Exploring Spaces for Learning (in the sun)

Feeling quite flattered that the International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association quotes me in their conference publicity:

" In Towards Creative Learning Spaces: Rethinking the Architecture of Post-Compulsory Education (2011), Jos Boys raises intriguing questions about changes in the spaces we use in higher education, pushing educators to think beyond traditional categories of “formal” and “informal” learning sites to imagine more complex relationships between our classrooms and the world beyond them. In the wake of increasing reliance on ever-expanding virtual learning spaces, greater emphasis on experiential learning, and a push toward the global classroom, leaders in higher education must consider their work from a wide range of perspectives."

Unfortunately dont think I will be able to afford to go! For those of you who can, the 2013 International HETL Conference is to be held at the University of Central Florida, in cooperation with the UCF Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. As they go on to say:

"We invite you to join colleagues from around the world in an exploration of innovative technologies, pedagogical strategies, and international collaborations being used to engage and retain students in the new millennium. Together we will discuss which models and approaches are most promising, how are they being used to engage and retain students, and how we can apply them to advance the scholarship and practice of teaching and learning."

Belated news from Stockholm

Never got it together to post about the Future Learning Environments - How Space impacts on Learning conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in July 2012, so just going to point you to a post by another conference delegate - Andrew Laing from DEGW.  Just received the final versions of the papers presented at the conference, which are great, and will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Inter-Professional Care  next year.

A quick promo

A reminder that the next reLIVE conference has currently got a call out for papers. It is called Creative Solutions for New Futures and is being held at the Open University, Milton Keynes from  21^st – 22^nd September 2011. As they write:

"Innovation in teaching and learning through virtual worlds was a major theme of ReLIVE08, the first conference to bring together researchers and educators in this field. In the three years since this event, our understanding of what it means to work, play and learn in these spaces has increased significantly, generating a rapidly growing body of academic knowledge. Whilst virtual worlds are providing us with platforms for innovation, and new opportunities to understand and address the needs of learners in the 21^st century, we are under more pressure than ever not only to continue demonstrating innovation, but to do this at scale, for less money, whilst increasing efficiency and productivity. The challenge for us all is to contribute to a future where innovations meet these requirements whilst keeping learners, and learning, at the core of all that we do.

With a nod to recycling we have therefore decided that ReLIVE11 will revisit some of the themes of ReLIVE08, but from the fresh perspective of using all that we have learned in between to explore how virtual worlds can help us and our learners to find creative solutions for new futures."

Which reminded me that I recently came across this website listing '100 educational virtual tours' - not virtual learning environments per se, but still an amazing educational resource. (I got there because I found myself avidly watching a realtime train journey on the Trans-Siberian railway...)

Education for the public good?

Another key theme that came out of the Reshaping Learning anthology, has been that thinking about learning spaces actually demands engaging with the whole 'shape' of education. At the post-compulsory level this is first about re-thinking what, where and how we learn, teach and research. Second it is about how space (conceptual, physical, virtual, social, personal)  matters in these processes. And, third, it is about generating creative and critical networks beyond the university so as to interact with other ideas and types of adult education, such as museums and other forms of public culture.


Many of the contributors to this book start from a position that higher education is under threat from pressures towards an over-riding emphasis on employability. And they look to re-valuing education as an important public service. 


I noticed that the upcoming American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting in New Orleans is called "Inciting the Social Imagination: Education Research for the Public Good." As Kris D. Gutiérrez and Joanne Larson write: "We are in the midst of a vibrant and troubling education paradox. On the one hand, it is a time of remarkable interest in education, with increased attention to reform policies, unprecedented educational legislation, and money from all sectors devoted to these efforts. In public discourse, education remains foundational to opening up a range of opportunities: to achieve social and economic mobility, to gain and secure employment, and to develop future life skills. Politicians refer to the knowledge society, economists write about the new economy, and the proliferation of innovative technologies demands new forms of learning in an unparalleled knowledge economy. Yet the path or shape that these efforts take is toward technocratic and market-driven solutions to the everyday issues schools, teachers, and students experience."


The conference will therefore explore how educational research might help deal with these challenges, particularly in enabling us to better re-imagine what an education for the public good might look like.

So ... I typed 'education for the public good' into Google and found a whole lot of stuff.....

The image here is of the Checkland Building, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton and is taken from a webpage advertising an upcoming pubic debate at the University entitled The future of university education? to be held on Saturday 30th April 2011.

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.

Design and Management of Learning Spaces conference

This one day conference in mid-June was sub-titled Changing Minds and offered an interestingly eclectic set of speakers across architecture, education and estates.

The person who stood out for me though was Simon Austin from Loughborough, one of the partners in the recent HEFCE -funded project on Academic Workspace. As he summarises:

"Many universities have tried to create new types of academic office environments that foster collaboration and knowledge flow between occupants, in a bid to increase creativity and innovation in teaching and research. However, core aspects of academic work also require privacy and opportunity for quiet reflection. A common strategy to address this tension is the provision of multiple work settings, which provide occupants with a mixture of private and social/shared environments. This presentation introduces the concept of default location and, with reference to two in-depth case studies, argues that this plays a critical role in the success of multi-setting office environments."

