice skater.
Illegible at this resolution, but present on all schools are the white No Signs. These are most
visible in 2A-C.
These signs, except for their apparent ubiquity, seems harmless enough, but when
considered critically (especially when many of these signs are positioned in close proximity to
bike racks) a number of important questions immediately spring to mind: Where do these signs
come from? What do they attempt to produce? What do they mean? What is it like to be a
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student who skateboards, scooters, or rollerblades who is confronted by these signs on a daily
basis? What do these signs say to students about what their schools value?
These questions lend themselves to hermeneutic and phenomenological consideration.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpreting ‘texts’ to derive their meaning, underlying values, and
origins (Buchanan, 2010). Texts worth studying in this inquiry are school board policy
statements, municipal bylaws, and the architectural space itself.
“As an approach to research in education, phenomenology involves a careful and
systematic reflection on the lived experience of a pedagogical phenomenon,” (Adams &
Thompson, 2010, p. 736). Phenomenological lenses are particularly helpful at helping determine
students’ affective response to No Signs and the institutional thinking that produced them.
In their 2010 paper, Interviewing Objects: Including Educational Technologies as Qualitative
Research Participants Cathy Adams and Terrie Lynn Thompson propose a series of heuristics
which allow an object to be interviewed as an active research participant. The heuristics are
derived from merging the horizons of Adams’s hermeneutic-phenomenological work with
Thompson’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach. For this paper, I will employ a number of
Adams and Thompson’s heuristics to interview, not the No Signs, but the architectural school
space itself.
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Figure 2. ‘Accidental skateparks’ outside three Calgary schools. 1A-C shows an entranceway that was part of a redesign at the turn of the century. A new office and library wing was added to the school and this entranceway was built with a ramp (not visible), multiple sets of three stairs, handrails and multi-level stone gardens with smooth concrete edges. 2A-C shows a 1960s school built into a slight hill. The main entrance (2C) includes a relatively steep set of steps which splits into two directions and two more sets of steps before reaching street level. 2B shows a section of the walkway that runs parallel to the road where a series of three benches are set just above the asphalt leading to the back door of the school (2A) where a longer set of stairs leads from the school down to a graded section of pavement and the road. 3A and 3B show the school mentioned in the introduction. The angled ramps leading to the school’s entrance can be seen somewhat in 3A, but 3B clearly shows the ramps and benches that surround the school. Photos from Google Maps.
Although my interpretations on school space could certainly be drawn by any student
who navigates urban space in a non-mainstream fashion (parkour ‘traceurs’, unicyclists, BMX
bikers, pogo-stickers, and those skiers and snowboarders who move ice shavings and snow from
their local hockey arenas so they can jam urban rails), I will focus this paper on skateboarders
because they have been the subject of considerably more research than other de/reterritorializers
of urban space. The terms “skateboarder”, “skater”, and “rider” will be used interchangeably.
On Architectural “Space”
Arguably the world’s leading skateboarding academic is Iain Borden, who is neither a
cultural historian nor a youth anthropologist, but a professor of architecture who specializes in
critical urban re/design. In his book Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the
Body (2001), Borden points out that the notion of “space” in architecture has changed over the
last century. Initially, the product of architecture was the design and construction of structures
within space. With the development of gestalt psychology, architects began to pay more
conscious attention in their designs to building space between structures as part of the
architecture. Only recently has architecture started to take a new turn thanks to the writings of
Henri Lefebvre. Contemporary architecture includes an understanding that space and
architecture are created by those who inhabit and move through the spaces between structures.
As Borden states:
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Architecture, like all other cultural objects, is not made just once, but is made and remade
over and over again. Each time it is represented through another medium, each time its
surroundings change, each time different people experience it. (2001, p. 5)
Informed by a swath of researchers including Foucault, Lacan, Lefebvre, Heidegger, and Idhe,
contemporary architecture is not an object, but a series of multiple interactions created as
different subjects enter into short-term relationships with the objects inhabiting a space as they
move through it.
