Voices of experience: designing spaces for learning Raylee Elliott Burns Queensland University of Technology Council of Education Facility Planners International.

Voices of experience: designing spaces for learning

Raylee Elliott BurnsQueensland University of Technology

Council of Education Facility Planners InternationalConference - Melbourne - 2008Radical learnings: abandonment and regeneration

‘Designing spaces for learning’

QUT Master of Education: study area core and elective

‘Designing the school library: spaces and places for learning’

Doctoral thesis

Impetus … cycles of ‘being’

puzzled … overwhelmed … enthused …galvanised …

Who and what is valued

here?

Impetus?

Designing experiences ….. uplift & parachute

Research project …. ‘Performing hybridity’

Questions …. problem-based approach

How are learners and learning, teachers and teaching understood?

Who exerts influence on the designing?

How are design participants influenced?

What is assumed and taken-for-granted?

How do design elements work to permit, prohibit, locate and order?

Where do educators have the opportunity to speak about learning space designing?

‘all occupations engaged in converting actual to preferred situations are concerned with designing’

Schon (1983,77)The Reflective Practitioner

QUT School of Cultural & Language Studies, Faculty of Education

Raylee Elliott Burns (Ph D candidate) Foundation Co-ordinator Master of Learning Innovation (TL)

Hilary Hughes (Ph D candidate):Current Co-ordinator Master of Education (TL),

Professor Kerry Mallan

Dr. Anne Russell

School of Design, Faculty of Built Environment & Engineering

Assoc Professor Jill Franz (Architect)

Acknowledging the encouragement of:Catherine Baudet: Ferrier-Baudet Architects

Children are undervalued in building terms. They deserve great buildings and great outdoor spaces. They deserve spaces that inspire and are safe and their carers and teachers deserve the same.

For example: if teachers are unable to carry out their programmes because of inadequate space and inflexibility of the space, then children are compromised. They are our greatest resource – we need to provide them with the best

(Baudet, 2001, unpaged)

‘Designing spaces for learning’

QUT Master of Education

Study area core in specific qualifications:•Teacher-Librarianship•Learning Futures•Public Education (from 2009) and elective in general program

•Knowledge Hubs•Cyberlearning•Designing spaces for learning•Information-learning nexus•Youth, popular culture and texts•Digital pedagogies•Teachers’ Work•Information Organisation•Leadership for Change

QUT Master of Education

If these are the learners that we imagine, that we hope for and actively seek to develop …

and these are the learning experiences we value in the process of developing such learners …

then what kinds of learning spaces might support such learners and learning?

how might we go about designing such spaces?

•Perceptions of learners in current theory and pedagogy

•Design theory in education contexts

•Pedagogy and learning space relationships

•Time-space and place: physical/geographic and digital/online

•Designing learning environments

Learning experiences online and on-campusindependent and collaborative engagement

•Research review

•Conceptual & visual representations

•Problem based approaches to designing criteria

•Document analysis

•Site visits & analysis

•Online forums with education & design practitioners

•Design project

Thinking about learning space designing?

‘vernacular’ ‘accredited’

magnifying the ‘voices of experience’

‘languages’ of designing: heuristic approaches

Alexander (1979); Heath (1989); Lawson (1997); Day (2003)

Heuristic approaches to designing:

VAST Tom Heath

Consensus design Christopher Day

‘Patterns & Principles’ Christopher Alexander

Prakesh NairRandall FieldingJeff Lackney

What is its individual spirit?

What values and spirit should things convey?

How do people feel about it? What qualities does this imply?

What is ebbing and flowing and changing?

How can these changes grow out of the developmental currents already at work?

What is it’s physical context?

What material changes does this require?

Day (2003) Consensus design: socially inclusive process. Oxford: Architectural Press.

VAST …people have values, in relation to

aspects/activities

of buildings [sites/systems] which must be

expressed in built form [technology]

Tom Heath 1989

V.A.S.T – design heuristic

Proposes that people have:

Values – feelings, attitudes, beliefs, customs, laws - in relation to system of human relationships

Activities – aspects system of human activity

Site/System – of buildings, system to support human activity

Technology – which must be expressed in built form production of built space system

(Heath, 1989) inspired by Zeisel, (1984) ‘Inquiry by design: tools for environment-behaviour research. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

focusing

imagining

venturing

backtracking

unfolding

feeling our wayworking our way gradually

unravelling complexity

Designing as a processes of discovery

Paper:

‘Voices of experience designing spaces for learning’

Doctoral thesis:

‘Designing the school library: spaces and places for learning’

Who and what is valued here?

Designing the ‘school library’: spaces and places for learning

investigates the potential for multiple voices of experience –educators, designers/architects, education facility planners and students – to influence the designing of school libraries as a spaces and places for learning.

Puzzles, and dilemmas … assumptions and

confrontations

•Rhetoric-reality gap: policies & facilities

•Inequalities of education facility provision

•System and process constraints

•Limiting conceptions of learning spaces

•Perpetuation & reproduction of limitations

Identify and magnify the ‘voices of experience’

Educators, designers/architects, education facility planners, students

Critical interpretative stanceculture, society, education & governance

Critical ethnographic approachinterviews, observations, published texts

Critical discourse analysiswho speaks, by what authority, what is spoken

about & how

The ways things are

The ways things are done

The ways things are done around here

‘habitualised ways, tied to particular times and places, in which people apply resources (material or symbolic) to act together in the world’ (Fairclough, 1999, 21; Fairclough 2001).

‘awareness of what is, how it has come to be, and what it might become [,] on the basis of which people may be able to make and remake their lives’ (Calhoun 1995; Fairclough 1999).