Session Information
05 SES 03 A, Democracy, Citizenship, Safety and Voice
Paper Session
Contribution
New schools around the world are being built in vertical form to cope with growing populations and limited land in urban contexts. Verticality means rethinking how students move between floors to avoid crowding, find connections to light and fresh air and green spaces. Verticality brings pedagogical and physical design challenges in effectively catering for diverse learners in constrained spaces and opportunities for innovation. While urban vertical schools are not new in USA, UK, and European urban environments, they are in Australia (Swinburn 2017; Taylor & Wright 2020). There exists little research about them especially in relation to students’ wellbeing (Carroli et al 2022).
Students should be central to urban school design processes given that schools are created for them, with schools’ core business being student learning and student outcomes. Student voice is an opportunity to inform school design and empower students through inviting them to identify and examine important issues relevant to their school experience and taking these views seriously. Therefore, student voice “connect(s) the sound of students speaking not only with those students experiencing meaningful, acknowledged presence, but also with their having the power to influence analyses of, decisions about, and practices in schools” (Cook-Sather 2006:363).
Each students’ experience of school spaces is unique, so adults must find a range of inclusive ways to listen to diverse student voices and ensure students feel supported expressing their perspectives in ways comfortable and meaningful to them.
This project positions ‘voice’ in three ways; voice as process, voice as atmosphere, and voice as impact. Together, voice is positioned as a multivocal engagement through:
- Seeking and eliciting views and perspectives, a methodological decision and action [Process]
- Enabling students to communicate their point of view/layers of meaning more fully through student produced creative works (e.g., narration/voice-over, text on screen, camera work, editing choices) [Atmosphere]
- Positioning voice as something with value, extending beyond a process, and committing to “voice that matters” (Couldry 2010:3). To matter, voice needs to be taken seriously and acted upon (Lundy 2007) [Impact].
Student evaluations of school learning spaces are valued in school design research as assumptions about design, construction, and use of school spaces can be challenged. However, the diversity of student voices are not often represented, with student voice usually reported in one register. For example, it is well established that children and young people consistently prefer connections to nature and fresh air, and express frustrations with crowded and stuffy classrooms (Dudzinski, 2019; Taylor & Wright 2020). Choices about where and how to collaborate, opportunities for movement, integrated technology and elements of fun are student preferences being incorporated into many new school buildings (Truong et al 2018). Rarely are student voices acted on, or represented as diverse perspectives.
There are three interrelated objectives of this study.
(1) Understand and capture diverse student experiences of school spaces through the lens of enablers or constraints for student thriving in urban vertical contexts. Franz’ salutogenic design framework (Franz 2019) offers a ‘sense of coherence’ for understanding built environments in terms of their manageability, meaningfulness, and comprehensibility. The framework provides a way for young people to communicate diverse experiences of urban vertical spaces in the language of ‘thriving’/‘not thriving’.
(2) Address the disconnect between seeking voice [Process] and doing something meaningful with the perspectives shared [Impact]. The Lundy Participation Model (2007) informed project design decisions ensuring student voice is heard by appropriate audiences, such as architects, builders, and educational decision-makers, and acted upon to influence decisions.
(3) Enable students to tell their stories of their school spaces through multiple creative methods in ways that encouraged depth and breadth of student voice [Atmosphere].
Method
This paper combines Franz’ salutogenic framework with the multivocal positioning of voice and articulates how the use of multiple modalities enabled deeper exploration of diverse student perspectives of their urban vertical school experiences. The Thriving in Urban Vertical Schools project is a three year (ongoing) mixed-methods project funded by an Australian Government Linkage grant that seeks to understand the impacts of high-density urban schooling on student capability and wellbeing, and how these school spaces are experienced by diverse student cohorts. Occurring in three schools across three different educational jurisdictions, this project involves university researchers in five disciplines (education, architecture, design, IT, and community engaged research), high school students, educators, school designers, builders, architects, as partners and collaborators. This paper focuses on the findings from the first year of the study. The student data collection process included students first participating in an online survey before engaging in a one-day data collection workshop. The workshop involved brainstorming sessions, student analysis of qualitative student survey responses, photo elicitation, drawings and annotations, sound experiments, construction experiments and storyboarding. Following this, students engaged in weekly lessons that were teacher /researcher co-designed and embedded in the curriculum. This timetabled class supported student’s deeper exploration and engagement with thriving in physical, social, and digital environments, and developing video productions with guidance from industry experts. These activities culminated in the production of student digital narratives that were screened and discussed during student-partner reflective conversations with school leaders, project collaborators, and students. Viewing student produced digital narratives, still images and drawings, decision makers can glean an embodied perspective of student experience of school spaces. Alongside these student-centred activities, interviews were conducted with teachers and adult partner collaborators, as well as a post-occupancy evaluation and observational walkthrough. Two student focus groups concluded the data collection where students provided interpretive commentary on early themes. Alongside these student-centred activities, interviews were conducted with teachers and adult partner collaborators, as well as a post-occupancy evaluation and observational walkthrough. The choice and sequencing of the qualitative methods enabled depth and breadth in the exploration of student experiences over time, while the intersections between them led to the stories about students’ lived experiences of the school spaces to be told in different ways.