In a culture stuck on cruise control, the [O]ther skater chooses to operate in a forgotten
no-man’s land. In fact, the skater thrives on using the discarded, abandoned and
generally disregarded portions and structures of the society at large. Metropolitan
dwellers are simply witnesses to the functioning of the city, where the experience of
urban space is like that of a museum, with visitors’ bodies controlled by an ‘organized
walking’ of contrived route, speed, gestures, speaking and sound.’ (Borden, p. 190,
2001).
The same entranceway of a school can be read in multiple ways and the space itself is
created by different agents. To the average school ‘comer-or-goer’, the entranceways shown in
Figure 2 are neither special nor flexible in their potential uses. They are conduits into and out of
the school, nothing more. To me, the steps and handrails are virtual skatepark elements; I have
neither the skill nor the inclination to negotiate these elements on a skateboard myself but I can
see the potentiality of the space. To a student skateboarder, however, the “handrails aren’t for
people with mobility problems” (2001, p. 192), they’re an object to ollie onto that allows for a
downward flow to the concrete below. These youth not only see the multiplicity of affordances
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that certain arrangements of concrete, steps, and handrails provide, but they are able to change
how they negotiate these spaces in unique ways that transform a school entranceway, for
example, into a performative skatepark.
Once you are introduced to the idea that school entranceways can be deterritorialized and
reterritorialized by skateboarders, you come to see the multiplicities of the shapes that were
intentionally designed by school architects, but that perfectly align with the needs of young
riders. In Figure 2, there are numerous stretches of smooth concrete and asphalt runways needed
to gain speed, take-off zones and landing zones for tricks, and run-outs that can be used to come
to a safe stop or to redirect the board’s direction for another pass.
Contemporary architecture also demands that designers consider the temporal aspect of
space. A school entranceway is only such for a few busy periods at the beginning and close of
the school day and at either end of recesses, breaks, and the lunch hour. For the vast majority of
the day, these spaces are vacant and functionless. They are no longer entranceways, they are a
meaningless assemblage of structures. Their designed monofunction dissolves into
functionlessness. The space becomes entirely virtual, an area ripe for deterritorialization by
skaters.
The Skateboard as a Reading Device
Objects touch one another, feel, smell, and hear one another. Then they contemplate one
another with eye and gaze. One truly gets the impression that every shape in space, every
spatial plane, constitutes a mirror and produces a mirage effect; that within each body the
rest of the world is reflected, and referred back to, in an ever-renewed to-and-fro of
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reciprocal reflection, an interplay of shifting colours, lights and forms. (Lefebvre in
Borden, p. 105, 2001).
Skateboards ‘read’ the urban environments through their skateboards, arranging corridors
of space (stretches of pavement, drops, rails, benches, and sets of steps) together like words in a
sentence. Skateboarder and skateboard develop a human-machine relationship that Idhe (1979)
refers to as “embodiment”. The rider experiences the city through his board, each bump and
crack of the urban environment is absorbed into his body. The board affords the experiencing of
the landscape as an extension of the rider (Ho, 1999). Not only is the city read through the
skateboard like brail on a page is read by a trained hand, but it’s song can also be heard.
I listen to the skateboard. ... Skating over concrete with consistently spaced [concrete
slabs] produces a regular rhythm that varies according to my velocity. Also, the different
textures of the ground surface will communicate their qualities to me aurally. A smooth
skateable surface such as marble, for example, will reveal itself in smooth, calm sounds,
whereas an unskateable surface such as gravel will sound coarse and unforgiving. (Ho,
p. 101, 1999).
What Schools Value
In his analysis of human-technology relations, Don Ihde (1979) describes how some
objects that exist almost constantly in our surroundings disappear into the background. These
taken-for-granted constructions remain hidden to us until they reemerge as ‘Other’ due to some
breakdown (such as when a vending machine fails to accept your money or holds on to your
Coffee Crisp, dangling it in front of your eyes behind the impenetrable glass forcefield) or due to
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a sudden temporal-spatial change (like the vending machine that just fell on top of someone who
was rocking it, trying to retrieve a mis-vended chocolate bar). Background and alterity can be
applied to the human-spatial relations which occur by different actors negotiating the same
space. A school administrator is functionally blind to the space of their school entranceway; this
space and its stairs and handrails has fallen into the background. This space becomes Other
when the administrator leaves school one afternoon and finds that a ‘mob’ of skateboarding
youth have reterritorialized the entranceway for ‘anOther’ purpose.
