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CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Building ‘educational visions’: some considerations
3. Alternative educational visions: What if…?
4. Future scenarios: What if we made the technology do what we wanted?
5. Time for a wider debate?
6. Other useful resources
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
At the present time we are witnessing a massive investment in the design and build of new schools to equip the UK education system for the 21st century. The economically and architecturally ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is setting out to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over the next 10 to 15 years. But how much of this effort has been inspired by an equally wide-reaching educational vision? Already, evidence from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) is suggesting that the design quality of recently built schools is not good enough to achieve the Government’s aim of transforming children’s education1. If the design quality is insufficient – what is the quality of the educational strategy underpinning that design?
The design of these schools will shape the ways in which we think about, experience and conduct education in this country for the next 50 to 100 years. The educational visions upon which they are built will be solidified in bricks and mortar, the learning relationships they envisage will be captured in concrete and glass. The institutions created now will physically encapsulate and
determine the ideas it is possible to have about education, learning and learning
relationships until the dawn of the next century.
That is a long time to spend working in institutions that do not engage with the educational challenges of the 21st century and which do not exploit the resources that it has to offer.
This paper is not concerned with questions of ‘design quality’, nor with the funding mechanisms enabling the build of new schools. Instead, our aim is to ask the following questions:
- What are the educational visions and debates needed to underpin the design of new educational institutions?
- What are the digital resources which may reshape the practice of learning in the 21st century?
- What alternative visions could be conceived for the ‘schools of the future’?
Our aim is to ensure equal attention is paid to the educational visions underpinning new school designs as it is to questions over the abilities and costs of architects and builders. Without this educational debate, the new schools currently in development are likely to become straightjackets for educators and learners, rather than sites to support, encourage and develop learning in all its guises over the next 100 years.
This paper arises from a two-day workshop bringing together individuals from a range of design, teaching, mentoring, policy and research backgrounds. The workshop aimed to ‘re-imagine’ learning spaces, and actively encouraged the development of ‘what if’ scenarios that push the boundaries of current thinking and encourage debate of the relationship between educational goals and the
design and resourcing of spaces for learning. These scenarios are presented in the paper, not as recommendations, but as a stimulus for discussion.
The images in this publication [see pdf version] are included to prompt debate and discussion rather than to act as simple ‘illustrations’ of the text. They were generated by young artists as creative responses to the scenarios presented in the document. Translated into image, these ‘future visions’ of educational spaces are at times challenging and distopian, at others delightful and engaging. They all, however, serve the purpose of questioning our assumptions about what constitutes a ‘learning space’.
2. BUILDING ‘EDUCATIONAL VISIONS’: SOME CONSIDERATIONS
“Instead of starting from the physical, you need to start with the program you know you need to have. Then you can see how your existing structure won’t let you do that. And then you do the work of making physical changes.” (Dr Betty Despenza-Green, Director, National High School Initiative2)
‘Building schools for the future’ is about building environments in which learning will happen in the future. It is first and foremost about education, not architecture. It’s about fostering learning relationships, not just combining bricks and mortar. If these spaces are going to work, we need to know what sort of educational interactions and practices we want to take place in them, and
to build from that vision to design the spaces, resources and environments to support them. For these reasons, we need what Torin Monahan calls the ‘built pedagogy’, the educational vision to underpin the design principles for the learning environment3.
Schools are already having to deal with huge uncertainties related to their viability and sustainability and will face a range of other significant demographic changes over the next few decades, including changing age profiles within local communities, fewer numbers of school age children, the transience and mobility of local communities, as well as a whole range of other economic and societal developments that are likely to impinge significantly on the types of skills and competencies required in the future. In order to respond to such uncertainty and serve the changing needs and diversity within local communities, new learning spaces cannot be rigid or ‘exclusive’ and need to consider how to build on and interconnect and integrate with informal and formal provision that already exists. Designing new learning spaces requires us to consider not only the purpose of schooling now, but far more importantly, the changes necessary for a better, more holistic education for learners in the future.
We need to start, then, by asking not ‘what buildings do we want?’ but instead ‘what sort of education do we want to see in future?’ We need to ask not ‘how many classrooms do we need?’ but ‘what sorts of learning relationships do we want to foster? What competencies do we want learners to develop? What tools and resources are available to us to support learning?’ Indeed, the OECD Schooling for Tomorrow4 group identified several dynamics that need to be taken into account when considering alternative models of learning and school systems. Immediate contextual dimensions, such as new partnerships with the community, wider cultural influences, as well as establishing clarity about critical learning factors, such as the role of the learner, the organisation and pedagogy, were all thought to be crucial.
Until we ask these questions, then, we will not be designing learning spaces for the future, but will simply be reproducing schools of the past, albeit with more comfortable seating and better ventilation.
This section of the paper is intended to raise some questions that we strongly feel should form the basis for any discussions about the educational visions for future learning spaces. Whilst we acknowledge that there are exemplary schools, consultants and local authorities which embed these sorts of questions in all their design discussions, our argument here is addressed to those to whom these sorts of issues are seen as marginal or irrelevant in the decision-making process for commissioning new school design.
1A recent report from CABE identified that “the design quality of secondary schools completed over the last five years is not good enough to secure the Government’s ambition to transform our children’s education… Too many of the mistakes of the past look like being repeated in the fi rst wave of schools being built under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme”. Over half of 52 schools audited in the last five years were assessed as ‘poor’ or ‘mediocre’.
CABE (2006). Assessing Secondary School Design Quality. www.cabe.org.uk/AssetLibrary/8704.pdf
2Despenza-Green, B. Director, National High School Initiative at the Small Schools Workshop based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, quoted in ‘Innovative School Design for Small Learning Communities’. www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/208
3Whilst this is an exceptionally useful concept to use to think about how to design new learning focused spaces, it must also be remembered that the underlying philosophy behind the term ‘pedagogy’ implies a particular set of relationships and ways of learning, which not all learning spaces need necessarily be designed around. Monahan, T (2002). Flexible space and built pedagogy: emerging IT embodiments. Inventio, vol 4, no 1. www.doit.gmu.edu/inventio/past/display_past.asp?pID=spring02&sID=monahan
4See: www.oecd.org/topic/0,2686,en_2649_34859774_1_1_1_1_37455,00.html
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