A different kind of learning space

Met Jan Sellers at the Learning Landscapes conference: she is a National Teaching Fellow and her project is exploring labyrinths as a teaching tool. As she says:

"She began to explore the need for quietness, and time and space for reflection. She was aware of an increasing sense of stress, pressure and haste amongst students in their academic lives, and to some extent, a loss of joy in learning. (...)

The labyrinth works at a number of different levels. At its simplest the labyrinth provides a quiet, peaceful walk: a structured opportunity for reflection. The narrow path requires concentration to follow, thus offering a focus on the present; this may result in an experience akin to a walking meditation."

This led to the installation of the Canterbury Labyrinth at the University of Kent in 2008, as part of the Creative Campus Initiative (CCI). A team of facilitators at Kent are now working with this and other, temporary and portable, labyrinths, leading events including team-building, confidence building and workshops to foster creativity and deepen reflection within and across academic disciplines.

For more information, click here.

Image shows Canterbury Labyrinth in Winter: photograph by Jim Higham, University of Kent

The problem with names

The Learning Landscapes conference has been written up in the Times Higher Ed by Matthew Reisz, under the title "

"Lingua franca needed to shape cutting-edge pedagogic spaces".

What is most perhaps most interesting is the (one) response to date, which I will quote in full:

"Lingua franca needed? We could do with a little more plain English too. Pedagogic spaces indeed! And what on earth does "ways in which the academic voice can be fully articulated within the decision-making processes at all levels of the design and development of teaching and learning spaces" mean?"

So whilst Mike Neary, the co-ordinator of the project, is calling for more academic involvement in, and reflection on, learning space design - especially through deeper engagements with the idea of the university - here is an academic who doesn't even know what he is talking about. I have also interviewed many tutors who didn't think the concept of learning spaces means much that is useful or interesting to them.

This isn't to say that academics are the problem. Rather it raises three issues. First, both educational theory and architectural design still have little purchase on many post-compulsory academic disciplines; theory because it seems obscure and unrelated to the specialist expertise of different subjects, and architecture because outside of art and design it tends to be treated as something which is obvious, but which architects somehow fail to get 'right'. Second, there is no such thing as a shared language about learning spaces - what we urgently need to do instead is improve our understandings of the relationships between space and its occupation; and to open these up for wider debate. Third, we have to start from where academics and their colleagues are, that is, by accepting the tensions and complexities of existing communities of practice within and across universities and colleges, and not expecting consensus or even acceptance that here is an area worth considering. And to do that we need to make better arguments....