On the design of school spaces and their uses…
Posts and Interviews about Educational Theory, Pedagogy and how they relate to school design and architecture
Transitions: Inhabiting Innovative Learning Environments – Graduate research symposia.
While the provision of innovative learning environments in many countries around the world is an exciting and overdue development, they are also presenting new challenges for teachers.
Continue reading “Transitions: Inhabiting Innovative Learning Environments”
A list – to be updated – of school museums (that is, museums of school life or buildings) in Europe and a few beyond.
Below is a list of museums related to school and school life. I’m happy to add to it or make corrections if you have suggestions – just use the Comments form, below. Thanks. Continue reading “A List of Museums of School, School Life and Education”
The old village primary school (1930-2000) in Nerokourou (Crete) is now the Museum of School Life (Μουσείο Σχολικής Ζωής) and striking for its reminders of the physicality of education and material technologies of teaching and learning.
The old primary school in the village of Nerokourou, just outside of Chania, Crete, was open to students between 1930 and 2000. When the new and much larger primary opened, 100 metres up the hill, Headteacher Dimitris Kartsakis and his wife Maria Drakaki wanted to keep the original school as an educational tool in its own right. With teaching materials, school bags and tunics from the 1940s and 50s, curricula, registers with students’ marks, maps, restored desks and seating, clippers for cutting the hair of children with lice, the Museum of School Life opened in 2006. Continue reading “The Museum of School Life, Nerokourou, Crete”
As a collaborative* doctoral research student in the field of architecture and education, I’m often asked to explain what my research is about. I’m always surprised by how much my answer changes according to who I’m talking to, when and where we’re talking and how I’m feeling about what I’m reading and writing at the time. Far from having a polished elevator pitch, my thoughts about what I’m up to change and develop week by week.
As I’m currently contemplating the writing of my final thesis, I thought I might try and compress my research into a short description here for this blog, offering it in a spirit of exploration and curiosity (mine, as much as yours, I suspect).
I’m interested in where children learn in schools. There hasn’t been much academic or professional research in the field of education about that, although there are some notable exceptions**. Continue reading “An educational paradox: where beginner readers learn in school”
In 1811, Joseph Lancaster publishes his Hints and Directions for Building, Fitting Up, and Arranging School Rooms, one of the key triggers for the idea of a modern school building and a legacy-leaving document that affects how we think of schools today and perhaps even the fact that we can think of schools today. Just four years later in the Paris of 1815, Charles de Lasteyrie writes this Continue reading “When School Architecture Meant System Architecture”
Gert Biesta on school architecture and democracy, and learnification – a reductive reappraisal of education as learning.
Gert Biesta’s work recalls our attention to the purpose of education – before asking whether something “works” educationally, he’s interested in what we mean by education, what is it for, who is it for? He’s a Professor at Brunel University in London and at the ArtEZ Institute of Arts in the Netherlands and a member of the Steering Committee for the Design Matters project. After giving a talk to research students in the Faculty of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, he kindly agreed to answer a few questions on how we talk and think about school buildings.
The full transcript’s below or there’s an easier-to-print pdf here. In summary though, we discussed the changing vocabulary whereby classrooms become learning spaces and how this relates to what he wryly terms “learnification”. Continue reading “What are schools for? An interview with Gert Biesta on the learnification of school buildings and education.”