So, through rigorous comparative study, the research was able to show real qualitative differences in the experiences of academic staff/usability of space between having private offices with a shared area; and sharing an open-plan office with bookable 'seminar/private' spaces off. Most importantly this was not just a matter of functionality; it was how they felt they might be perceived by others if 'took up' space in particular ways.

Just great to see a well evidenced study, with clear and usable outcomes.

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....

Engage with Engage!

Had a fantastic time last week at the Engage International Summer School in Kilkenny (with a trip to Dublin thrown in), entitled Shifting Perspectives - positioning learning at the centre of the gallery. Engage is a membership organisation representing gallery, art and education professionals in the UK and worldwide. Gallery educators, curators and artists explored both where 'learning' sits within the wide range of institutional step-ups represented; and what learning means or should mean in a gallery/museums/collections/archives situation.

It was very stimulating for me to be working and talking with people who share many concerns but must also engage different audiences and have other sorts of cultural baggage and a very different history around, and context for, their various ideas, attitudes and practices. It throws a kind of useful questioning look at the assumptions we have in art and design in higher education. The amount of energy discussing the problems and sucesses of a variety of institutional frameworks was also insightful - something again that seems to me to be less explicitly considered in the university sector.

Image shows workshop underway in Kilkenny Castle photo: Jos Boys

What is creativity, again?

Did a workshop at another event exploring creativity and innovation last week, at the Creativity Centre (part of the CETLD-C University of Sussex and Brighton collaboration) . Organised by the University of Brighton's Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) it brought together for sharing and debate some projects around creativity going at the university.

The day was introduced through a talk by Ray Land who, together with Eric Meyer, has written on 'threshold concepts' and 'troublesome knowledge' as a way of grasping and interrogating the complex processes through which students 'get' the key ideas and practices of their subject discipline - and the 'liminality' of learning spaces this implies.

He talked a lot about the relationships between learning and creativity, both of which he articulated as liminal spaces. However - sometimes - creativity seemed to be being defined within the popular commonsense as something outside of everyday learning, as a letting go/anything is possible/do what you want kind of activity. He often linked it to chaos and to transgressive acts "where normal rules are abandoned".

For me, this is a misunderstanding of creativity - as something separate to and more uncontrollable than, 'normal' learning. As we tried to show in the ADM-HEA YouTube video (mentioned in my last post which was appropriated (!) pretty directly from Fischli and Weiss's Der Lauf Der Dinge/The Ways Things Go) - the best creativity integrates the asking of unexpected questions with rigorous processes of experimentation and testing. It is not 'outside' or a different kind of learning, but central to how all learning takes place.

But I agree with Ray Land absolutely that such processes are anxiety-inducing and complex - liminal spaces - which need to be both protective ('holding environments' in Winnicott's phrase) and enable risk-taking. The work he and Eric Meyer (and others) have done in this field - particularly Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding - remains a very valuable resource in helping us re-think learning spaces.

Play is a serious business

Attended the HEA-ADM Vital Space conference recently - well not so much a conference, more a creative discursive space (!)which intersected the live event with an ongoing virtual blog... and culminated in a set of 60 sec. YouTube videos. Stephen Heppell of UltraLab (which mainly works in the schools sector) kicked things off with a YouTube talk, proposing key concepts for better learning spaces. David Clews, Director of the HEA-ADM responded in kind; and then at the event itself, groups were allocated a concept to explore.

My group had playful. What was interesting is that all the groups immediately got involved in the complexity and tensions of their concepts, wanting to think harder about what was going on beyond the cliches. Our group all felt there was already a big problem with the concept of playful just meaning brightly coloured beanbags, being 'touch-feely' and having 'fun'. We talked a lot about the serious business of play as taking creative risks and all that that implied. How can students be supported in this? What kinds of spaces do they need? How can it be developed within contexts where resources are short and this kind of play/risk-taking difficult to asssess/challenging to conventional methods?

So our group tried to express this notion of playfulness - click here to see our video.

A hot topic!

Learning Spaces in Higher Education seems an increasingly hot topic, with lots of events going on. The Reinvention Centre (Oxford Brookes/Warwick) has their next conference at the beginning of April - their Fourth Social Learning Space Symposium: Learning Outside of the Square , and Plymouth University are holding Boundary Changes: Re-defining Learning Spaces at the end of April. Sheffield Hallam and Sheffield Universities have just started up a Learning Spaces Special Interest Group (SIG). In London, the University of the Arts is planning a follow up to their successful 'Space to Think' event last year with another conference this summer. And the ADM-HEA Annual Forum is also on Space. (They have also been running a student essay writing competition in Learning Spaces.)

So why does it still feel as if this area remains under-theorised or developed. Where are the well-argued and susbstantive publications rather than just downloadable case pdfs? Where is the academic research rather than the consultancy-driven case studies? interestingly the book I am writing as part of this CETLD work is being published under architecture - the education editors said there was not enough demand in the educational field.......not sure that the people organising/attending all these events would agree....

Image of playground pods by Jos Boys, Acklam Burghley School, Camden, London