 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
You
are here: Reinventing Learning Spaces
(This is the text of an address given by the author in May 1994)
Introduction
This center for architecture and education focuses on the design of learning environments. The center has taken as one of its goals to call together agencies, organizations and individuals to dialogue and dream. My brief talk today focuses on the dream aspect of the goal.
I am a newcomer to participating in the dialogue of this center, but I have long considered learning environments as part of the concept of curriculum. I define curriculum as contents, experiences, and environments so organized as to achieve the goals of the school. I have always realized that we need to make conscious decisions about the nature of the spaces where students are to have experiences so as to learn content, to make it their own.
It appears to me that as we contemplate the design of future schools, of future facilities that will encourage educational renewal and restructuring, that we perhaps are too timid, unaware of the shackles of our hidden assumptions and suppositions to what a school is and what is defined as a learning space. To a great extent, we seem to accept that learning environments are still largely classrooms where a teacher or team of teachers is in control or engaged in coaching students to take control.
As I dream what the future school might look like as a space, it appears to me that we need to do more than restructure the schools; we need to reinvent our schools. We need to engage in outrageous thinking about learning environments. Now, I realize that outrageous means exceeding all bounds of reasonableness; it means something shocking. However, I think that we need to deal with concepts of space and education that are indeed shocking. We need to realize that reasonableness is defined by present context. We further need to realize that what is unreasonableness today may be very reasonable in the 21st century, and it is for the 21st century that we are contemplating educational space.
Perhaps we should not think of schools as primarily places for learning, but rather as arenas where individuals engage in knowledge construction. Schools as knowledge construction organizations have been suggested by Phillip Schlecty in his book, Schools for the 21st Century. Thinking of schools as knowledge construction organizations is more in line with an information age. In an information age, the primary mode of work is knowledge work. In this information age, the emphasis is on the production, management, and use of knowledge. Knowledge which is obtained from processing information is the new economic, social, and political capital of this new age.
Environments that Engage, Challenge, Arouse
Currently, there is much talk about educational reform. But, while we are talking of reforming our curriculum, reforming our instruction, reforming our actions with schools, we are not reforming, reconceptualizing, the spaces into which our reformed curricula and necessary pedagogical and professional actions are to occur.
It still appears that most school designs place the classroom as the primary space in a school. And, it is a classroom primarily under the control and management of one teacher, or perhaps a teacher team. Also it seems that this classroom, while we do recognize that it is complex, seems to suggest that we accept the notion of detailed complexity which involves the identifying of all the variables that could influence a problem. Our view of learning space, classroom if you wish, should reflect a realization that the space is one of dynamic complexity. Such complexity, according to Michael Fullan, is the "real territory of change". In dynamic complexity, cause and effect are not close in time and space and obvious interventions do not produce expected outcomes.
I would go so far as to say that perhaps the very concepts of cause and effect need to be rethought. Reflecting on dreaming spaces within the concept of dynamic complexity means that the hallmarks of such spaces should have as normal attributes complexity, dynamism, and unpredictability. It appears that many in education view such attributes as things that get in the way of learning.
Educational learning spaces that exhibit dynamic complexity actually may do more than restructure the school. Such learning spaces may contribute to a reculturing of the school. Just how to design spaces that reculture is very fuzzy. But, I do know that if we are to think in terms of reculturing or developing new education cultures in schools we need to attend to values, beliefs, norms, habits, dreams, fears, desires, language, and behaviors of all of the players concerned with education.
In designing spaces that reculture schools, we want real cultures. We want cultures that foster authentic activities as opposed to hybrid activities. Authentic activities of knowledge production, of knowledge work, resemble the activities of those outside of schools who are doing similar work within some scholarly area. Thus, students studying history in a school cultural environment would be doing history reflecting an authenticity in action compared to a historian. Students in a science classroom would be engaged in actions not unlike the scientist in a laboratory. Students engaged in mathematics would be dealing with the concepts, the heuristic, the algorithms, in ways resembling those individuals who employ mathematics in the "real" world.
I would say that much educational activity today is really hybrid. It is activity that only can be found in schools. Reading a chapter in a history text and answering the questions at the end of the chapter, even if done in cooperative groups, is not the doing of history. Watching a teacher demonstrate an experiment is not the doing of science. Reading a classic to do a book report is not done in the literary world. These are hybrid activities. We need to ask what kind of dreaming space will enable us to change from these activities to authentic ones.
Learning Environments that Foster Authentic Activities, Knowledge Work
Authentic knowledge work takes time. It cannot be accomplished in fifty-minute time periods within spaces that cluster individuals by age or subject. We need spaces that will facilitate the creation of meaning, places where knowledge can be constructed, experiments conducted, investigations carried out, and results of inquiry shared and shaped. We need spaces where the curriculum can serve as the raw material for the knowledge-work process.
I am not far enough into my dream of outrageous spaces to know what these spaces might look like. But, I can see in the shadows of my dreams spaces that allow for laboratories, studio spaces where educational dramas might be conducted; spaces where students can gather for "thinking" time; spaces that furnish students with arenas for both solitary and social reflection. I also see spaces where simulations can occur; spaces designed for virtual reality.
I also realize that learning spaces must be more than spaces within schools. Schools need to be connected with the wider environment. Educators may work with others, such as is being done at this Center to both design and coordinate experiences of students in those spaces most necessary for the particular knowledge work required within the curriculum.
I see misty outlines of spaces that suggest unity, integration of knowledge realms, not discontinuity, the atomization of information. I see spaces that suggest prolonged inquiry under the control of students, with teachers as consultants, coaches, guides. I see spaces that allow for emergence and chaos, that give students time and space for developing patterns of meaning, projects.
I see spaces that enable student dreaming teams to collaborate on long-range projects.
I see spaces where the concept of synergy, the concept that under certain conditions the whole can be more than the sum of the parts, is a key concept.
I see spaces that allow dreamers to take initiative and responsibility through reliance on themselves and "colleague teams", spaces that allow for creating knowledge through mutual deliberation.
Accompanying my shadowy visions of outrageous spaces are the emergence of new criteria to judge what is an effective dreaming space. In addition to the criterion relating to whether a space allowed an action to occur would be the criterion that would address the intensity of the action, the criteria that would address the degree of student joy, passion, and commitment to the knowledge making for which the space was designed.
I have taken the request to speak to you briefly today as an invitation to us all to have exciting dreams--actually to dare to dream exciting dreams--exciting dreams about outrageous spaces so that students will be able to grab, create for themselves assistance of educators and others passionate dreaming within authentic activities.
Francis P. Hunkins, Ph.D. is Chair in Curriculum and Instruction and a Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the College of Education, University of Washington. He can be reached by e-mail at asker@u.washington.edu.
Copyright © 1994 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
http://www.newhorizons.org
For permission to redistribute, please go to:
New Horizons for Learning Copyright and Permission Information