Conference Agenda

Space matters to education. Physical spaces and material resources affect how teachers teach and students learn. Reflecting the diversity of users and uses, relations between school premises and education have proven extremely complex, with few direct causal links between physical elements and learning (Woolner et al., 2007). Spaces, nevertheless, facilitate or constrain activities and behaviour (Sigurðardóttir & Hjartarson, 2011; Stadler-Altmann, 2016), reflect educational cultures and often entrench educational values. Design and redesign, accordingly, may serve to enhance the alignment between space and pedagogy (Frelin & Grannäs, 2021), reflect new values and encourage innovative practices (Woolner et al., 2018).

Enthusiasm surrounds innovative learning environments or ILEs (OECD, 2013). The evidence base has been recognised by significant decision-makers, such as municipal bodies, national governments, the OECD and the World Bank (Grannäs & Stavem, 2021), and mandates for open, flexible school facilities are manifested (Sigurðardóttir & Hjartarson, 2011). The potential contribution of educational practitioners and their pupils to the adaption and redesign of conventional and innovative facilities, however, is often neglected (Bøjer, 2019: 45). A participatory approach to developing school space is frequently recommended (Blackmore et al., 2011), but uncertainties remain about how to carry it out.

One of the keys to successful alignment of practice, culture and school facilities, is to ignite awareness and initiative among practitioners and learners regarding their everyday physical environment and its possibilities. Although experience shows that designs for schools, cannot simply be transported between nations, approaches to planning and designing can be exported and used successfully in contrasting contexts (Woolner & Cardellino, 2021). Our ongoing research collaboration, DRAPES, and, specifically, our recent Erasmus+ project Collaborative ReDesign of Schools or CoReD (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/), aimed to do just that, bringing together values, needs and pedagogical intentions when planning physical changes in schools or adjusting the arrangement and application of existing spaces. Guidance and tools were needed for school users to contribute to the design and redesign of their physical learning environments. The aim of this symposium is to share experiences gained from our research and development of six analytic tools for collaborative and participatory reflections on educational settings and redesign of schools, focusing particularly on how tools, initially developed in one European country (Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom), were adapted and used in differing national and school contexts, deepening our understanding of how each tool can be applied in diverse ways and settings.

Our overall goal has been to give practitioners the means to engage effectively with their own settings and practices to improve the fit between teaching, learning and space, as well as communicate our results to a global audience. The key idea has been to develop tools sufficiently structured for practitioners to pick up and use, but flexible enough to adjust for different design stages and educational settings. Fully developed, user-friendly tools, with instructions in six languages, are now maintained on a project website, supported by 26 case studies as well as cross context syntheses of how the tools work best and elaborated principles and guides for collaborative redesign of educational settings. The presentations report sections of these efforts including case studies, cross case synthesis and conclusive guidelines for tools developed and tested in the project. We also seek to problematise the successes noted of the tools, questioning how they function as supports for thinking, and enablers of collaborative discussion of design by specialists in education rather than architecture. We also consider these collaborations within the limits that wider national and political contexts put upon the opportunities for practitioners to take control of the design and use of school space.

Diamond ranking of statements was an established thinking skills activity (Rockett and Percival 2002: 99) that began to be used with images as an education research tool (e.g. Woolner et al., 2010; Clark, 2012; Niemi et al., 2015). Building on use of this activity to facilitate discussions about learning environments specifically (Muzir, 2017; Woolner, 2018; Sigurðardóttir, 2018; Stadler-Altmann 2021), CoReD included diamond ranking of images as one of the suite of tools to enable school users to understand their school spaces. The activity invites educational practitioners to take nine images, of either their own setting or chosen from image libraries of spaces in other schools, and arrange them according to criteria such as ‘good place for learning’/‘poor place for learning’. Over the CoReD project, diamond ranking was used in a range of schools, from kindergartens to secondary institutions, in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and UK. These premises were extremely varied, ranging in age from recently built to 50 years old to over a hundred, including some renovated buildings, and based in urban, suburban and rural areas. It was used with, and by, teachers, other staff and students, with a range of intentions. The activity was carried out in various ways, some using generic images and some using photographs of the particular school, with different ranking criteria, including using differing criteria to rank one set of images (suitability for instruction; suitability for concentration). In most cases, the activity was intended to be the first stage in longer-term redesign processes, but the rankings were used in differing ways, either to highlight and discuss concerns or to begin to explore possibilities and initiate design ideas. Across this diversity of uses, participants reported that the diamond ranking activity was engaging, and it is evident, from recordings and observations, that it supported discussion about the design and use of educational space. Therefore, in this presentation, we will consider the reasons for its success, looking at usage of the tool and feedback we received from participants. Although it is possible to argue that for diverse people, intentions, and settings, diamond ranking ‘works’, we will discuss how an activity that is so structured and ‘easy to do’ (comment from 11-12 year old student), enables school users to see school space differently. This will include considering the flexibility of the organisation of the activity (choice of images and ranking criteria) and the particular power of photographs to convey experiences.

