Session Information
19 SES 06 A, Another Brick in the Wall? School Buildings Between Architectural Vision, Economic Space-Management and Educational Mission
Symposium
Contribution
Architecture has to design buildings which organise all the activities implicated in their dedication and which represent this dedication and its activities to its environment. In other words: A building defines, what people can do inside and if or how this can be transparently perceived from the outside. Accordingly a school-building cannot be seen as a mere container for pedagogical proceedings, and the learning and teaching that is spatially arranged by it will not be indifferent to its shape . But a school does not only fix the places where learners and teachers can stay or the traces (where) they can move, it also bears implicit messages and 'hidden information': A front-door can welcome or repel us, a silhouette can make us feel secure or frightened, a room can embrace us or give us the impression of “getting blown through a tube”, its paint can make us feel bright or gloomy, warm or cold, calm or turbulent.
Because of the complex meanings the spatial environment of learning and teaching might transport, it is deeply concerned with the topics of power, governance and structural domination. Determinations of possibilities of halts and locomotions as well as normative significant meanings shape a corridor for feeling, acting and thinking, for obeying, questioning and resisting. The seats in a classroom may be assembled in a way that invites us to communicate with our colleagues or that isolates us from them, the position of the teacher may be marked aesthetically as one of a powerful and undoutable authority or one of a consultant and cooperative learner, a school-building may – by spatial and symbolic means – produce an atmosphere of free and creative reasoning or of intellectual and mental narrowness.
Recently school architecture has become a serious matter of educational discussion. Following the 'spatial turn' in cultural sciences also the educational sciences have discovered the 'third educator', an expression designating the spatial ambience of living and learning, coined by the Italian pre-school educationalist Loris Malaguzzi ('Reggio-Pedagogy'). The current transformation of public education generates new teaching and learning habits and a modified utilisation of class-rooms and school-buildings. Also the entry of new media in school which facilitate new ways of communication and instruction brings about changing demands on the spatial dimension of learning environments. So the „masoned pedagogy“ of public schools has become a topic of extraordinary interest.
The symposium presents four case-studies about particular aspects and dimensions of school-architecture. Its contributions shed some light on the question in what way the spatial circumstances influence learning and teaching activities which they frame and are part of and why they are of fundamental importance: They account for the basic orientation and motivation of learners and teachers, they provide a part of the context in which all the learning and teaching activities are situated, they comment on what the intended or ongoing learning is about, what it is good for and why it should be carried out.
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