The No Sign was designed, mass produced, and mounted on schools for a reason: to
prevent the use of school spaces by riders. Its messaging is explicit, its intent is clear. But what
values does it promote and whose values are they? What is the hidden curriculum of these signs?
It’s About Keeping Kids Safe
Why no skateboards? Because skateboards are dangerous. Doctors, administrators, and
school board lawyers are worried about possible litigation stemming from skaters colliding with
pedestrians or from parents expressing outrage that their children were injured while
skateboarding on the school’s property (Borden, 2001).
Skating is dangerous. A number of studies from Australia, America, Canada, and the
United Kingdom have found conclusively that skateboarding is one of the leading causes of
adolescent injury, causing between 21-24% of all falls (Berström, & Björnstig, 1991; Konkin, et
al., 2006; Harris, Allyson, Rowe, & Voaklander, 2012; Unni, Locklair, Morrow, & Estrada,
2012; Lincoln, Caswell, Almquist, Reginald, Norris, & Hinton, 2011). Most skate-related
injuries resulted in non-urgent and semi-urgent traumas to the extremities that required mostly
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non-surgical medical interventions. Fatalities are extremely rare and other activities result in
injury rates similar or great than those of skateboarding.
3.3.2. 1 to 4 yearsMore than one third (34%, n = 232) of fall injuries were
from this age group (Table 3). The leading causes of injurieswere falls from furniture (23%), playground equipment (18%),and slipping or tripping (17%). Falls from one level to anothercomprised 19% of fall injuries in this group (Table 3). Theseincluded falls from trampolines, windows, decks, and toyvehicles. Falls from slipping or tripping accounted for 14% ofcases. There is some variability by age in the occurrence ofinjuries. Falls from furniture, slipping, or tripping were morefrequent among the younger (1- and 2-year-old) children.Injuries sustained at the playground and caused by falls fromstairs were more common among 3- and 4-year olds.
3.3.3. 5 to 9 yearsThis group accounted for most number of fall-related
hospitalizations (39%). Almost a third of these injuries werecaused by falls from playground equipment. Monkey bars andslideswere themost commonplayground equipment involved.Falls from furniture (12%) and falls caused by tripping orslipping (12%) were the other leading causes of fall injuries.Falls from one level to another was the second most frequentcause of injury (Table 3). However, this classification includeda variety of causes such as falls from trees, carts, trampolines,deck, and windows. Falls associated with rough and tumbleplay (8%) typical of this age group were also present.
3.3.4. 10 to 14 yearsApproximately 19% of fall hospitalizations were from this
group (Table 3). The leading cause of injury was falls fromskateboards (24%). Skateboard injuries were more commonamong the older male children. Other causes were falls fromtrampolines and falls due to slipping or tripping. These injurieswere more common for the younger children in this age group.
The 3 leading causes of fall-related injuries for thedifferent age groups are shown in Table 4.
4. Discussion
Falls are the leading cause of pediatric injuries. However,injury prevention efforts often do not reflect the significance
of this problem. Research suggests that mothers perceivedthat society viewed falls by children as normative and thatthere was little expectation for parents to prevent them [10].However, most fall-related injuries are preventable.
With a few exceptions [11,12], studies on pediatric fallshave focused on specific types of falls [2-5] rather than injurypatterns in different age groups. Falls are likely to beinfluenced substantially by developmental stage [13]. Thedata captured in the trauma registry are informative about themain causes of fall-related injuries. However, in many cases,it fails to convey specific information that would be helpfulin guiding injury prevention efforts. For instance, the leadingcause (E-code) of fall injuries was E884.9—fall from onelevel to another (tree, haystack, stationary vehicle, embank-ment). This code covers a variety of causes and may notreveal differences by age. For infants, injuries were incurredwhen the infant slipped from a caregiver's arms, whereas for1- to 4-year olds, injuries may have been caused by fall froma stationary toy vehicle or trampoline.
