Transitions through remodelling teaching and learning environments

ABSTRACT

Over time, and influenced by various stakeholders, a global trend has emerged regarding learning environments, pedagogies and learning skills for the 21^st century. This article describes the transition of a secondary school building’s physical learning environments through two snapshots; one from when the school was built and the other 9 years later. When new schools are built, a contemporary design theme is for the learning spaces to be pedagogically and physically flexible enough to facilitate multimodal pedagogies that meet individual learners’ needs. Compared to traditional forms of education and school buildings, an innovative learning environment design is considered to correspond more closely to these aspects. The results show a mismatch between the architecture and the pedagogical practices, and how the architecture was adapted to the pedagogical practice. The planning, designing, implementing and consolidating of new schools based on unconventional ideas about teaching, such as open-plan design, interdisciplinary co-teaching, flexible use of the learning environment and the creation of dynamic organisations is a complex enterprise.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• flexibility
• physical learning environment
• school organisation
• teacher agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Grannäs

Jan Grannäs is associate professor at the Department of Educational Sciences at University of Gävle, Sweden. His field of research is learning environments, curriculum studies, democracy and education.

Siv Marit Stavem

Siv Stavem is a phd-candidate at the Department of Education, University of Oslo under an industrial PhD-scheme.  She is working for Norconsult as an education consultant with a special interest is in education policy and learning spaces.