Brown’s lectures are positively medieval. Consider the 14th-century painting by the artist Laurentius de Voltolina, which depicts a “lecture” around the same time as the first recorded use of the word to mean a discourse delivered before a class. The professor presides from an elevated pulpit at the front; his diminutive students sit before him in rows, hands clasped atop their books. Straight backs — I’d say ramrod-straight, only this was a century before the invention of the ramrod — and forward-looking gazes prevail in the front row, while those in the back are touching their temples together in gossip. And then there’s the guy in the middle, slumped into the curve of his elbow in sleep. Slap some MacBooks on those desks and slouch some Longchamp totes on the floor, and de Voltolina’s tableau would prove an accurate depiction of a lecture in the Salomon De Ciccio Family Auditorium in Anno Domini 2026.
This row-and-column business is long overdue for a shake-up. We should take our chances on a gut feeling bet: By taking it upon ourselves to experiment with the lecture configuration, we’ll find that we never needed its constraints in the first place.
Previous research cast the lecture configuration as a tool of interest not for students, but for instructors who needed to impose discipline on the bodies of their students. One such study compared the effectiveness of rows versus circles based on how frequently the arrangements pumped certain desirable gestures out of students’ bodies, such as raising one’s hand or making comments. Classroom organizations were therefore figured as strategies of control, as mechanisms to trigger “on-task” movements and curtail “off-task” ones. In another study, the message of body taming is more explicit: The authors confidently explain that, a la Michel Foucault, through purposeful manipulation of the geometry of desk, student and instructor make possible “control over others ... without physical restraints or implications.”
These studies fail because they turn on the false assumption that it’s the professor’s job to discipline students’ bodies into performing certain behaviors that are required for learning. Gazes that stray away from the professor, for instance, could well be one of the “off-task” behaviors that these studies argue should be minimized by a professor wielding classroom configuration as a corrective tool. However, other research has shown that for some individuals, averting or closing one’s eyes to shut out external stimuli can aid the encoding and retrieval of new information. Theories of queering and neurodivergence, too, debunk the assumption that certain kinds of bodily configurations should be imposed upon us from outside as healthy correctives to the unruliness of our bodies. Foucault himself figured that the “serial” arrangement of the classroom was never designed to benefit the student. Through habituation, students just come to harbor the false belief that without such a system, their bodies won’t be ready to learn.
By taking it upon ourselves to disrupt this tyranny-by-convention of the lecture configuration, we can begin to challenge the assumption that bodies can only learn when their ‘deficiencies’ are held in check by their surroundings. Think about what configurations dominate in your classes, and devise strategies for stress-testing the spatial conventions of that environment. Leave behind the bolted-down chairs of your lecture hall and pull a chair onto the stage. Investigate what happens when you set down your bag at the head of the seminar table — that seat the professor never had to tell anyone to leave unoccupied. Abandon face-to-face engagement and stare at a wall. Without such traditional lecture configurations working their disciplinary powers on your body, will you find that you are still able to learn?
Last Thursday afternoon, I decided to take that last provocation out for a test drive in my ninety-person political science lecture. I chose the backmost row of Friedman 201, turned my desk-table 180 degrees to face the wall, flashed a nervous smile at the confused faces up and down the row, and settled in. What followed was ninety minutes of pure intrigue. Because the voices of the professor and the students were both emanating from behind me, I could assign no rank to them the way my traditional position in the front row had conditioned me to. Without such spatial cues, I found that it took longer for me to identify the good takeaways and start jotting them down. But while my body might’ve been engaging in less on-task behavior than usual, my thoughts were turning in a new direction I had not — and perhaps could not have — considered before. The lecture discussed Edmund Burke’s defense of traditional inequalities, a touchstone idea of modern conservatism I’d normally have had no trouble writing off. Yet I found myself wondering whether my discomfort at the erasure of familiar positional inequalities proved Burke’s point — that maybe some not-so-democratic conventions are practical to keep.
I describe my fumbling thoughts on Burke because I want to tell you that through the embarrassment and discomfort, I was thinking. I was questioning. I was making faces at the wall — having no professor before me for whom I needed to perform engagement — and I could feel that in the absence of external order, I was still learning.
I recognize that this is a tricky call to action. To take me up on my bet is to lay yourself open to optional experiences of vulnerability and uncertainty in a space where uncritical deference to professorial authority is often rewarded. But the experiences we end up alchemizing will prove worth those troubles. In an experiment that paired people to talk in configurations that tested traditional spatial norms, one participant reported that as she stood back-to-back with her partner in conversation, she could feel his shoulder blades shift against her own as he spoke. This strikes me as a radically beautiful and estranging experience: conscious of a shared embodiment in muscle and bone even as face-to-face contact is circumscribed, transforming our understanding of what it means to share a humanity even as our ideas conflict.
While there is a lacuna in the literature on measurable effects that configurations have on our relationship to discourse, these anecdotes — collected by me, by the conductors of these “very strange” experiments, and now, hopefully you — strike me as good proof that a successful newness can be introduced to what was tired and medieval. Perhaps our own very strange experiment will lead to revelations as potent and poetic.
Chandler Ahn ’29 can be reached at geumbee_ahn@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
