Innovative Spaces and Pedagogy (original) (raw)

Editorial: Perspectives on Spaces for Teaching and Learning

2018

… I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. (Foucault, 1984, p.2) This special issue focuses on a wide range of Perspectives on Spaces for Teaching and Learning. Discussion on this theme began in a series of questions following a PhD Conference at the University of Aberdeen in 2017 on 'Perspectives on Space(s) in Our Research Contexts'. What spaces are offered or used for when teaching and learning take place today is worth further investigation locally as well as universally. As we all encounter different educational contexts, cultures, societal needs and technological achievements, it is not possible to conceptually limit spaces offered for teaching and learning into what they represent for each individual practitioner or researcher. Instead, different arguments can broaden individual perspectives and benefit all, while leading to self-reflection for one's own research perspectives.

Innovative Spaces at School. How Innovative Spaces and the Learning Environment Condition the Transformation of Teaching

Makers at School, Educational Robotics and Innovative Learning Environments

This paper introduces the contributions to Track C1 of the symposium, which explored the link between architectural space and learning processes, while trying to outline their connection and mutual influence. The paper also aims to outline major trends and innovative approaches in the field of school design. Specifically, it refers to the relationship between the architecture of school, the users’ spatial perception, and the capacity to increase learning skills through the experience of comfort and quality spaces. Also, the relationship with the urban structure is investigated as a crucial aspect of school architecture.

Learning spaces and pedagogic change: envisioned, enacted and experienced

Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2015

Building on work in how spaces of learning can contribute to the broader policy agenda of achieving pedagogic change, this article takes as its context the Building the Education Revolution infrastructure programme in Australia. Deploying a sociomaterial approach to researching learning spaces and pedagogic change and drawing on data from interviews conducted with senior leaders, teachers and students in schools with flexible learning spaces, we report on pedagogic change as envisioned for, and enacted and experienced in, these spaces. It was found that there is no causal link between learning spaces and pedagogic change. Rather, pedagogic change is encompassed within multiple sets of relations and multiple forms of practice. We see promise for the emerging field of learning spaces in thinking about space from a relational, sociomaterial perspective. This approach pursues a non-dualist analysis of the space-pedagogy relation and offers less deterministic causal accounts of change than those that are commonly made in the popular and policy literatures.

The PLACE as Factor of the Pedagogical Quality of Space

Research has shown that aspects of the subject’s behavior are governed by a sense of space that permeates social interactions, is reflected on the built space and gives the social environment both a material and a symbolic dimension. In this context, the place is a subjective version of the space, associated with the desires, the choices and the capabilities of the subject. The concept of the place acquires special interest in the educational process, because the child forms places spontaneously, whenever he has the chance to do so, having the innate need to develop a field of expression and constant interaction with his social environment. Can the spontaneous creation and functioning of places by the children become a permanent and predesigned component of school space? This was the issue of a research study conducted in kindergartens in Thessaloniki, organized around an educational game activity in the classroom. We named educational places the micro-environments created by the children during this research. Observation has shown that an educational place is composed by a module of both spaces and activities, created and managed exclusively by the children. The evaluation of the data showed that the educational place, as element of school space, had multiple positive effects on the educational process. The most important effect was that a new model of school space emerged from the development and the functioning of educational places, which is based on an informal and continuous re-planning of space by the child during the educational process associated with his activity. This model highlights an interesting dimension of flexibility of space as a factor of the educational environment, which is exclusively owed to the process of its utilization. Adopting this model, the school space can be transformed into a field of educational places, directed to the acquisition of learning experiences

Innovative Learning Spaces in the Making

Frontiers in Education, 2020

This article details a qualitative, case study focusing on the affordances of innovative makerspaces for teaching and learning. The theoretical perspectives framing the research include embodied learning, materiality, neuroarchitecture, and structuralism as it relates to power, inclusion, and engagement within a learning space. Findings provide an overview of how the physical space (including the architecture of, and the furniture and materials within, the space) became an actor in the learning process. Three schools are highlighted as the case study examples. A detailed overview is provided of each of the spaces and the findings are supported through rich descriptions and a variety of data sources (i.e., teacher quotes, Twitter posts, images). This study is timely given that many Ontario schools have been and continue to build makerspaces to respond to the need to develop students' global skills and competencies (critical thinking; innovation and creativity; self-directed learning; collaboration; communication; and citizenship).

Teachers’ Perception of Learning Spaces

EDULEARN Proceedings, 2019

The evolution of educational theories in recent years, as well as the emergence of new pedagogical strategies related to learning processes, require attention to research on the configuration and organization of learning spaces (

Space Pedagogy - Responsive Environments for Learning

2018

The generational changes in the 21 st century rapidly cause fundamental shifts in pedagogy, therefore in the built structures designed for learning too. A wider variety on the range of open/communal and closed/personal spaces has been introduced in school designs all over the world, nevertheless there is a strong conflict between the lifespan on the built frames of education and the almost continuously changing pedagogical methods. The paper introduces the widening range of school architecture, with the critical analysis of new typologies in the recent past. The research focuses on new learning space strategies, where spatial perception and construction as learning tools widen the school environment into urban scale. The built and virtual environment gradually become alternative educational platforms models, which are integrated in the frequently renewed curricula, resulting in a need for new design approaches to achieve responsive environments in school architecture.

School as Space: Spatial Alterations, Teaching, Social Motives, and Practices

Studia paedagogica, 2014

Space is only gradually emerging as a topic in educational research in general and in research on schools in particular. In this paper, we approach an empirical examination of social processes in schools within the framework of two prominent theoretical approaches to the topic of space: the absolute and the relational. By empirically examining how classroom arrangements are influenced by material space and in themselves constitute space, we hope to arrive at a better understanding of how space, teaching, and social relationship structures are intertwined in schools. Furthermore, we present the argument that a combination of the two spatial concepts is promising when empirically examining social processes within a spatial reference frame.

Space-Places and Third Teacher: The Issue of Architectural Space in the Age of Knowledge Cities and Schools 3.0

Research for Development, 2019

Information and knowledge are not synonyms; rather they are quite distinct facts. As a form of knowing never separated from the critical processing of subjects, knowledge is sensitive to space. The city as a knowledge hub demands a dense exchange of context where urban morphologies cannot be replaced by dispersed relations allowed by ICT networks and smart efficiency. Symmetrically in school buildings, that is, the basis of knowledge infrastructures, learning architecture is not replaceable by an unstructured environment, mechanically derived from a new flexibility allowed by digital technologies and specific mainstream views on "innovative teaching". This paper critically explores the role of architectural space in the age of 2.0-3.0 schools, discussing the relationship between transformations introduced by the unstructured classroom upgraded by digital technologies and new necessary experimentations on architectural space, the third teacher. Architectural space is not only an active player in influencing learning and development but is also a constitutive element in the formation of thought and a specific tool of critical, cultural and imaginative knowledge of reality. Organising space means organising the metaphor of knowledge.