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Is it a café? Is it lawn with lake? Is it lecture room, professor’s office, virtual architecture of computer phone and web cam, corridor …? No – they’re all spaces on, or connected with, university lands. These lands, as empty spaces, exist irrespective of users. Once the spaces are used, they become ‘landscape’, ‘the projection of human consciousness, the way the land is perceived and responded to’...
The premise of this chapter is that space (and place: which I define here as what people make of the space they inhabit) is an under-acknowledged independent variable in understanding how higher education institutions work. Space in the university takes the form it does as a result of the decisions and actions of its designers, its users, those who manage it in various ways, and those who look after...
When learning space is a scarce resource, there can be a temptation for conversations about space to become increasingly dominated by spreadsheet generated data – sqm/student, sqm/staff, sqm/income, cost/sqm, % utilisation, and so on. It sometimes seems that the more we focus on this kind of data, the more insurmountable the problem of ‘not enough space’ becomes. But, how much space is ‘enough space’?...
Societies – and this applies as much to societies in our own time as in the past – need public spaces for learning and many other purposes. Such spaces are, of course, a cultural construct, reflecting the characteristics and preoccupations of the communities of which they are part. Public spaces play three key roles: first, they are spaces of opportunity, for provision of public good; second, they...
The idea of learning space has many attractions, but it holds traps for the unwary. The idea is at once educationally expansive, potentially emancipatory and even subversive. It opens up the hope of students becoming authors of their own learning in spaces that they claim as their own. But the idea of learning space, as it is being taken up, deserves to carry warning signs. There are invisibilities...
This chapter begins with a glance in the rear view mirror, reflecting on the outcomes and more speculative ideas that emerged from the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD) between 2005 and 2010. Structured in two parts, the first section will recount the ideas that underpinned the CETLD’s formation and informed its aspirations, focusing on design education and learning...
The following essays contain some reflections on my involvement with the EQUAL initiative1, funded through the European Social Fund, which aimed to foster social innovation. As a way to support the spread of social innovation across projects, EQUAL started a number of communities of practice and organised events for participants to learn together. This capability to organise learning across a complex...
Educational discourse is saturated with descriptors of space. We know all too well the spatial notions of top and bottom grades, of ‘under’ graduate, ‘foundation’ level, and ‘higher’ education. We assess in different fields and have learned about the ‘spiral’ curriculum’, ‘scaffolded’ learning and ‘zones’ of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1962). There is ‘open’ learning and ‘distance’ learning, ‘threshold’...
This ethnographic case study investigates staff and student experiences of undergraduate teaching and learning in three new, specially designed spaces at two UK universities. On a small scale, it explores the themes, and applies some of the methodologies of research and data analysis, set out in Chapter 2.The findings highlight some valuable points for further study and consideration in this field...
I have been teaching in higher education for over 20 years and during that time I have always undertaken research, to a greater or lesser extent. Like many people I really began with a Masters, then a PhD and progressed to writing a few papers. In all the institutions where I have worked, research was recognised as a component of my activities as an academic, yet there was little if any guidance on...
From the emergence of modern educational institutions in the wake of the 18th century western Enlightenment, until the early 21st century, the spaces of learning appeared to have attained an ideal type-form. Within this institutional tradition, learning takes place in rooms that provide a stable, neutral environment; free from external distraction. Teacher and class face each other, the teacher backed...
In this chapter we argue that evaluating learning spaces is a valuable activity that can generate operational insights into how physical space affects learning, and can thus feed into processes of learning space design. The broader context is a desire to improve learning by designing better spaces within post-compulsory education.
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