Expected Outcomes
The inclusive and intentionally sequenced choice of methods allowed the researchers to identify deeper and layered insights that would not have been possible with isolated methods or at single timepoints. Students shared complementary and divergent aspects of their experiences that brought to the surface the sometimes conflicting ways that different school spaces either (1) enabled, (2) constrained, or (3) both enabled and constrained their capabilities. Commonalities and divergent experiences were reiterated through the different communicative mediums chosen. For example, data from the first workshop showed that the sensory experience was one of the things that was important to young people as they navigated their daily school lives. The different methods used in the workshop provided visual, verbal, and auditory depictions of diverse student perspectives of interior and exterior school spaces that they associated with an enabling and/or constraining sensory experience. The student created video narratives captured the atmosphere and immersive/experiential look and feel of their high school spaces that were not necessarily expressed through written, drawn, or spoken word alone. The creative work of the digital narratives enabled students to share experimental stories through their use of images, text, and sound. Student focus groups allowed the research team to dive deeper into student explanations for some of the tensions or emerging dominant themes and for the students to engage with one another in conversation and debate. The combination of creative and visual qualitative methods extended the voice opportunities for children and young people and challenged the research team to extend their theoretical concepts in response to more nuanced insights into diverse student experiences of thriving in urban vertical schools with implications for broader schooling. These multivocal findings also provided decision makers opportunities to act on student voice and to create change through rethinking design, consultation, and building school spaces differently.
References
Carroli, L., Willis, J., Franz, J., et al. (2022). What conversations are evident in research and commentary about Vertical Schools? A discussion paper. Queensland University of Technology. https://research.qut.edu.au/tvs/wp-content/uploads/sites/387/2022/12/TVS-Final-Discussion-Paper-November-2022_published.pdf Cook-Sather, A. (2006) Sound, Presence, and Power: “Student Voice” in Educational Research and Reform, Curriculum Inquiry, 36(4), 359 – 390. Cook-Sather, A. (2009) Translation: An Alternative Framework for Conceptualizing and Supporting School Reform Efforts. Educational Theory, 59(2), 217–231. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2009.00315.x Couldry, N. (2010) Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism. SAGE Publications. Dudzinski, A. (2019). Human scale in architecture of schools located in dense urban fabric. In Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (Vol. 788). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319- 94199-8_36 Franz, J. (2019). Towards a spatiality of wellbeing. In Franz, J, Hughes, H, & Willis, J (Eds.) School spaces for student wellbeing and learning: Insights from research and practice. Springer, Singapore, pp. 3-19. Lundy, L. (2007). ). ‘Voice’ is not enough: conceptualizing Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33, 927-942. Taylor, H., & Wright, S. (2020). Urban Schools: Designing for high density (H. Taylor & S. Wright, Eds.). London: RIBA. Truong, S., Singh, M., Reid, C., Gray, T., & Ward, K. (2018). Vertical schooling and learning transformations in curriculum research: points and counterpoints in outdoor education and sustainability. Curriculum Perspectives, 38(2), 181–186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-018-0053-y Swinburn, A. (2017). Vertical School Design: Strategising the spatial configuration of a multi-storey typology to facilitate education in dense city environments. Retrieved from https://www.architects.nsw.gov.au/download/Vertical School Design_AdamSwinburn.pdf%0A
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