This retrospective review of data of pediatric patientsadmitted because of injuries from falls identifies specificcauses of fall injuries by age group. This enables moretargeted fall prevention efforts [6]. Injury prevention expertsnote the need to provide developmentally relevant counsel-ing. They also suggest restricting the number of topics for
Table 3 External causes of fall injuries by age
E-code Cause of injury b1 y 1-4 y 5-9 y 10-14 y Total % of all falls
E884.9 Fall from one level to another(tree, haystack, stationaryvehicle, embankment)
28 44 75 31 175 26%
E884.0 Fall from playground equipment 0 38 84 9 131 19%E884.2, E884.4,E884.5
Fall from furniture (including chair,bed, other furniture)
18 54 30 1 106 16%
E885.9 Fall from slipping and tripping 0 32 24 16 72 11%E880.9 Fall from stairs 4 16 5 5 30 4%E885.2 Fall from skateboard 0 1 4 22 27 4%Other Other 6 47 40 41 134 20%
Total 56 (8%) 232 (34%) 262 (39%) 125 (19%) 675 (100%) 100
Table 4 Leading causes of fall-related injuries by age
Age Leading causes of injuries from falls
b1 y Falls from slipping out of caregiver's arms (47%)Falls from beds and couches (40%)Falls from a countertop (13%)
1-4 y Falls from furniture—beds, chairs, couches (23%)Falls from playground equipment (18%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (17%)
5-9 y Falls from playground equipment (32%)Falls from beds and couches (12%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (12%)
10-14 y Falls from skateboarding (24%)Falls from trampoline (12%)Falls due to slipping/tripping (11%)
1459Age variability in pediatric injuries from falls
Table 1. The cause of fall injuries organized by age (Unni, P., et al., p. 1459, 2012).
Unni, P., et al. (2012) studied the medical records of patients treated at a pediatric
emergency care centre over a three year period. Table 1 show the causes of fall injuries
organized by age. Skateboarding does account for a large number (22 out of 125 cases; or
17.6%) of falls resulting in injury for youth aged 10-14, warranting its own row on the table.
The number of skateboard injuries, however, is less than the incidence of injuries sustained by
children falling from trees, stationary vehicles, and embankments (31/125; 24.8%), and is half as
much as ‘other’ falls which include injuries sustained on trampolines, while roughhousing, while
engaged in organized sport and in unstructured play (41/125; 32.8%). Looking at injuries due to
falls for younger primary students (aged 5-9), one must notice that skateboarding related injuries
essentially disappear but are replaced by a startlingly high number of injuries from falling during
all sorts of activities including falls from playground equipment and furniture.
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At school specifically, physical education classes and team sports cause 46% of all
injuries across all grade levels, with another 38% occur during unstructured play during lunch
and recess breaks (Berström, & Björnstig, 1991). Despite this schools don’t come equipped with
“No Playing on the Playground” and “No Playing Soccer” signs. There are values and norms at
work here. Why are only a few activities seen by school authorities as being unsafe? Why is
bike culture the norm, but skate culture is not?
Bicycle riding is a potentially dangerous activity that results in injuries across all age
groups (Konkin, et al., 2006), but bicycle riding is the only activity that is explicitly prohibited in
administrative regulations for the Calgary school board whose schools and signs are the focus of
this paper (CBE, 2005). The policy mentions neither skateboards, scooters, nor roller blades nor
does it make use of the broad term “wheeled conveyance” used in the City of Calgary’s Parks
and Pathways bylaw (2011). If bicycles aren’t permitted on school grounds, why are there
bicycle racks in every school yard?
Ironically, perhaps the greatest risk to students is the one that is so socially acceptable
that it fades completely into the background. Despite their risks, skateboards will never be as
dangerous as cars. In 2009, cars caused 172,883 injuries in Canada; 11,451 being serious enough
to require emergency medical care, and 2,209 resulting in death (Transport Canada, 2009).
Regardless, a study in Victoria found that, despite living within a 20 minute walk from school,
56% of school-age children commuted by car (Underwood, 2012).
