Conference Agenda

Educational learning environments across Europe are increasingly shaped by tensions between innovation, wellbeing, and policy-driven implementation. In recent decades, many school systems have invested in innovative open and flexible learning environments intended to support student-centred pedagogies, inclusion, and learner agency (Benade, 2019; Morris & Imms, 2025). Yet current shifts in educational discourse and governance indicate a renewed inclination toward more traditional classroom models, often justified by concerns about structure, attention, classroom management, and learning outcomes (Sasson et al., 2021; Charteris et al., 2025). These developments raise urgent questions about how space, pedagogy, and wellbeing interact in everyday educational practice and how spatial choices implicitly shape educational culture.

Against this backdrop, this symposium responds to the shared research question: How can spatial understandings of agency and wellbeing, across teachers and learners, inform the design, use, and evaluation of learning environments? Rather than treating learning environments as static containers or functional infrastructure, the symposium conceptualises them as socio-spatial and pedagogical ecologies that are continuously produced through embodied and affective engagement with space, professional practice, and institutional conditions (Carvalho & Yeoman, 2021; Mulcahy et al., 2015). While innovative learning environments have been widely promoted, research consistently shows that spatial redesign alone does not automatically lead to pedagogical change (Imms & Byers, 2017; Woolner et al., 2018). Moreover, empirical insight into how teachers and learners actually experience, negotiate, and produce learning environments remains fragmented across disciplinary boundaries, limiting both the explanatory power of educational research and the practical usability of design and policy frameworks.

As a result, design intentions, pedagogical realities, and wellbeing ambitions may become misaligned. The symposium therefore aims to move beyond binary debates (e.g., closed classroom vs open learning landscape; structured vs flexible; stimulating vs calming) by critically examining what lies in between: the nuanced spatial gradients and micro-practices through which agency and wellbeing are enacted (McPherson & Saltmarsh, 2017). This “in-between” is approached as an interdisciplinary research space, where socio-material and spatially informed perspectives become essential for developing more refined understanding, translation, and professional learning.

Bringing together four complementary papers from Denmark, Australia, Finland, and Belgium, the symposium explores the intersection of teacher and student agency, learner wellbeing, and learning environment design through empirical and methodological lenses. Bøjer examines design-based training and participatory approaches that position teachers as active co-makers of learning environments (Bøjer & Brøns, 2022), while Mahat highlights teacher-led (micro)inquiry as a situated mechanism for developing spatial competency and professional agency during spatial transformation (Lai et al., 2020; Mahat et al., 2024). Niemi offers fine-grained video-based insight into how students enact agency through embodied and spatial practices in open and flexible learning environments (Mondada, 2019; Niemi et al., 2024). Stevens contributes an architectural lens on affective spatial experience, proposing that students’ affective descriptions of teaching spaces can be mobilised as spatial intelligence to enrich learning environment evaluation and professional dialogue (Castilla et al., 2017; Desmet, 2018; Stevens & Balendonck, 2026).

The contributions collectively address three interconnected thematic lines:
(1) Affective and experiential dimensions of learning environments;
(2) Teacher spatial literacy, agency and competence as professional knowledge; and
(3) Translational and participatory approaches that connect spatial evidence to professional learning, design processes, and evaluation, particularly in the context of shifting European education policies.

The symposium concludes with a designerly synthesis that connects key concepts (i.e., agency, affect, wellbeing, spatial literacy) and the protagonists involved in learning environment projects into a shared “blueprint”. This artefact captures cross-paper insights, unresolved tensions (e.g. structure vs. openness), and emerging research questions (e.g. integrating affective spatial evidence into evaluation; developing tools for teacher spatial literacy; responding to policy shifts).

