The Spatial Production of Learning Opportunities in Skateboard Parks

Drawing on an ethnographic study of skateboarders, we examine how learning occurs in two city skateparks. We consider the dialectical relationship between participants’ activity and setting, or individually experienced spaces of the skateparks. Individuals edit these settings in activity, even as activity generates setting, and space is socially produced in the collective editing and activity of participants. Learning opportunities, or access to participation in the communities of practice of the parks, emerge from this spatial production. In the two skateparks these learning opportunities were inseparable from other skateboarding activity; spaces of teaching, learning, and skating overlapped and mutually elaborated each other.