Design for the Changing Educational Landscape

Space, Place and the Future of Learning

Andrew Harrison, Les Hutton

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134482047
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arquitectura
• Categoría: Arquitectura general

The whole landscape of space use is undergoing a radical transformation. In the workplace a period of unprecedented change has created a mix of responses with one overriding outcome observable worldwide: the rise of distributed space. In the learning environment the social, political, economic and technological changes responsible for this shift have been further compounded by constantly developing theories of learning and teaching, and a wide acceptance of the importance of learning as the core of the community, resulting in the blending of all aspects of learning into one seamless experience.

This book attempts to look at all the forces driving the provision and pedagogic performance of the many spaces, real and virtual, that now accommodate the experience of learning and provide pointers towards the creation and design of learning-centred communities.

Part 1 looks at the entire learning universe as it now stands, tracks the way in which its constituent parts came to occupy their role, assesses how they have responded to a complex of drivers and gauges their success in dealing with renewed pressures to perform. It shows that what is required is innovation within the spaces and integration between them. Part 2 finds many examples of innovation in evidence across the world – in schools, the higher and further education campus and in business and cultural spaces – but an almost total absence of integration. Part 3 offers a model that redefines the learning landscape in terms of learning outcomes, mapping spatial requirements and activities into a detailed mechanism that will achieve the best outcome at the most appropriate scale.

By encouraging stakeholders to creating an events-based rather than space-based identity, the book hopes to point the way to a fully-integrated learning landscape: a learning community.

PART 1 Learning space

DOI: 10.4324/9780203762653-2

CHAPTER 1 The learning universe

DOI: 10.4324/9780203762653-3

Learning takes place throughout our lives and across the physical and virtual communities we occupy: as an activity it can be encountered in an enormous range of spaces, from purpose-built school and higher education buildings to museums, galleries, hotels and conference centres (Figure 1.1). This is an extensive portfolio across a rapidly changing landscape. Both the scale and the speed of change ask designers the hard question: is it possible to create space for learning that will be responsive, resilient and well designed – or is it already too late to do more than passively acknowledge this change in status and circumstance?

Figure 1.1 Mapping the learning landscape

Because we are fundamentally concerned with design, this book takes a place-based approach to this learning universe, while acknowledging that the activity can be free-floating and virtual. Our purpose in looking at these places is not primarily to systematize, although that is an essential and rather neglected first stage (Temple 2008: 229–41), but to assess their performance as a necessary precursor to prescriptive action. We also acknowledge that the aim of this book is to provide designers, procurers and users of space with the means to effect useful change in their own sphere of influence – and this transformational imperative inevitably privileges certain spaces at the expense of others.

Three major space groupings emerge from the baggy portfolio covered in Figure 1.1. The first place is the school building, the core space of which, the classroom, at one time adequately defined the activity – teacher at the front, children facing – and now does not (Figure 1.2). The second is the complex of spaces and activities that make up a further and higher education campus – lecture rooms and classrooms, libraries, student centres, sports facilities (Figure 1.3). This is no longer a remote, hermetic space but an accessible, permeable space with deep roots in the wider community – and deep economic obligations: these places have to exist as rigorously and accountably in the real world as any commercial workspace. This extension of once-restricted services and obligations is taken much further in the final category – those spaces above, below, within and beyond traditional learning spaces that nevertheless must be planned for, designed and assessed in terms of performance: just like any learning space, any workplace (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.2 School buildings: Chantry High School, Ipswich. For decades the classroom was no more than a teacher and an audience and a single acceptable configuration: learning styles – and spaces – are changing

Figure 1.3 The university campus: Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan. The type of further and higher education accommodation that used to be enclosed and exclusive and is now a focal point for the whole community

Figure 1.4 Business and cultural spaces: Turku City Library, Finland. The public library: the space is disarmingly similar but its use has utterly changed. Now the library has the capacity to be a learning hub for the entire community

All these spaces – school, higher and further education and the new ancillary learning spaces, including virtual learning environments – emerged piecemeal over time in response to a number of long-term drivers, and betray their disaggregated origins in their haphazard suitability for current – let alone future – learning needs. Do we – put simply – know enough about this landscape to prepare ourselves for the changes it must face?