As education systems respond to accelerating social transformations, including shifting pedagogical paradigms, increasing learner diversity, and post-pandemic reconfigurations of schooling, educational environments have become a critical yet under-examined dimension of professional practice (OECD, n.d.; UNESCO, 2025). While many schools are transitioning to innovative and flexible learning environments, teachers’ capacity to work productively with spatial change remains uneven (Imms & Mahat, 2021). Spatial competency, that is, the ability to perceive, interpret, and intentionally mobilise the affordances of physical learning environments in support of pedagogical aims (Mahat & Loh, 2024), continues to be marginal within dominant models of professional learning (Mahat, 2025). This paper argues that teacher-led (micro)inquiry provides a powerful, context-responsive approach to developing spatial competency under changing conditions of education (Mahat & Bradbeer, 2024). Characterised by small-scale, iterative cycles of observation, experimentation, reflection, and adaptation, (micro)inquiry is embedded in teachers’ everyday practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Timperley et al., 2007). Unlike standardised or externally imposed professional development, spatial (micro)inquiry positions teachers as active agents responding to the socio-material conditions of their classrooms and schools (Biesta et al., 2015; Fenwick et al., 2011). Empirically, the paper draws on mixed-methods case studies of three schools in Melbourne, Australia undergoing spatial transformation. Using teachers’ reflective accounts and artefacts generated through collaborative inquiry, it illustrates how (micro)inquiries enable teachers to examine how spatial arrangements mediate learning, participation, inclusion, and wellbeing: how layouts shape collaboration, how movement and visibility influence student agency, and how material affordances interact with pedagogical intent. Through repeated cycles of inquiry, teachers develop heightened spatial awareness and adaptive expertise, allowing them to align space-use with evolving learner needs, institutional expectations, and broader social change. Importantly, this process supports professional agency by legitimising teachers’ situated knowledge and capacity to reconfigure space rather than merely adapt to it, and hence contribute to the development of spatial competency, supporting more coherent and intentional responses to new learning environments. The paper concludes by discussing implications for professional learning frameworks, school leadership, and teacher education. It argues that embedding spatial (micro)inquiry within professional learning infrastructures is essential for enabling teachers to navigate the tensions between innovative educational environments, accountability pressures, and the changing purposes of schooling. In doing so, the paper contributes to Network 06 debates on educational environments by foregrounding teacher agency and practice-based inquiry as key responses to contemporary social and spatial transformations in education.

Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 624–640. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R., & Sawchuk, P. (2011). Emerging approaches to educational research: Tracing the socio-material. Routledge. Imms W. & Mahat M. (2021) Where to now? Fourteen characteristics of teachers’ transition into innovative learning environments. In W. Imms & T. Kvan (Eds), Teacher Transition into Innovative Learning Environments (pp. 317-334). Springer. Mahat, M. (2025). Developing teachers’ spatial competency: A tripartite model of professional learning and development. In H. Stokes & McLean Davies, L. (Eds.). Critical Conversations in Teacher Education: Contemporary Perspectives from Australia (pp. 63-79). Emerald. Mahat, M. & Bradbeer, C. (2024). Teacher-led inquiry in school learning environments: Setting the context. In M. Mahat & C. Bradbeer (Eds.). Teacher-led inquiry in School Learning Environments: Leading by Example (pp. 1-10). Emerald. Mahat, M. & Loh, C. E (2024). Teachers’ changing perspectives of their spatial competencies: A case study of professional learning in Singapore. Teaching and Teacher Education, 152(2024), 104797. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2024.104797 OECD. (n.d.). Future of education and skills 2030. OECD Publishing. UNESCO Institute for Statistics Education Data and Statistics Commission. (2025). Education data and statistics. UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Across the world, schools are increasingly built or retrofitted with flexible, activity-based designs intended to support innovative pedagogies. Research indicates that such environments can promote learning outcomes, inclusion, and student agency by enabling more personalised and collaborative learning (Benade, 2019; Morris & Imms, 2025). However, these spaces also require new teaching and learning strategies (Duthilleul et al., 2021; Lai et al., 2020), a change often assumed to follow automatically from spatial redesign. Yet research and practice consistently show that new spatial layouts and pedagogical visions do not, in themselves, lead to changes in practice (Imms & Byers, 2017; Woolner et al., 2018). This paper addresses this gap by investigating how teachers’ spatial competences can be developed through design-based and participatory approaches. Drawing on Martin’s (2002) and Lackney’s (2008) concept of environmental competence, spatial competence is understood as the ability to perceive and shape the learning environment as an active and responsive element of teaching practice. Teachers with spatial awareness and competence can act as spatial agents who deliberately use space to support learning. Although the need for such competences is increasingly recognised (Leighton, 2021; Mahat et al., 2024), they remain largely absent from teacher education and school building processes (Bøjer & Brøns, 2022). Empirically, the paper draws on three Danish case studies: 1) a primary school (2018); 2) a teacher training pilot project (2020–24); and 3) an ongoing diploma course for teacher professionals (2020-). The paper presents concrete design-based methods and participatory approaches that support collaborative reflection, experimentation, and professional learning, enabling teachers to develop new understandings of the space-practice relationship. Methodologically, the paper is grounded in socio-spatial perspectives on education (Carvalho & Yeoman, 2021; Mulcahy et al., 2015), viewing learning environments as dynamic constellations shaped by physical design, pedagogical values, school organisation, and student motivation (Gislason, 2018). The case studies combine Research through Design (Frayling, 1994) and Action Research (Wolkenhauer et al., 2017), using design processes and educational practices as means of inquiry. The paper concludes that teachers should be understood not merely as users but as active co-makers of the learning environment. Supporting teachers in this role requires deliberate training in spatial awareness and competence. Across the case studies, design-based and participatory methods fostered active reflection and exploration of the space-practice relationship, contributing to practice-based knowledge, experiences, and ultimately teacher spatial agency.

