Voices of experience: designing spaces for learning Raylee Elliott Burns Queensland University of Technology Council of Education Facility Planners International Conference - Melbourne Radical 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-campus independent 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 designChristopher Day Patterns & PrinciplesChristopher Alexander Prakesh Nair Randall Fielding Jeff 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 its 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 way working 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 stance culture, society, education & governance Critical ethnographic approach interviews, observations, published texts Critical discourse analysis who speaks, by what authority, what is spoken about & how

The ways things are done around here The ways things are done The ways things are 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).