In July 2006, Paul Temple undertook a literature review of learning spaces for the Centre for Education Studies at the University of London aimed at informing ‘the future design of learning spaces, in order to facilitate the changing pedagogical practices needed to support a mass higher education system with its greater student diversity. It was anticipated … that issues arising might include the implications for learning space of changing student demands, new pedagogies and technological advance’ (Temple 2007: 4). In this he makes the point that the design of learning spaces has been ‘a continuing occupation’ in the schools sector – and he cites Clark (2002) – whereas several standard texts on teaching and learning in higher education (e.g., Light and Cox 2001) ‘do not mention the nature of learning spaces, even in passing’ (Temple 2007: 10). He traces the causes of this divergence of interest – for the ‘long-standing and continuing tradition in the UK and elsewhere, of applying an education-centred philosophy to the planning of school buildings (DfES 2002: 7)’ – to the start of publicly financed education in Europe in the later nineteenth century (Temple 2007: 57).

The connection between building design and educational theories and methods received ‘special emphasis in the post-1945 national school building programmes, where standardized, innovative school designs were created, for reasons both of cost-effectiveness and to allow new pedagogic methods to be readily applied (Maclure 1984)’. Furthermore, he adds, ‘there was been a tradition in school pedagogy of careful observation of the differences that school designs and classroom layouts make to student behaviour and work (Loughlin 1977)’. ‘This level of detailed observation and reflection on the micro-organisation of teaching spaces’, he asserts, ‘is largely absent in the higher education literature’ (Temple 2007: 57). More recently Barrett et al. (2013) conducted a study to look for evidence of the demonstrable impact of school building design on the learning rates of pupils in primary schools. The study, ‘A holistic, multi-level analysis identifying the impact of classroom design on pupils’ learning’, developed hypotheses as to positive impacts on learning for ten design parameters within a neuroscience framework of three design principles. These were tested using data collected on 751 pupils from 34 varied classrooms in seven different schools in the UK:

The multi-level model developed explained 51 per cent of the variability in the learning improvements of the pupils, over the course of a year. However, within this a high level of explanation (73 per cent) was identified at the ‘class’ level, linked entirely to six built environment design parameters, namely: colour, choice, connection, complexity, flexibility and light. The model was used to predict the impact of the six design parameters on pupils’ learning progression. Comparing the ‘worst’ and ‘best’ classrooms in the sample, these factors alone were found to have an impact that equates to the typical progress of a pupil over one year. It was also possible to estimate the proportionate impact of these built environment factors on learning progression, in the context of all influences together. This scaled at a 25 per cent contribution on average.

This clear evidence of the significant impact of the built environment on pupils’ learning progression highlights the importance of this aspect for policy makers, designers and users. The wide range of factors involved in this holistic approach still leaves a significant design challenge.

(Barrett et al. 2013: 1)

In 2011, the fourth compendious Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of exemplar buildings, Designing for Education (OECD 2011), was overwhelmingly schools oriented, drawing evidence from 28 countries and 60 recently built/refurbished education facilities only seven of which are further or higher education establishments rather than schools (Box 1.1). Yet in the introductory chapter of the book, Alastair Blyth, acknowledging the schools slant of traditional reporting by the Centre for Effective Learning Environments (CELE) and its precursor, the Programme on Educational Building (PEB), heralds a more recent concentration on further and higher education: ‘higher education facilities became a concern as a university level education became almost universal and problems developed in relation to managing large university estates, catering for greater student numbers and managing greater varieties of courses on offer’ (OECD 2011: 17).

Box 1.1 Further and higher education exemplars

Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland; MAD-faculty, KHLim – PHL Belgium; The Saltire Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University, United Kingdom; Sino-French Centre, Tongji University, China; Batiment Atrium, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, France; Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA; Akademia Muzyczna im. Karola Szymanowskiego, Katowicach, Poland.

Source: Designing for Education (OECD 2011)

In its coverage of learning space in our third grouping, however – the rising presence of place without space, virtual/distributed learning and of space ungeared to established institutions – the literature is distinctly spottier. None of the exemplar spaces in Designing for Education (OECD 2011), for example, is a non-formal or informal learning environment (OECD terminology for these third stream locations: Box 1.2): these are covered in another OECD report (OECD 2010) – 15 years after OECD education ministers agreed to develop strategies for ‘lifelong learning for all’ (OECD 1996).

Box 1.2 The learner's perspective

From the learner's standpoint, formal learning is always intentional – their explicit intention is to gain knowledge, skills and/or competences. This would include learning that takes place inside the initial education and training system, and also workplace training by their employer. Informal learning is often referred to as learning by experience or just, experience. The simple fact of existing, this view holds, constantly exposes the person to learning at home, at work and during their leisure time. This definition – with a few exceptions (Werquin 2007) – is fairly consensual.

