Our editorial summarizes what we consider the main contribution of this publication:
In this special issue we offer an extensive exploration and conceptualization of the visual and material dimensions of education and learning, bringing together a cluster of emerging scholarly ventures that investigate how people create, explore, interpret, negotiate, adjust, contest, transform and envision learning environments. This edited collection of research papers shows the versatility of the growing field of schoolscape studies and the high potential of recent theoretical and methodological innovations to investigate the visual and material dimensions of education and learning. The studies share the view that premises designed for education as well as other spaces can equally serve as sites of teaching and learning. Among others, the papers ask what the environment offers and how images, multimodal texts and artifacts can be used to enhance (language) learning and communication. The empirical case studies apply a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, bringing innovation into the generation, presentation and analysis of data from varying educational institutions and mundane settings covering geographical sites from Europe and North America.
