Designing for Learning

Creating Campus Environments for Student Success

C. Carney Strange, James H. Banning

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118823507
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

Understand the design factors of campus environmental theory that impact student success and create a campus of consequence

Designing for Learning is a comprehensive introduction to campus environmental theory and practice, summarizing the influence of collegiate environments on learning and providing practical strategies for facilitating student success through intentional design. This second edition offers new coverage of universal design, learning communities, multicultural environments, online environments, social networking, and safety, and challenges educators to evaluate the potential for change on their own campuses. You'll learn which factors make a living-learning community effective, and how to implement these factors in the renovation of campus facilities. An updated selection of vignettes, case scenarios, and institutional examples help you apply theory to practice, and end-of-chapter reflection questions allow you to test your understanding and probe deeper into the material and how it applies to your environment.

Campus design is no longer just about grassy quads and ivy-covered walls—the past decade has seen a surge in new designs that facilitate learning and nurture student development. This book introduces you to the many design factors that impact student success, and helps you develop a solid strategy for implementing the changes that can make the biggest difference to your campus.

• Learn how environments shape and influence student behavior
• Evaluate your campus and consider the potential for change
• Make your spaces more welcoming, inclusive, and functional
• Organize the design process from research to policy implementation

Colleges and universities are institutions of purpose and place, and the physical design of the facilities must be undertaken with attention to the ways in which the space's dimensions and features impact the behavior and outlook of everyone from students to faculty to staff. Designing for Learning gives you a greater understanding of modern campus design, and the practical application that brings theory to life.

Part One
Components and Impacts of Campus Environments

Several critical perspectives have informed educators about the relationship between students and their institutions of higher learning. So named an unenlightened perspective, one approach “is built on the premise that not all young people [or returning mature students for that matter] belong in college and that therefore it can be expected that a lot of students won't be able to make it. It follows, therefore, that student failure is evidence of the efficacy of our higher education system” (Banning & Kaiser, 1974, p. 371). The appropriate role for educators holding this perspective, then, is to ease students out of the institution through counseling them toward other opportunities. A second perspective focuses on the concept of adjustment; accordingly, “if there are students who can't make it, they should be provided with counseling and other services in order that they might change and be better able to benefit from the educational environment” (p. 371). In other words, the institution's role is to help students solve their adjustment concerns so they can succeed. A third perspective is characterized as developmental. This perspective assumes that “college students [of all ages] are in a transition or growth period and that there are certain tasks they must perform in order to reach maturity…they need to grow up some before they can really benefit from the educational environment” (p. 371). The institution's role in this case is to be appropriately supportive as students reach a point of readiness to benefit from their educational experiences. Although an element of truth is contained in each perspective, according to Banning and Kaiser, “none speaks sharply to the issues of institutions changing, institutions adjusting, or institutions growing up, or more importantly, to the relationship between students and their environment” (p. 371). In response to the limitations of these approaches is the ecological perspective, incorporating “the influence of environments on persons and persons on environments” (p. 371). Implicit in this latter perspective is the assumption that institutions themselves bear responsibility for the design and creation of campus environments, arranged appropriately or otherwise for meeting educational purposes.

In a comprehensive review of environmental correlates and determinants of human behavior, Moos (1986) concluded that the “arrangement of environments is perhaps the most powerful technique we have for influencing human behavior. From one point of view, every institution in our society sets up conditions that it hopes will maximize certain types of behavior and certain directions of personal growth” (p. 4). Thus, colleges and universities establish conditions to attract, satisfy, and retain students for purposes of challenging them to develop qualities of the educated person, including a capacity for complex critical reasoning, communication, and leadership; a sense of identity and purpose; an appreciation for differences; and a commitment to lifelong learning. Such goals are the traditional purview of educators, and as Dewey (1933) suggested, they are better served by specificity rather than serendipity: “We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference” (p. 22). To be more fruitful in our efforts, we concur with Dewey in the assumption that educational settings designed with an understanding of the dynamics and impact of human environments in mind will go further in achieving these ends.

As we approach this topic of the design of effective campus environments, we are persuaded by Moos's (1986, p. 4) distinction between an ideal and an optimum environment:

There are no clearly defined criteria for an ideal environment that can meet everyone's requirements. But we are much more likely to achieve an optimum environment when critical decisions about constructing and changing the environment are in the hands of people who live and function in it. These decisions are currently in our hands, and to make them wisely we urgently need more reliable information about human environments and their impacts on human beings.

Thus, Part One (Chapters One through Four) of this volume provides an overview of what we believe to be the best information we have on the nature of human environments and their impact on human beings in an educational context.

In the past decade, considerable information on the impact of human environments has emerged in the literature on college students and their experience of higher education (Evans, Forney, Guido, Patton, & Renn, 2010; Levine & Dean, 2012; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005; Renn & Reason, 2012a). However, what seems missing is an “integrated perspective regarding the human environment” for purposes of creating “conditions to maximize certain intended effects” (Moos, 1986, p. 4). Toward that end our review and synthesis of these materials begins by identifying some of the assumptions and understandings that have shaped our work.