Benade, L. (2019). Flexible learning spaces: Inclusive by design? New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 54(1), 53–68. Bøjer, B. H., & Brøns, M. G. (2022). How co-design can contribute to the ongoing development of hybrid learning spaces by empowering the users. In Hybrid learning spaces (pp. 45–60). Springer. Lai, C., Huang, Y. X., & Lam, T. (2020). Teachers’ socio-spatial practice in innovative learning environments. Cambridge Journal of Education, 50(4), 521–538. Leighton, V. (2021). Envisaging teacher spatial competency through the lenses of situated cognition and personal imagination to reposition it as a professional classroom practice skill. Teacher Transition into Innovative Learning Environments, 249–275. Mahat, M., Hurn, B., & Bradbeer, C. (2024). Putting teachers’ “spatial competency” on the professional learning map: An environmental scan. The University of Melbourne. Morris, J. E., & Imms, W. (2025). Flexible furniture to support inclusive education: Developing learner agency and engagement in primary school. Learning Environments Research, 28(2), 223–248. 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.

Open and flexible learning spaces are widely promoted as enabling autonomy, collaboration, and engagement (e.g. Benade, 2018; Sassoon et al., 2021; Wiklund-Engblom et al., 2025), yet relatively little is known about how these pedagogical expectations are actually enacted, negotiated, and appropriated by students in situated learning activities. Based on a video-based study of students’ learning interactions in Finnish schools, this study examines how students’ agency is enacted through everyday classroom practices as they unfold within, and in relation to, open and flexible spatial arrangements. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (e.g. Mondada, 2019) of video-recorded classroom situations, the study examines how students use movement, positioning, bodily orientation, and material resources to manage participation, attention, and social relations. The analysis shows that agency is not merely a matter of individual choice or freedom, but is continuously negotiated through interactional work: claiming and reshaping space, creating temporary boundaries, withdrawing or engaging, and adapting to the presence and availability of peers and teachers (McPherson, A. & Saltmarsh 2017). Empirically, the paper analyses, among other cases, an episode from a fifth-grade mathematics lesson in which a group of students collectively constructs a temporary “math hut” using mattresses and pillows in order to work together on fraction tasks. This case illustrates how pedagogical intentions related to collaboration and concentration become spatially materialised—and transformed—through students’ own spatial actions, and how a learning environment is actively produced in the course of ongoing instructional activity. While not foregrounding wellbeing as a separate analytical category, the study highlights how conditions for comfort, focus, and emotional security emerge as part of these agentive spatial practices, and how open configurations may both enable and constrain students’ possibilities for participation. By making students’ embodied and interactional spatial practices visible, the paper contributes empirical insight into how agency is lived and produced in open and flexible learning spaces. It argues that video-based methodologies offer a powerful resource between educational research, pedagogical practice, and learning space design by revealing how pedagogical expectations are enacted, negotiated, and reworked in everyday classroom activity, and and how students create opportunities to resist, reshape, and reinterpret these expectations in practice.

