Webquests for class experience (i)

Do a Webquest about the learning environment

There is much more to space and place than meets the eye. Winston Churchill is reported to have observed that “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Elaborating on this theme, a practising architect remarks that architecture:

is a social practice and as much cannot avoid being part of a complex network of power relationships. The fact that it impacts upon the production of . . . the built environment clearly indicates the political implications of aesthetic control. Space is neither innocent nor neutral: it is an instrument of the political; it has a performative aspect for whoever inhabits it; it works on its occupants. At the micro level, space prohibits, decides what may occur, lays down the law, implies a certain order, commands and locates bodies. (Pouler, cited in Scheer and Preiser, 1994, p. 175) 221-222

A. VISUAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT:

Schools and Colleges
• Boston College has a nice page which visually describes different types of classroom arrangements offered in the school. This can help provide some ideas about how to arrange furniture in an educational space.

• Huntington College likewise has a site which shows possible seating arrangements found in classrooms. The page which the link leads to illustrates 4 types of possible classroom arrangements and provides description and comments about the arrangements. There is some animation in the site which can be a little confusing. If you observe that the animator was trying to do, the intention is to transform arrangement one to arrangement two to arrangement three to arrangement four.

Hotels
• The Ramada Prince George has a great page which illustrate many different types of arrangement which can be configured for meetings.

• The Grove Hotel in Chandler's Cross, Hertfordshire uses a software calls Active Matrix to help you plan, visualize and even download your seating arrangement floor plan.

• Runnymeade Hotel likewise uses Active Matrix to help clients create 'to scale' diagrams of our meeting rooms in a variety of set ups.

Commercial furniture design companies
• A company called Smart Desks has a Classroom Design Archives Page which "contains typical classroom, training room, computer lab and conference room plans © SMARTdesks Design Studio. Feel free to use these designs for requisitions, grant proposals, etc."

Non-Profit Organizations
UNICEF has some nice information in their website, one of them relates to Centers of Learning, while the other relates to Arranging space in the classroom.

LITERATURE
Rodney Fulton has a great article entitled A Conceptual Model for Understanding the Physical Attributes of Learning Environments. This article proposes the SPATIAL model which is suppose to help educators maximize usage and design of the physical environment for learning purposes.

There is a chapter from Linda Shalaway's Learning to Teach...not just for beginners which provides some interesting information about Classroom Organization and the physical environment which is found in Scholastic Press's website. The site provides succinct information about arranging space, desk placement, environmental preferences, and designing classroom space.

Every object, color, texture, and spatial configuration, as well as their selection and placement, has educational significance. The designer of such spaces must, therefore, ask him or herself: "What educational implication does this or that design decision have for the occupant (learner or teacher)?" In order to do that, the designer must work closely with the educator to articulate what those goals for children are, and the educator must articulate more than square footage per child as the conceptual base for education.

Architecture Can Teach...and the lessons are rather fundamental by Anne Taylor, Robert A. Aldrich, and George Vlastos.


Learning Spaces: More than Meets the Eye by Malcolm B. Brown and Joan K. Lippincott http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0312.pdf

Here is a handout from a training session on classroom management

(Include all of Roger Hiemstra's stuff, http://www-distance.syr.edu/leindex.html, Cornell, etc on educational architecture - space is not innocent)