It’s Not About Keeping Kids Safe
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No one wants to see a student get hurt at school, nor do youth skateboarders want to hurt
pedestrians. Both adult authority figures and skaters alike want their schools to be safe, but, why
then are other school-based activities which are as likely as skating to result in injury, permitted?
How can a school prohibit skateboarding but condone the frequent use of motor vehicles?
Skateboard- made of wood, metal and plastic, costs about £100, runs on leg power;
causes chips and scratches on bits of stone and metal. Car- costs a fortune, runs on
poisonous shit, pollutes the air and water, fills the city with ‘smog’, causes the death of
hundreds of thousands of people every year. Mmmmm? And yet, despite all this cars are
O.K. but skateboards are evil, objects of vandalism, a dangerous menace that must be
stopped. (Borden, 2001, p. 257)
‘Safety’ is a master signifier, a form of hermeneutic cheating that schools use to explain
away activities that they don’t want to understand (or don’t want to take the time to understand).
The hidden curriculum inherent in the No Signs does not come from a desire for safety (solely),
but also stems from the dominant culture’s disrespect and aversion to countercultural youth
activities. Lefebvre points out that architecture can be explored in terms of rhythmanalysis.
Skaters don’t move through space at the same rate and in the same linear fashion as do
pedestrians and bicyclists, rather they deke and weave through crowds very quickly and then
occupy public common spaces (like stair cases, parking garages, and plazas) for extended
periods of time. Temporal-spatially, skaters are Others.
Mixed Messages
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As Giroux says, the school is “organized not to eliminate differences but to regulate them
through cultural and social divisions... [D]ifferences are either ignored ... or subordinated to the
imperatives of a history and culture that is linear and uniform” (2000, p. 177). He uses the term
“border youth” to describe those who occupy the fringes of social institutions and who must be
brought into the centre. Twenty years ago, only a handful of institutions and boosters
saw skateboarding as the ‘best youthful antidote to urban boredom that has come
along for years’ (The Times of London), more usually the public dialog was about
banning skateboarding from the city streets. Such concerns have now died away,
perhaps from the realization that skateboarding although physically robust is not
inherently life-threatening. (Borden, pp. 249/250, 2001).
The City of Calgary has an award-winning multi-phase Skateboarding Amenities Strategy
that is seeking to increase the amount of skatepark space available to the city’s exploding youth
population. A skatepark recently opened on the Vancouver campus of the University of British
Columbia. Some communities in Australia are actively encouraging skateboarding as an
acceptable youth sport. Some cities in Europe, the United States, Canada, (and even Pakistan)
have opened skateboarding alternative schools. Yet there seems to be little interest by Calgary
school authorities to acknowledge and accept skate“border” youth into the mainstream public
space of the school.
Despite widespread cries to battle youth obesity, and research supporting the value of
unstructured play (Figure 3), anti-skateboarding sentiments still permeate our schools. Giroux
(2000) begs teachers to consider the roots of modern identity formation in youth so articulately,
that he merits quoting verbatim here.
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This is a world in which one is condemned to wander across, within, and between
multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness, difference, and a dislocating
notion of meaning and attention. ... No longer belonging to any one place or location,
youth increasingly inhabit shifting cultural and social spheres marked by a plurality of
languages and cultures. (Giroux, p. 180, 2000).
Educators need to understand how different identities among youth are being produced in
spheres generally ignored by schools. Included here would be an analysis of how
pedagogy works to produce, circulate, and confirm particular forms of knowledge and
desires in those diverse public and popular spheres where sounds, images, print, and
electronic culture attempt to harness meaning for and against the possibility of expanding
social justice and human dignity. Shopping malls, street communities, video halls, coffee
shops, television culture, and other elements of popular culture must become serious
objects of school knowledge. (Giroux, p. 190, 2000).
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Bradley 293
(e) interacting socially and feeling accepted and supported by others. Perhaps the impact of skateboarding, like that of other leisure activities, is mediated by these processes.
In sum, the literature suggests a number of possible correlates of skate park use, and a number of possible antecedents and consequences of involve-ment in this leisure context. Figure 1 provides a conceptual overview of the factors likely to be involved. The current research investigated a subset of these factors.
