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How to pick the right learning environment - 01/04/2010
Education, I think the older ones amongst us will agree, has changed a lot over the years! It used to be about kids sitting in rows in front of the teacher and all learning the same thing at the same time sitting on hard wooden chairs with square wooden desks. Nowadays, a lot more thought goes into the “learning environment” and how spaces are used and set out. This impacts all of us involved in the building/refurbishment of schools. This will become increasingly challenging as funding becomes tighter and the percentage of refurbishments increase.
At early project design phases, schools are asked to provide direction for designers to establish the framework or “design brief” for the design process. Not surprisingly, staff and pupils are rarely equipped with the necessary experience to respond to the technical, spatial and organising queries which are asked of them - it simply is not part of their everyday experience.
With no existing facility in the UK enabling teachers, pupils and the community at large to experiment with new spaces to develop best practice in learning environments, the charitable trust, Education for All (“EfA”), is setting out to create a national learning research space in a warehouse space here in Corby. To this end, EfA is looking to assemble a collection of organisations and individuals who feel they can contribute to the transformation of a basic building shell into “a facility for the research of good learning practices - designing with the client rather than for the client”.
The initial phase of the project is being undertaken with a local secondary school, Lodge Park in Corby, working with the head teacher to develop a pupil-focussed research environment and supported by funding from Partnerships for Schools as part of its Space 4 Personalised Learning (“S4PL”) programme.
In future phases, beyond year one, other schools from Northamptonshire County Council and other Local Authorities are signing up to take part in the project. The flexibility of the space will ensure that while previous user’s best practices are available as exemplar practices, each user group will be able to experiment to suit their own particular circumstances and learn from their own trial and
error processes.
The Project Strategy Team is looking to develop the site as a centre for research, partnering with education research establishments to record and measure the experiences of users and to share this information across the UK and with international partners with similar education interests.
It is not intended that internal spaces will be bounded in permanent configurations but, rather, provide an open invitation for pupils and staff to play with space.
A simple idea which should help schools to establish what type of learning environment would suit them best before they commit their budget to something that may not work.