Breaking the box: ‘school-lessness’ and modern

school designAssociate Professor Craig Deed

School of Education

College of Arts, Social Science and Commerce

La Trobe University

Background

• Research interests:• Affordances of open plan flexible space

• Collective intelligence

• ARC Grant – Improving Regional Students Learning 2012-14

• 3,000 students and 150 teaching staff across new four open plan secondary schools

The problem (1)

Need for responsive matching of contemporary teaching and learning approaches andeducation and employment opportunities

Me in the math classroom. Fred, age 17

The problem (2)

Learner perceptions of strategies they encounter the least in the classroom:• Authenticity• Relevance• Individualisation• Shared control• Consultation My teacher and me. Jack, age 6

The weight of memory

School as institution – routines, rules, conventions

+ Individual and shared memory of school

+ Community memory and expectations

+ Teaching as storied, custodial, situated, embodied work

= A system designed to withstand innovation

= Transitional/hybrid/graduated state

Traditional views of classroom design:• Enclosed• One educator in control of

his/her classroom• Fixed desks facing the front• Whiteboard at the front• Knowledge transmission• Isolated disciplines• Controlled agency• Certainty• Routine• Invisibility

One response

Intentional, successful and quality learning interactions between the educator, the learner, and the context

Workin’. Ted, age 17

School-lessness

Compared with a traditional school … open spaces [seem] vast, empty and industrial. The physical absence of what was understood to be school [provides] a sense of school-lessness: dislocation and anxiety about how to achieve the purposes of a teacher’s institutionally placed work.

Deed, C., & Lesko, T. (2015). 'Unwalling' the classroom: Teacher reaction and adaptation. Learning Environments Research. doi: 10.1007/s10984-015-9181-6

School-lessness concepts

• Unconventional or irregular space

• Democracy

• Openness

• Agency

• Communities/neighbourhoods

• Interdisciplinary and social collaboration approaches

• Visibility

• Flexibility

Unwalling. Matta-Clark, 1970s

School-lessness as mindset (questions, prompts, anchors)• Different thinking and action

• Flexible time/space

• Energy/routine

• Individual/Community

• Control/freedom

• Fluidity/structure

• Risk/possibility

• Visibility/invisibility

Implications for contemporary school design must:

• Account for the complexity of modern classrooms

• Account for educator and learner narratives of past, current and future classroom experience

• Avoid formulaic or deterministic forms/fallacies – must take account of context and educator/learner capacity

• Provide a language for addressing the duality of institutional convention and imaginative new responses

• Offer practical/functional insight/justification to shape/form

Implication one - Mutuality

Mutuality

• Space that affords shared control

• Flexible space that allows different combinations of educator/learner control

• Educator presence

• Mutuality• Learner, educator

and context

• Reflexive monitoring of intentions, actions and reactions

Implication two - Culture

• Afford community/neighbourhood space

• Interdisciplinary

• Local work/activity

• Local material/shape

• Sense of democracy – educator and student space/time

• Culture• Networked

• Co-responsibility for learning

• Learning community

• Visibility

Implication three – space as disruptive/generative

• Afford authentic experience

• Project/inquiry learning

• Openness to outside

• Flexible use of furniture

• Movement inside/outside

• Writable surfaces

• Space as disruptive/generative• Entrepreneurial

• Imaginative

• Unexpected

• Virtual

• Unwalling

• Outside

• Visible

Implication four – personal space

• Afford individualisation

• Informal/irregular space

• Meditative/thinking

• Safety/comfort/belonging

• Educator space?

• Personal space• Individual as thinker

• Personal capacity

• One’s own preferences and approach

Implication five – (re)occupying tradition

• Afford relevance

• Space/noise/light/control

• Language/tools/values

• Architectural/educational anchors, prompts and questions

• Re(occupying) tradition• Language

• Routine

• Values

How to make these implications generative

• Promote innovation as a means of increasing the functionality of school (i.e. learning success)

• Must have stable senior staff involved in design and habitation, with a philosophy that supports flexibility and experimentation

• Accept that you are designing for agility rather than stability (in terms of ecosystem that is created)

• Must combine functionality with global concepts (otherwise it is just a local oddity)

• Explicit support for real-time entrepreneurial learning and adaptation

Acknowledgements

• ARC Linkage Grant funding

• Professor Tom Lesko, College of Architecture, Design and Construction Management, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, USA

• Professor Vaughan Prain, School of Education, La Trobe University

• Marist College, Bendigo

• Bill Conroy, photographer