School design and wellbeing: Spatial and literary meeting points

In many works of fiction for young people, school settings often play a significant part in staging the interactions between characters, child and adult alike. Schools and children’s literature share common characteristics: both are created by adults for children; both serve a socialising and pedagogical function; and both are highly responsive to cultural and technological change. As children’s literature’s implied audience is the child reader who is experiencing school in all its variant aspects, it is then important to consider how fiction represents the idea of the school as both space and place, and the insights (and lessons) it offers in terms of transformative possibilities either through constructions of fantastic or realistic school settings, or implied through negative examples. Drawing on the influential studies of spatiality by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, and interdisciplinary research, this chapter considers the extent to which a selection of contemporary texts for young people gives an imaginative form to the spatial practices of school that research documents. By drawing together two modes of knowing—the ‘real’ and the imaginary—this chapter shows how each plays an important part in understanding how design and affect impact on children’s wellbeing and their experience of school life