Source: OECD (2010: 2)

Schools

In the UK, eight clearly identifiable phases can be observed in the development of publicly provided education over more than 150 years. At each stage, the design and provision of school buildings have emerged from a potent mix of policy, economics, demographics and changing learning and architectural theory.

The burst of elementary school construction that followed the 1870 Elementary Education Act, for instance, seems, at this distance, to be a monolithic process designed to meet the provisions of the Act – but ‘it disguised a wide variety in both internal organisation and external architecture’ (Seaborne and Lowe 1977: 22, quoted in Woolner et al. 2005: 7). In its provision for free elementary education, this vast Victorian building programme was as complex in its origins as the post-war building response to free, universal secondary education in the wake of the 1944 Butler Education Act: free, as in non-fee-paying, but at a heavy cost to losers in the Burt 11-plus IQ lottery that determined their place in the UK’s tripartite system of education that operated between 1944 and 1976.

Long after the 1944 Act, its chief political architect Rab Butler wrote of how important it was to ‘ensure that a stigma of inferiority did not attach itself to those secondary institutions … which lacked the facilities and academic prestige of grammar schools’. But how could it be otherwise? Grammar schools had, in general, three times more money spent on them; they had the best teachers, the best facilities.

(Benn 2011: 42)

The Butler Act itself, of course, was the end-product of a long and iterative programme: the 1902 and 1903 Balfour Acts had transferred control of state schools from school boards to country and borough councils and begun the process of ‘regularizing arrangements previously made by some boards, especially in cities, to go beyond “elementary” education’ (Saint 1987: 36). The provision of secondary schools remained haphazard and inadequate through the Acts of 1918 and 1921, the initial Hadow Report in 1926, followed by further reports in 1931, 1933 and 1938, reviewing the whole structure of English schooling and informing the spirit of the Butler Act.

In Andrew Saint’s estimation, the English post-war school-building movement that followed the Act can advance bold claims both for its aims and its achievements. ‘Alone in Britain, without exact parallel in other countries, its proponents grasped the chances for social development implicit in modern architecture since the 1930s and succeeded in applying its principles in such a way as to benefit a whole nation’ (ibid.: 225). He sees the aim in terms of lofty architectural commandments:

Firstly, they held that everything about architecture and building ought to be submitted to the test of the most searching, rational scrutiny. Secondly, the benefits of a better architecture had to be conferred evenly upon the whole population, not reserved for one small segment. Thirdly, the methods of architecture had to be intensely cooperative and collaborative. From a combination of these tenets sprang a fourth. Buildings were to be the embodiment of a continuous, developing process between architect, client, user and maker.

(ibid.: 225)

This ‘austere code’, he asserts, formed the bones of a movement that achieved great things for the nation’s children:

Against a shifting backdrop of urgency, opportunity, shortage and stringency, [the school-builders] helped to develop policies and means of construction which housed a whole generation of children in state schools to a far higher standard of accommodation and services than anything thought imaginable before the war. There was no ‘double-banking’ of the kind common elsewhere [splitting the curriculum into morning and afternoon sessions], no child turned away for want of a school place. The schools built were neither temporary nor identical. They could expect a medium- or long-term life-span, and they were tailored to the different local wants and aspirations of teachers and education authorities. Some were original and handsome, others were not special to look at, but most were practical. Imaginative practicality, in so far as such generalizations can be made, was the distinguishing mark of the post-war British school.

(ibid.: 225–6)

Would this forgiving assessment be the generally held view by 2004, when the Labour government launched its Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, acknowledging the poor standard, condition and relevance to changing circumstances of England’s secondary schools and aiming to refurbish or rebuild all 3,500 of them over a 15-year period at an anticipated budget of £45 billion (DfES 2004)? (Or 2010, when the Coalition government’s education secretary, Michael Gove, scrapped it and replaced it with a more limited capital investment programme?)

The poor state of the UK school building stock – and, to a lesser extent, the poor match between the space and its current uses – was no secret. Between 1997 and 2004/5, the Labour government increased capital investment in school buildings from £700 million to £3 billion per annum (DfES 2003a), in an informal programme using Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as a funding mechanism, in which the private sector provides the capital funding, and also builds and (mostly) operates the facilities under a 25 to 30-year contract. A significant number of primary and secondary schools in...