Walking Through the Future in the Present: Teaching Practices in Postdigital Learning Spaces

Abstract Learning spaces with integrated technology are often heralded as transformative, yet the sociotechnical imaginaries underpinning these spaces rarely manifest as envisioned in our everyday teaching and learning practices. This paper explores how the attributes of a refurbished classroom were experienced as ‘futures in the present’ by the first cohort of ten university teachers to use the space. In it we investigate tensions between imagined futures, past routines, and current realities using walking interviews. These in situ narratives of practice were analysed tracking links between the foundational elements of practice: materials, meaning and skill. This resulted in the identification of five key themes (spatial dimensions, navigation, informality, simultaneity, and variation/uniformity) and three significant high-level insights: movement’s central role in teaching practices, benefits of multiple spatial configurations, and the value of grounding future possibilities in embodied experiences. Rather than offering a blueprint for the future, we argue that examining educators’ embodied interactions with prototype learning spaces—their practical experiments with possible futures—provides valuable insights for the development of convivial, equitable, and sustainable postdigital classrooms.