A few years ago I had the opportunity to attend the LearnxDesign conference hosted at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the conference I presented a paper on a relatively recent project I had undertaken to better understand the needs of faculty with respect to some upcoming classroom renovations. Afterwards I was part of a team that edited a special issue of FORMakademisk about design in learning.

Seeing that my role once again is intersecting with the needs of faculty with respect to classroom and learning space design, it thought I would go back to that unpublished paper and pull forward a few basic principles of theory that were discussed at that conference, and also provide a quick summary of the results from the research project. These ideas will be presented in three parts, the first (this one) looks at some of the basics and background of learning space design, the second the results of our small study, and the third, a summary of some of the current work being done in this area with thoughts about the future.

For many reasons, including but not limited to proximity, function, tradition, and personal aesthetic preferences, learning space use and allocation is a concern shared by students, faculty, administration, and staff. The placement of amenities such as eating areas and comfort facilities, the re-appropriation of classroom, lab, office, or library space, and what constitutes the best designs for a modern classroom bring forward debate and passionate opinions. What this means is that we are invested in, and interested in how our physical environments are constructed, especially those that we spend a great deal of time using.  They matter to how we feel, how we teach, and how we learn. Though we could naïvely reduce the act of learning to happening only in the mind, learning and teaching is truly an embodied practice- one’s body and mind co-exist within a space and engage in forms of learning that go beyond cognition and are influenced by the affordances and restrictions present in the physical and psychological environment. Both students and teachers are influenced by the context that they find themselves in, which means that the design and allocation of learning spaces has a direct influence on teaching and learning.

The study of learning environments is not new, and others have written extensively about how people learn in a variety of spaces (see Oblinger, 2006). As a social psychologist I am particularly rooted in the work of Lewin (1936) who stated that behaviour is a function of the person and the environment (BfPE). Lewin’s field theories argued that the physical and psychological words are both dynamic, fluid, and flexible, and that our mind interacts with physical space to create behaviour (Shoda, 2004). Systems theories further this point and address the ways that humans are connected to their environments and the myriad reciprocal interactions between behaviour and the environment which foster or hinder learning (Millová & Blatný, 2015). Social constructivist theories (see Vygotsky, 1978) argue that knowledge is socially situated and developed in relationship with others. All three of these theories focus more on the student as a learner, not on the teacher as a transmitter of information.

When we look at many traditional North American universities built in the 1960s-1980s to respond to the influx of students enrolling in universities, the institutional architecture was developed with the anticipation of teacher-centred learning which reflected and reinforced the idea of teaching as a form of transmission. Subsequently, the accompanying media and seating systems are designed as to facilitate a passive approach to learning (Biggs, 1999; Jamieson, 2003). One only needs to cast their mind to a theatre-style university classroom with tiered, fixed seating facing the front, to see how the environment dictates the type of activity (lack of activity) that is preferred. Only the instructor faces forward, looking to students to transmit knowledge through speech, visual presentations, and body language. On the other hand, many modern active learning classrooms have started to direct us away from this approach and provide moveable seating, flat floors, and sometimes ‘pods’ or group table with a shared screen and the ability to connect computers or phones to project content on the screen. In between these spaces exist flat classrooms with fixed seating, large lecture halls with flexible seating, and myriad purpose-built and retro-fitted designs that suit the esoteric wants and needs of specific people and places. It is now the case that universities contain all of these spaces- built up over time as campuses evolved and shifted to meet changing demands.

These various architectures present not only a challenge to instructors, but to students, facilities planners, staff who allocate classroom and meeting space, and coordinators who determine class size and composition. If behaviour is a function of a person and the environment, and we are unconsciously influenced in our learning and teaching by the physical space we find ourselves in, then we have an almost infinite number of variables including both the person and the environment which are interplay in each one of our classroom spaces. How do we physically equip spaces when we don’t have full awareness of the people, or the anticipated behaviours we are creating for? What are the salient pieces of classroom architecture that contribute to a better learning experience? What opportunity do we have to think about the assumptions at play in order to negotiate this complicated learning-space interaction? How does the physical classroom influence teaching as well as learning?

These questions and others were part of the impetus for the study we conducted as we tried to determine what space was being used for, and then develop a renovation plan to create spaces that would best meet the needs of the anticipated future users.


References

Biggs, J. (1999). Constructive alignment in university teaching. HERDSA Review of Higher Education (1). 1-22.

Jamieson, P. (2003). Designing more effective on‐campus teaching and learning spaces: A role for academic developers. International Journal for Academic Development, 8(1/2), 119‐133. Oblinger, D. (2006). Learning Spaces. Louisville, CO: Educause.

Millová, K., & Blatný, M. (2015). Personality development: Systems theories. (pp. 879-883) Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.23035-3

Shoda, Y. (2004). Individual differences in social psychology: Understanding situations to understand people, understanding people to understand situations. The Sage handbook of methods in social psychology, 117-141.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. London: Harvard University Press.