This symposium considers recent experiences in schools in three countries relating to the effect of the physical learning space on pedagogical practices and the influence of learning models on learning spaces design.  Our recognition of this area as fundamentally interdisciplinary is reflected in the authors background including educationalists, sociologists and architects.  Although existing research leads us to reject physical determinism, it is proposed that the physical environment has a part to play in supporting or encouraging particular educational practices.  Investigating differences between practices in differing settings and examining any changes in practices associated with changes at the physical level will enable us to understand better the relationship of environment and pedagogy.  This  includes considering how changes in physical learning spaces are influenced by the decisions of educational policy and desired pedagogical models. The symposium aims  to inform how desired or proposed changes in practices can be encouraged through attending to the physical setting, but also reveal any limiting factors that reduce the likelihood of change.

Background

School spaces reveal a complex relationship between practices and settings.  For example, although there is evidence of links between teaching methods and classroom arrangement (Horne Martin,  2002), it is unclear how much teachers arrange their rooms according to their own pedagogy and how much the nature of the space, informed by educational policy and learning models, influences their practices.  The historic experience of open plan classrooms in the US and UK was that physical environments could be changed quite dramatically, following policy direction, without much resulting change in pedagogical practices (Bennett et al., 1980).

Yet in some schools (Uline et al., 2009), or for some teachers (McCarter & Woolner, 2011), innovation across setting and activities are mutually reinforcing, with changes to the physical setting facilitating other changes or supporting reflection on values, intentions and priorities.  If schools are to benefit from such virtuous cycles, policy and practice must be informed by better understanding of how settings influence teachers’ practices, how policy and pedagogical models influence learning spaces design and how linked changes to environments and practices may be enacted.

This research

These papers investigate these questions in three different European education systems, united by concern with

• understanding what happens in practice in schools
• relating education policy to pedagogical practices and learning spaces design
• using the perspectives of teachers and students, architects and educationalists, to interpret events. 

Our broadly pragmatist approach, which makes appropriate the mixing of research methods (Denscombe, 2008), fits our conception of the educational world as interactions between physical entities and understandings, where ‘knowledge manifests itself first of all in the way in which organisms transact with and respond to changes in their environment’ (Biesta & Burbules, 2003: 11).  

We use Moos’ (1979: 161) model of classroom climate to locate the papers in relation to each other and as a basis for considering the potential for successful innovation through chains of events and positive cycles of change.

The approach is framed by the political decisions on education and the pedagogical models adopted.