This symposium reports and reflects on the participants’ global studies of educational facilities across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, SE Asia and Australasia. They illustrate themes simultaneously present in both national contexts, and globally across contexts. The conference theme of ‘education in an era of risk’, enables us to show that challenges to traditional learning environments design, and to traditional pedagogy, pose significant risk to political policy-makers, architects, educators students and parents. We show that these changes are consistent with efforts to address the quickly changing socio-economic scenario, dominated not only by increasing population diversity and globalisation, but also by the influence of mass digitisation.

The presentations address questions of participation and non-participation, seeking to illustrate the contested political nature of participation – while on one hand, community participation is considered desirable (TKI, nd; Woolner, McCarter, Wall, & Higgins, 2012), on the other, it is actively deterred or ruled out to minimise the risk of parental objection (Benade, 2018) or to reduce possible planning delays (Education & Skills Funding Agency, 2014). The transformation of education and schooling in and for the twenty-first century is a key theme underlying not only these presentations, but indeed also the policies and processes they reflect on and critique. The policy intent at the level of global governance (OECD, 2013) calls for national education and higher education systems to transform themselves in and for the current century, addressing pedagogy, relations between teachers and students and the places where teaching and learning occurs. This intent has been eagerly taken up in OECD states such as Australia and New Zealand, though questions of transforming education more generally through architectural, pedagogical and technological design are a global matter (Benade, & Jackson, 2018). This century has witnessed the ‘learning turn’, placing increasing emphasis on ‘the learner’ and correspondingly decreasing emphasis on learning knowledge, emphasising instead learning skills and dispositions. As participants in this symposium suggest, these trends, particularly when coupled with the challenges of working collaboratively in teams in large shared spaces, pose significant risks to teachers. Not only is their traditional sense of professional purpose under threat, but so too is their traditional understanding of the nature and place of their work. Change, however, is always difficult—and getting on with ‘business as usual’, albeit in new, but ‘traditional’ spaces, is not without risk either.        

The presenters all draw on their fieldwork experience with schools and institutions that have engaged with the challenge of re-imagining their place and purpose. They reveal, through their research, how transformative change is advanced as a way of preparing the next generations so as to mitigate the ‘risk’ posed by the challenges of the current century, how state policy assesses and addresses the tension between the old and the new, revealing fissures and highlighting policy pitfalls, and how the design of pedagogy and the spaces of learning at the local level interprets these macro issues. The presenters are qualitative and mixed methods researchers, whose work with schools, universities and individual participants is informed by spatial theory, critical policy critique and organisational theory. They report on case studies involving either single or multiple sites, where they have collected data using a range of tools, including observation, interview, survey, photographic elicitation and documentary analysis. The proposed symposium on the ways the development of flexible learning spaces in education reflects the theme of ‘education in an era of risk’ will be of interest to researchers interested in qualitative methodology, critical application of theory to findings, the emergence and development of ‘twenty-first century teaching and learning’, and dispositional curriculum. 

Benade, L. (2018, November). Consultation and participation in the (re)design of school learning spaces. Paper presented to the annual conference of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE), Auckland, New Zealand. Benade, L. & Jackson, M. (2018). Transforming education: Design and governance in global contexts. Singapore: Springer Education & Skills Funding Agency. (2014). Baseline designs: Guidance. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/baseline-designs-for-schools-guidance/baseline-designs-for-schools-guidance on 25 Jan 2019. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2013). Innovative Learning Environments. Paris, France: Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing. Retrieved 25 Jan 2019 from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264203488-en TKI (Te Kete Ipurangi). (nd). Guide to ILEs. Retrieved 25 Jan 2019 from https://www.inclusive.tki.org.nz/guides/planning-innovative-learning-environments-iles/#work-with-parents-and-whanau#work-with-parents-and-whanau Woolner, P.; McCarter, S.; Wall, K. & Higgins, S. (2012). Changed learning through changed space: When can a participatory approach to the learning environment challenge preconceptions and alter practice? Improving Schools 15(1), 45-60.