This paper responds to Network 20’s call for studies examining ‘innovative methodologies that embrace materiality, relationality and spatial affordances’ across diverse educational environments. Traditionally, the design of educational spaces has focused on a range of largely physical components, such as the type and flexibility of furniture, or the availability and use of digital technologies (Damşa et al., 2019; Woolner, 2010). International research on the design of learning environments has examined ‘optimal’ and ‘innovative’ layouts, their alignment with pedagogy, and their impact in terms of learning outcomes, cognitive gains, and the development of particular skills and literacies (Imms et al., 2023; Barrett et al., 2015; van Merrienboer, 2017; Sasson et al., 2022). Arguably, this approach to research and design partly reflects traditional instrumentalist approaches in education, where a focus on ‘what works’ drives policy and practice towards the primary goal of preparing students to be successful contributors to a future workforce (Biesta, 2022). However, these dominant discourses can serve to overshadow the embodied, diverse, and relational ways in which students experience and make sense of their educational spaces (Colombetti, 2014).

This study actively engages with this tension in the conceptual underpinnings of learning space design, through an exploration of methodologies foregrounding the sensing body in the emergence of educational spaces as relational ecologies (Rousell, 2021). A relational lens is important to consider, as the design of educational spaces in the western world continues to reflect dominant monocultural visions that bely the increasingly diverse nature of student cohorts, impacting negatively on young people’s sense of belonging (Brillante & Mankiw, 2015; Calabrese-Barton & Tan, 2020). The role of the body in relation to educational spaces and spatial affordances – technological, digital, material – remains somewhat nebulous (Author 1 et al., 2025), despite expanding literature in the field of embodied education (Kersting et al., 2021). Ultimately, the sidelining of the embodied and the relational in the design of educational spaces narrows opportunities for meaningful participation, by limiting the range of ways that students can understand, explore, and communicate different concepts and connect to their environment. Indeed, students rarely have a say in how their educational spaces are designed and (re)configured (Author 1 et al., 2023), with the result that these spaces are often disconnected from lived experience in place (Author 2 et al., 2025). 

As part of an interdisciplinary research project focusing on the role of the senses in science and sustainability education, we collaborated with 18 students and two teachers in a secondary school in the UK over the course of a school year. Drawing on theories of embodiment, multimodality, and sensory ethnography (Kersting et al., 2021; Pink, 2015), a variety of spaces in the school – a ‘standard’ classroom, science classroom, and garden space in the grounds – were re-configured and re-imagined through a priming of sensory exploration. Sessions involved students actively engaging with the materiality of the space (investigating the textures and scent of plants), exploring textures on digital devices with heightened sensory feedback (haptic touch technologies), and experimenting with arts-based approaches (soil painting), with the aim of deepening inquiries and surfacing questions about what it means to participate meaningfully in relation with humans and more than human others in an educational space. Guiding the study was an appreciation that ‘designing’ educational spaces may involve physical alterations but also an acute awareness of how we move, interact, sense, inhabit, and make sense of the space, through and with our bodies. To explore what different encounters and questions may arise through such a reimagining of space, we developed innovative methodologies which brought sensory and embodied experience to the fore. 

18 secondary school students aged 12-13 participated in the research with their two teachers. The school is situated in an urban area of Edinburgh, UK, with a highly diverse student population (over 40 languages spoken) and a catchment area which includes some of the most socio-economically deprived areas of the country, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD 1-3). Two key questions framed the study: 1. To what extent do sensorial and embodied experiences encourage students’ inquiry into the nature of their educational spaces? 2. In what ways does designing for a diversity of sensorial affordances support meaningful participation across diverse student groups? Across 10 interactive sessions, taking place during science and ‘life skills’ subjects, students were invited to take on the role of co-researchers of their educational spaces through a range of modalities. In the sessions, students explored the garden area in their school grounds – a space not readily accessible to the wider student population – and identified something they found interesting or notable, through which researchers could observe to what extent sensorial inquiry naturally occurred. From these initial observations, sensorial inquiry extended through the re-design of the classroom spaces, where students engaged with soil through a variety of mediums: soil textures were approached artistically for their ability to release pigments and minerals at the touch; whereas digital haptic touch technologies allowed students to ‘feel the untouchable’ by overlaying haptic and audio feedback on images from underneath the soil and the zoomed-in stomata of leaves. Additionally, students collected natural objects from the grounds to further explore in the classroom, developing and articulating lines of scientific inquiry through artistic representations including soil painting. Researchers took observation notes and held audio-recorded reflective conversations with students and teachers. Photographs and video recordings were taken to document interactions, artworks, and artefacts, and the ways in which the spaces changed physically and socially through the activities. A framework of embodied interaction and communication (Author 2 et al., 2024) drew attention to propensity to engage in sensorial inquiry, alongside a focus on richness of interaction, language, and gesture. Findings were curated through a qualitative sensory ethnographic approach (Pink, 2015), which places strong emphasis on multimodal methods and connections with space and place, thus resonating with the research focus on embodied and sensorial encounters.

Findings disclosed opportunities for prompting curiosity and inquiry through sensorial and embodied interaction, bringing students into closer connection with their surroundings. Sensory ethnography surfaced episodes where students encountered the materiality of the space, provoking questions about the different environments in the school. For example, exploration of natural and digital haptic leaves led to discussions about a lack of biodiversity in the school grounds. The haptic technologies, rather than aiming for fidelity across textures, acted as bridge between embodied experiences in the outdoors and science classroom, connecting to inquiries including the role of soil in water retention. Students discussed feeling ‘at home’ in the garden space, which they previously never visited, and encouraged teachers to take them out during lessons. Sensorial and embodied interactions offered a plurality of ways in which students could participate, from scientific observations through haptics to artistic interventions through soil paintings, culminating in a student-led exhibition. Attending to a diversity of ways of knowing and being saw the spaces emerge as relational ecologies (Rousell, 2021) where students came to inhabit the learning environment (Ingold, 2007). Furthermore, students began to raise questions of power and agency, querying who made decisions about design of and access to spaces. Teachers discussed how sensory explorations altered the feel of the space and impacted positively in slowing the ‘pace of learning’, while acknowledging that embodied approaches remain largely underexplored in formal education (Nathan, 2022). There also remain ongoing tensions in reimagining educational spaces, where students’ sensorial inquiries clashed with the highly structured nature of curriculum and traditional visions of school spaces. Nevertheless, recognition of these tensions served to highlight critical questions about the ‘feel’ of diverse learning environments – how can our educational spaces continue to sustain us, and reflect the world we wish to inhabit, in relation with others?

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