Scary places. Pomeranian school common rooms from the hauntological perspective

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present the spectra of the school common room on the example of the difficulties it is struggling with and to propose solutions on how to overcome these difficulties. The first part presents the social vision of the common room from the perspective of people who are directly related to it, including the authors’ point of view. Then, the provisions of the Educational Law are presented and descriptions of how the common room activities should look like and what they are meant to be used for. Due to the easily noticeable dissonances between the first and the second part of the text, its role becomes to change a place called “storage room, outbuilding, exile for teachers” – the school common room. It is a space where almost nothing has changed since the last millennium. The authors do not agree with this, but they also notice difficulties in those places (school common rooms) which are familiar to them. These obstacles, however, are to motivate actions that may cause real changes in the functioning of the common room and brighten its “black PR” – to “tame it”. The inspiration to take up this topic were the two year seminar deliberations on spectrum and ghosts, as well as the authors’ experiences related to the different functioning of schools and common rooms operating in them.