Re-shaping Learning - the conference (and the book)

The Re-Shaping Learning conference at the University of Brighton in July 2010 aimed to bring together the best researchers around Learning Spaces - who are usually separated because they work across the different disciplines of educational theory, design teaching, architecture and estates management. One of the things we have been interested in is how to make the best work more easily accessible (since it is scattered across many subjects and locations). So it is great news that Sense want to publish a book collection for us.

The conference was also one of the last events of CETLD, at the end of its five  year life, and - as with the other CETLs - it  is only now that some crucial emerging themes are becoming clear. A key concern of the conference was to widen debate about Learning Spaces beyond building some new innovative informal learning spaces. Many contributors agreed that it also urgently needs to include theoretical research and development, cross-disciplinary critical debate, improved methodologies for designing and evaluating spaces and a much more focussed engagement with the 'big' issues of learning as a social and spatial practice; that is, both unravelling the assumptions about where, how, why and for whom different forms of education are patterned in space and time, and how these might be better organised.