Benade. L. (2018). Being a Teacher in the 21st Century. Singapore: Springer. Leighton, V. (2021). Envisaging teacher spatial competency through the lenses of situated cognition and personal imagination to reposition it as a professional classroom practice skill. Teacher Transition into Innovative Learning Environments, 249–275. 275. McPherson, A. & Saltmarsh, S. (2017). Bodies and affect in non-traditional learning spaces. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(8), 832–841. Mondada, L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality,multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 47-62. Sasson, R., Yehuda, I., & Magen-Nagar, N. (2021). Teachers’ classroom management and student behaviour in innovative learning environments. Teaching and Teacher Education, 103, 103347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103347 Wiklund-Engblom, A., Bergström, B. & Lindfors, M. (2025). Exploring teaching practices in an innovative learning environment: A pragmatic view on the student-centred ideal in future classrooms. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00570-

Learning environments are increasingly recognised as central to students’ wellbeing, engagement, and learning (Barrett et al., 2015). Yet in both educational discourse and practice, physical learning environments are still frequently discussed through sharp dualities: classroom versus open learning landscape; stimulating versus calming; structured versus flexible. Such binary framings obscure the actual “in-between” spatial conditions where agency and wellbeing are often negotiated in everyday teaching and learning. This paper argues that these polarised interpretations are partly rooted in limited spatial literacy among educational professionals, leading to reduced vocabulary and restricted capacity to interpret the didactic potential embedded in space (Stevens & Balenonck, 2026). Positioned at the intersection of educational research and architectural design, this paper proposes that students’ affective descriptions of learning spaces can be mobilised as architectural design intelligence. Rather than treating affective language as subjective impression, the study examines it as experiential spatial evidence that can enrich how learning environments are designed, used, and evaluated (Castilla et al., 2017). The paper addresses the research question: How can students’ affective descriptions of learning spaces be interpreted as architectural knowledge relevant to agency and wellbeing? This question is timely within current European debates on learning environment design, including tendencies to revert to traditional classroom models and critiques of open learning landscapes (Charteris et al., 2025; Page & Anderson, 2024). Methodologically, the study draws on a qualitative corpus of short written reflections collected from higher education students describing how their teaching spaces (aulas) feel during learning activities. The analysis follows a two-step process. First, affective descriptors (e.g., calm, oppressive, energising, chaotic) are identified and coded, supported by affect-oriented approaches from design research (Desmet, 2018). Second, these affective terms are spatially anchored through references to architectural conditions such as light, scale, enclosure, acoustics, materiality, and spatial organisation. This interpretive approach links affect not to preference, but to spatial qualities and tensions. Findings reveal recurring affective patterns that transcend typological labels of “traditional” or “innovative” space. Students articulate key tensions—openness versus safety; stimulation versus overload; flexibility versus disorientation—suggesting that the quality of learning environments resides in nuanced spatial gradients rather than in fixed design categories. The paper concludes by proposing affective spatial analysis as a reflective tool to help educators and designers move beyond binaries, strengthen spatial literacy, and develop richer, more actionable discussions on learning environments that support agency and wellbeing.

Barrett, P., Davies, F., Zhang, Y., & Barrett, L. (2015). The impact of classroom design on pupils’ learning: Final results of a holistic, multi-level analysis. Building and Environment, 89, 118–133. Castilla, N., Llinares, C., Bravo, J. M., & Blanca, V. (2017). Subjective assessment of university classroom environment. Building and Environment, 122, 72–81. Charteris, J., Frelin, A., & Grannäs, J. (2025). Respatialisation in schools: Redesigning spaces and reimagining pedagogy. Oxford Review of Education. Desmet, P. M. A. (2018). Measuring emotion: Development and application of an instrument to measure emotional responses to products. In M. Blythe & A. Monk (Eds.), Funology 2: From usability to enjoyment (pp. 391–404). Springer. Geitz, G., Donker, A., & Parpala, A. (2023). Studying in an innovative teaching–learning environment: Design-based education at a university of applied sciences. Learning Environments Research. Morris, J., & Imms, W. (2022). Designing and using innovative learning spaces: What teachers have to say. IUL Research, 3(6), 7–25. Stevens, R. & Balendonck, S. (accepted for publication). The Teacher’s Rider: A Speculative, Identity-Based Method for Integrating Pedagogical Insight into the Architectural Design of Learning Environments. Archnet-IJAR