Schools are designed for specific educational purposes. Historically, these purposes have varied according to the periods in which the schools were built. The landscape of schools in the different time periods can be said to represent both traditional and progressive ideals. Schools are products of their time (Bengtsson, 2011). A school that is now regarded as outdated may, at the time of its construction, have represented radical and innovative ideas. Architectural and pedagogical ideals have also changed in terms of what constitutes knowledge and the kind of adults and society that schools want to shape.
A more recent example is the design of non-traditional open-plan learning environments, which require team teaching, a higher degree of shared space and resources for teachers, a different distribution of roles and responsibilities, flexible timetables and greater freedom for students in terms of self-directed learning and peer collaboration (Blackmore et al, 2011; Saltmarsh, 2015). This example illustrates that school environments are didactical spaces that both extend and limit teachers’ and students’ everyday teaching and learning.
How the different agents in the school environment experience and conceptualize the relation between educational approaches and the design of the school premises affects what they view as achievable and desirable in that space. In this sense, the school environment is not a fixed entity, but is continuously created and recreated in a dynamic everyday process (cf. Mulcahy, 2016; Stables, 2015). It affords different kinds of individual interpretations, judgements and responses, all of which influence the outcome of the education that is conducted there. Indeed, the enacted school environment is rarely played out in accordance with architectural blueprints and pedagogical intentions (cf. Woolner et al, 2012).
In the proposed symposium we focus on conditions for teaching and learning in relation to the design of school environments. The contributions share the assumption that there is a need to regard the school environment as “part of the life story of its users” (Stables, 2015). School environments are appropriated by their users who respond to their environment in different ways (Stables, 2015). Mainstream research has not sufficiently taken this into account. Rather, the focus has been more on design practices than implementation and transition practices (Blackmore et al, 2011). The contributors, all of which represent six countries (Canada, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and UK), address the lived experience of educational design from the perspective of students, teachers and other school staff, principals and architects. They encompass different types of environments; traditional and open-space, indoors and outdoors, and a range of age groups.
This symposium seeks to integrate and extend knowledge about the interplay between designed and experienced school environments for different individuals and groups who operate in them at a certain time. The discussant Prof. Andrew Stables will synthesize and discuss the contributions, partly from experiences from the “Design Matters” research project in the UK.