Clark, J.(2012) Using diamond ranking as visual cues to engage young people in the research process, Qualitative Research Journal 12(2):222–237. Muzir, A.(2017) School buildings maintenance in Malaysia: Current practices, key challenges and implications. PhD thesis, Newcastle University. Niemi,R., Kumpulainen,K., and Lipponen,L.(2015). Pupils as active participants: Diamond ranking as a tool to investigate pupils’ experiences of classroom practices. European Educational Research Journal, 14:138–150. Rockett,M. and Percival,S.(2002). Thinking for learning. Stafford: Network Educational Press. Sigurðardóttir, A.K.(2018). Student-centred classroom environments in upper secondary school: Students’ ideas about good spaces for learning vs. actual arrangements. In Benade, L.; Jackson,M. (eds). Transforming Education: Design & Governance in Global Contexts. Singapore: Springer. Stadler-Altmann, U.(2021) Pictorial and Spatial Image Learning – Using diamond ranking to understand students’ perception of learning environment, Proceedings of the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination. Woolner, P.(2018) Collaborative Re-design: Working with School Communities to Understand and Improve their Learning Environments. In: Ellis, RA; Goodyear, P (eds). Spaces of teaching and learning: Integrating perspectives on research and practice. Singapore: Springer. Woolner,P., Hall,E., Clark,J., Tiplady,L., Thomas,U. and Wall,K.(2010). Pictures are necessary but not sufficient: using a range of visual methods to engage users about school design, Learning Environments Research 13(1):1-22.

Educational transformation is known to be challenging (Woolner et al., 2018) and require the participation and collaboration of the users in the development processes (Bøjer, 2019; Woolner, 2018). This paper will discuss the making and use of a tool for collaborative school development, ‘Stories of Educational Spaces’ (SES) (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/tools/ses/). The tool was developed as part of the project ‘Collaborative Re-design with Schools’ aimed at creating activities and resources to raise the awareness about and involve educational professionals and school users in physical school space, its use and design. In the workshop-based tool SES, the participants use storytelling to explore the past, present, and potential future of selected spaces in a specific school environment. The participants work in smaller groups where they are asked to narrate stories and complement them with photographs or drawings. At the end of the workshop, the stories and images produced are the outset for a joint discussion in a larger group. With the activity of tracking and imagining the archived, lived and future architectural and educational (hi)stories of a building, the tool may serve several purposes: raising awareness and developing competences of the pedagogical use of the physical environment; creating a shared place affiliation among the participants; laying the ground for adaptive re-use of existing buildings or architectural elements in local and self-driven development projects; and collecting inputs for both smaller and larger renovation projects of existing buildings (Aytac et al 2016; Burke & Könings 2016; Wall et al 2019). The paper presents the core thinking in the development of the tool and the first experiences with its use (in Iceland, Denmark, and UK) leading to further reflections and re-adjustments. It focuses on the task of storytelling as a fundamental element in the tool (Lewis, 2011), connecting spaces, places (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016) and people with the past, present and future through real and imaginative (hi)stories. Through this, the tool facilitates collaborative engagement by acknowledging people’s starting points, connecting various aspects of a school environment, and facilitating the exploration of ideas and possibilities (Woolner, 2018). The paper also discusses how the differentiated use of the tool in three specific cases, taking place in three countries on different educational levels with different groups of participants (teachers, students etc.), has influenced the approach to and handling of the tool.