The Current ResearchThis research was conducted in a coastal city of Australia (population of 500,000) in which approximately 30 outdoor skate parks have been built and are maintained by the local city council and are freely available for use by all. Research by Boag et al. (2003) indicated that about one-quarter of adolescent residents of this city spend at least some of their leisure time in skate parks, with many others reporting being constrained (by a lack of money, transport, etc.) from so doing. Despite evidence of this kind demonstrating the popularity
Gender
Age
Skills,interests
Personality
Non-leisureactivities
Identityexploration &expression
Goal setting &striving
LeisureContexts &Activities(including
skate parks/skateboarding)
Task focus, flowconcentration
Developing &using
competencies
Socialinteraction
and supportOther(e.g.,
ethnicity)
PersonalIntegration
Social Bonding
Achievement
Opportun-ities for
IdentityAchievement
Self-esteem
Agency
Subjectivewell-being
Peers
Family
School
Society
School grades& retention
Vocational
Sport/leisure
PhysicalSelf
Health
Competencies
Figure 1. Conceptual overview of variables antecedent and consequent to participation in leisure contexts and activities
at UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIBRARY on March 9, 2013jar.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Figure 3. The benefits derived from unstructured play. (Bradley, p. 293, 2010)
Schools are meant to be inclusive spaces, but the use of No Signs and their undercurrent
non sequitur logic persist and need to be confronted and resisted.
Conditional Identities
I went into a clothes store and a girl came up to me and said, ‘If you need anything, I'm Jill.‘
I thought, This is amazing! I've never met anyone with a conditional identity before. ‘Wait! Who are you if I don’t need anything?”
NO SKATEBOARDING SIGNS: WHAT SCHOOLS VALUE 16
‘If you don’t need anything, then I’m Eugene’. (Martin, 2006)
Comedian Demetri Martin tells the joke above during a number of his shows in which he
deconstructs word choices and meaning. Although the idea of a ‘conditional identity’ is a
humorous one, it does apply in the case of skateboarders at school where no skateboarding is
allowed.
Bruno Latour contends that, when different subjects and objects are assembled, complex
human–technology hybrids emerge which engage “new intentions, associations, and actions” (as
cited in Adams & Thompson, p. 733, 2011). Latour’s famous example is the ‘citizen-gun’ that
results when a person and a firearm are brought into proximity. The way that the citizen-gun
approaches the world and interactions is significantly different than the way the citizen-without-
gun does. By extension, the configuration of skater-with-skateboard has different potentialities
than the skater-without-skateboard.
A skater-without-board, compliant to the hierarchical and non-sensical rules of the No
Sign and school authority, arrives to school and still sees the space of the school’s entranceways
as the skater-with-skateboard would. Only now, without the tool that allows him to develop
performative architecture, his ability to produce the actual space that he perceives is impaired; he
is handicapped. Like ghosts able to see the world but not act upon it or a Greek character
trapped in repetitive and ironic perpetual torture in Tartarus, skaters-without-skateboards are
constantly disciplined. Not only suffering from not being able to occupy and negotiate space in
the way he would prefer, a skater-without-skateboard suffers from a kind of ‘conditional identity
crises’.
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Conclusion
Performative architecture, such as skateboarding and parkour, have different intention
than traditional forms of architecture. They are less about “form, space, and materials,
and more about critical place-making that seeks to subvert the power of hierarchies
inherent in building edifices. ... Interestingly, the apparently powerless, can use the
‘tactics’ of movement and timing to usurp that power momentarily. ... Architecture has
always repressed the ‘other’. (McGaw, p. 219/220, 2009)
No Signs are about oppressing skate“border” youth just enough that they’ll conform to
institutional norms which emerged decades before their sport. The hidden curricular message
being received is loud and clear: If you’re a student who is book smart, you’ve got it made. If
you can draw, you’ve got a gift. If you are good with computers, you might be kind of a nerd,
but you’ve got a future. If you’re a creative writer, teachers will love you. If you’re a skater,
you’re not welcome.
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