Like Moos (1986), we, too, are guided by the tenets of a social ecological approach, with its emphasis on a “multidisciplinary study of the impacts of physical and social environments on human beings…from the perspective of the individual” (p. 28). This method also “emphasizes individual adaptation, adjustment, and coping,…maintains a practical applied orientation, [and] has an explicit [humanistic] value orientation…dedicated to increasing individual freedom of choice in selecting environments” (p. 31). These tenets, we conclude, are consistent with and supportive of the role of educators as they seek to understand and design environments that will maximize student learning.

As educators acquire a more sophisticated understanding of human environments, they will be better positioned to eliminate those features of institutions that are needlessly stressful or inhibiting and ultimately to create those features that will challenge students toward active learning, growth, and development. Whether we want them to or not, or whether we understand them or not, educational environments do exert an impact on students. Our preference is to approach the design of these environments with eyes wide open and intentions clearly informed. This goal will require grounding in a range of behavioral science concepts and models that inform such questions, the purpose we now turn to in this volume.

These first four chapters outline and illustrate core components related to the description and understanding of all human environments. Although we often become insensitive or perhaps even immune to the components and effects of our environments, the experience of a typical day for faculty, administrators, and students alike on any campus will reveal the scope of its effects. These include the sidewalks that encourage us to walk around a building rather than across the rain-soaked muddy pathway to an office, classroom, or residence room; the characteristic styles, conversations, and actions of colleagues, students, and staff within a given department or office; the expectations, routines, and procedures we follow (or ignore) in the execution of our responsibilities and assignments; and, finally, the distinctive values and impressions we seem to intuit from the very air we breathe that help us understand and communicate to others what it's like to be here. These are all exemplars of the components of human environments that serve to prod, bend, and shape the behaviors of those within them. Understanding what to look for and how to identify the components of the environment are the first steps in this overview.

Key components of all human environments include:

• Physical condition, design, and layout
• Collective characteristics of the people who inhabit them
• Organizational structures related to their purposes and goals
• Collective perceptions or social constructions of the context and culture of the setting

Each of four chapters in this part begins with a case scenario alluding to the various environmental features explicated in the chapter. Following the presentation of chapter content, a brief set of suggested discussion questions is included for purposes of exploring key concepts and their application to campus observations, policies, and practices. Thus, in Chapter One, perhaps the most obvious features of any campus environment—its physical characteristics—are addressed. Basic layout and spaces (Griffith, 1994), accessibility and cleanliness, interior color schemes, and even the weather on the day of a campus visit, for example, all shape initial attitudes in subtle yet powerful ways (Stern, 1986; Sturner, 1972; Thelin & Yankovich, 1987). Components of the campus physical environment, natural and synthetic, serve functional and symbolic ends, defining spaces for various activities, functions, and events and sending out nonverbal messages containing a range of possibilities. As places of active learning, colleges and universities contribute to designs that are supportive of student engagement and the experience of community (Chapman, 2006).

Chapter Two recognizes that information about the collective characteristics of environmental inhabitants, whether demographic (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity) or typological (e.g., personalities, learning styles, strengths, activities), is indicative of the dominant features of an environment. A profile of these collective human characteristics reflects the pattern, strength, and character of an environment, according to degrees of differentiation (type homogeneity among inhabitants) and consistency (type similarity) (Holland, 1973).

Highly differentiated and consistent environments (that is, those dominated primarily by a single type) are readily distinguished and clearly focused to those within and without. Such aggregates accent and reinforce their own characteristics over time and exert a powerful influence on the degree to which others are attracted to, satisfied within, and retained by them. Thus, campuses of a particular cultural, ethnic, or age-based group, for example, are more likely to attract, satisfy, and retain individuals who share traits in common with the dominant group. This perspective also suggests that the quality of any student's experience is a function of his or her congruence, or degree of fit, with the dominant aggregate. Those who share similarities with it are predicted to be most attracted to that environment, while those who bear little resemblance are least likely to be reinforced for preferred behaviors, values, attitudes, and expectations, in which case they are at risk for becoming dissatisfied and leaving that environment.

Chapter Three begins with the observation that all environments maintain some degree of organization (formally or otherwise) to meet certain explicit or implied goals. On a typical college campus, most faculty, staff, and students spend a good deal of time every day in purposeful environments such as residence halls, classrooms, department offices, recreation centers, services, and programs. To the extent that these environments are designed to achieve certain ends, getting organized to get things done is a natural conclusion to a number of decisions that must be made with respect to their purposes. Who is in charge? How will decisions about distributing resources be made? By what rules, if any, will the organization function? What must be accomplished and how quickly? How will participants be rewarded for their accomplishments? Answers to such questions generate various arrangements and structures that, in turn, define the organizational dimensions of an environment. Thus, concentrating decision-making power within one or a select few...