“Knowing locations”. The impact of the teachers on their socio-material learning environment.

Building on the metaphor of teachers as “knowing locations,” this contribution explores how teachers impact the socio-material learning environments. We illustrate how they influence teaching/learning making by zooming into two distinct settings: secondary school educational labs (E-labs) and art academy workshops. E-labs, with their clean, standardized, and technology-focused design, often hinder hands-on exploration due to restrictive material use and limited teacher involvement. Art academy workshops are richly personalized by technicians whose personal and pedagogical considerations deeply shape the learning atmosphere, either encouraging or deterring student engagement. By revealing the continuum of teachers’ influence on shaping socio-material relations within learning environments, we not only expose their role as ‘knowing locations”, but also emphasize the complex interplay between space, pedagogy, and embodied knowledge practices, in short, the ontological multiplicities of learning environments. We contribute to raising teacher’s critical spatial literacy.