Aytac, O. (2016). Adaptive reuse as a strategy toward urban resilience. European journal of sustainable development, 5, 523-532. Burke, C. & Könings, K.D. (2016) Recovering lost histories of educational design: a case study in contemporary participatory strategies, Oxford Review of Education, 42:6, 721-732. Bøjer, B. H. (2019). Unlocking Learning Spaces: An examination of the interplay between the design of learning spaces and pedagogical practices Institute of Visual DesignThe Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation]. Copenhagen. Ellis, R., & Goodyear, P. (2016). Models of learning space: Integrating research on space, place and learning in higher education. Review of Education, 4(2), 149-191. Lewis, P. (2011). Storytelling as research/research as storytelling. Qualitative inquiry, 17(6), 505-510. Wall, T., Rossetti, l. & Hopkins, S. (2019). Storytelling for sustainable development. In: leal filho, w. (ed.) Encyclopedia of sustainability in Higher Education. Springer International Publishing. Woolner, P. (2018). Collaborative re-design: Working with school communities to understand and improve their learning environments. Spaces of teaching and learning: Integrating perspectives on research and practice, 153-172. Woolner, P., Thomas, U., & Tiplady, L. (2018). Structural change from physical foundations: The role of the environment in enacting school change. Journal of educational change, 19(2), 223-242.

The School Development Evaluation Tool, SDET, was developed in the beginning of our new millennium and revised a few years back (Reykjavíkurborg & Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands, 2018), having served as an instrument of municipal policy aiming for flexible school practice, collaboration and individualised learning, as well as framework for studying teaching and learning at the compulsory school level (Gerður G. Óskarsdóttir, 2014). The revision was based on findings from such a study, as well as insights from external evaluations of compulsory schools in Reykjavik. Six strands in the tool represent features to review and develop. Organisation and leadership; policy, evaluation and development; learning environment; teaching practices; student learning; and parental involvement. Each strand entails issues to examine on a five-point scale towards a future vision of schooling. The first stage of the scale reflects constrained practices that prevailed most of the 20th century, while the fifth stage reflects individualised and collaborative learning, democratic practices and communities of learning, with intermediary stages delineating developmental steps towards that vision. The tool is laid out to enhance professional discussions among teachers and school leaders as they attempt to determine how and why they want to move forward in their administrative and developmental efforts focusing on student-centred or individualised learning (e.g. Jonasson & Land, 2012) as their point of departure. That entails differentiated tasks for students, the autonomy of students to influence their own learning, and student collaboration. The tool also reflects visions of the democratic school (Edelstein, 2008) and the school as a professional learning community (e.g. Louis and Stoll, 2007). Issues and strands underline the complexity of school development (Sigurðardottir et al., 2022), as well as the importance of coherence among school practice components (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). The physical environment must be reviewed in context with school culture, school organisation, and pedagogical approaches, bearing in mind manifold aspects of student learning (e.g. Gislason, 2010). Our study relates three cases where school staff reviewed their respective school buildings with potential adjustments and changes in mind. The tool was used at two lower secondary schools in Sweden, and one primary and lower secondary school in Iceland. All three schools were seen as of traditional design and considering alterations. The three case studies were somewhat limited in execution and scale, but served to show that the SDET tool can ignite and stimulate professional discussions in the early planning phase of redesign of school facilities.

Edelstein, W. (2008). Hvað geta skólar gert til að efla lýðræði? Hæfni og færni í draumalandi. [What can schools do to enhance democracy? Skills and competences in a land of dreams.] In Bjarnason et al., Menntaspor. Forlagið. Fullan, M. & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence. The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Corwin. Jonassen, D. & Land, S. M. (eds). (2012). Theoretical foundations of learning environments. Routledge. Óskarsdóttir, G. Ó. (ed.). (2014). Starfshættir í grunnskólum við upphaf 21. aldar. [Teaching and learning at the beginning of the 21st century.] Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan. Reykjavíkurborg & Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands [Reykjavik City & School of Education, University of Iceland]. (2018). Matstæki um þróun skólastarfs í anda hugmynda um einstaklingsmiðað nám, lýðræðislegt og nemendamiðað skólastarf og lærdómssamfélag. [School Development Evalution Tool]. Reykjavíkurborg and Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands. Sigurðardóttir, A. K., Hansen, F. B. & Gisladottir, B. (2022). Development of an intervention framework for school improvement that is adaptive to cultural context. Improving schools, 25(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/13654802211051929 Stoll, L. & Louis, K. S. (eds.). (2007). Professional learning communities. Divergence, depth, and dilemmas. Open University Press