School buildings all over the world have countless designs, resulting from collaborations among experts in many different disciplines. The school building endures for many years as teachers and students come and go. Schools may also reside in buildings that were constructed for other purposes, and the physical learning environment may find its place in former museums, factories or offices. The school’s physical learning environment can seemingly take any shape anywhere. The aim of this study is to explore how physical learning environments emerge in teaching and learning practices within schools built with different standardised design concepts.  

With decentralised governance for school buildings in Norway, local governments are responsible for meeting the Education Act’s requirements for school buildings, which states, ‘Schools must be planned, built, arranged and run in such a way that consideration is given to the safety, health, well-being and learning of the students’ (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 1998).

Except for general regulations on the necessity of school libraries and universal design, the central educational authorities have established no regulations or guidelines regarding the purposes of how design and functionality are connected. Local governments must translate the Education Act into design considerations, leading to diversity in school design in Norway. Recent studies have indicated that teachers adapt to and are happy about the usefulness of the school design, independent of the school consisting of classrooms or open learning spaces (Elfmark, 2022; Frøyen, 2018). Research into school design has often focused on its possible effects on student performance, teaching and well-being. However, the relationship between design and practice is crucial to the production of a building that can be and is used effectively (Daniels et al., 2019). From the ANT perspective, I want to explore how people and things appear in heterogeneous relationships which contribute to the emergence of physical learning environments.

The following research questions guide this article:

RQ1: What relations emerge between the built environment, the teachers and other actors?

RQ2: How do the physical learning environments emerge in the relations between the built environment, the teachers and other actors?

The conceptual framework must consider that the actors in this study speak with neither movements nor human voices. As a member of the posthumanist family, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) blurs the distinction between humans and non-humans and sees actors as effects of relationships and networks in a world that is constantly changing (Callon, 2001; Law, 2009). Walls, furniture, students, books and teachers do not appear as constant categories with specific characteristics. In fact, März et al. (2017) wondered, “How can the artefact as actor speak with authority, demand changes in practice or effectively alter existing practices or routines or establish new ones?” (p. 443). ANT supposes that there is no clear distinction between social phenomena and material forces that assemble and reassemble (Fenwick, 2015), highlighting how people and things are simultaneously actors and networks. Thus, ANT is useful in exploring how material practices and arrangements are necessary to establish governing and action. The ANT approach is not about giving artefacts human status but rather investigating and understanding relations to what is not us (Asdal, 2011). This paper aims to explore how  the physical learning environments emerge in the interrelation between different building designs, teachers’ agency and other actors. I chose a comparative approach to investigate schools within a Norwegian educational context.

I selected one school each from Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim municipal local governments in Norway. The three sampled schools were all built based on local standardised architectural design briefs. To be selected, the school building must have been completed within the last 4 years and have replaced an old building or appeared as an appendix to an older school building. I assumed that these requirements indicate an increased focus on the physical learning environments among teachers. The scope of this paper is classrooms and adjacent spaces or equivalent spaces in schools with open and flexible spaces. I chose to narrow my scope to the schools’ Grades 3 and 4, as teaching and learning areas for Grades 5–10 draw more on specialist rooms like science labs and art rooms. I conducted observations and interviewed teachers and learning spaces. For the observations, I drew on the technique of behavioural mapping as explored and described by Sandra Horne Martin (Martin, 2002) . The observations also included documentation of the type, place and use of furniture in the spaces, use of walls for showing different kinds of material, and placement of windows and glazed walls. For the interviews, I drew on elements from post-occupancy evaluation and conducted semi-structured walk-through interviews with groups of teachers at the schools. I recorded the interviews and wrote field notes. In analysing the learning spaces, I drew on the interview of objects with the heuristics described in ‘Listening for the invitational quality of things’ (Adams & Thompson, 2016a, p. 40) as guiding principles. Every artefact can be seen as an actor network or assemblage itself, as it is connected to several networks that might not be obvious to every other actor. With object interviews, I seek to better understand how the learning spaces in relation with other actors ‘inform, but also deform, conform or transform practice’ (Adams & Thompson, 2016b, p. 89). Drawing on data from semi-structured group interviews and observations, including mapping of how teachers used their learning spaces, I seek to report on the interrelation between the teachers and the learning spaces to enable the voice of the physical environment.

An assumption is that different school designs provide different opportunities for teaching and learning activities. A second assumption is that the teachers consider different opportunities in the learning spaces and artefacts available based on their background, skills and competence. Using ANT as a lens in this article highlights how the physical learning environment is as much a product of social construction as of technical innovation and devices in the built environment. Expected outcomes are how the relations between the actors are central to the building’s translation process, turning the process into transitions rather than transferences. Policy, physical infrastructure, technology availability, user-friendliness, economic models, culture and competence are factors that influence the physical learning environment. ANT provides a framework for describing the process of how the physical learning environments emerge as a practice through networks and relationships. The empirical findings of this paper may contribute to (1) governance of school design, (2) school leadership for appreciation of the opportunities in the school design and (3) architects for school design. For a consistent and meaningful policy for the design of physical learning environments, there is a need for more knowledge about how these environments are used.

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