approach: visceral and inspiring learning environments
The modern classroom...as neutral as ever, as drained of psychological content as ever, as boring as ever. Notice the utter passivity of these potentially vibrant, active kids. 30 years after leaving public school, we remember the rooms far more viscerally than the people: arid, airless, draining. It suggests at the very least that we pay attention to the environment as much as we pay attention to the lesson plan.
Two classrooms in Agadez Niger, 2006, one on each side of a teaching wall, in the shade of a small bosque. No resources, no enclosure, no one sleeping, incredible engagement. You can see the earthen bricks for a future building in the background.
School is too often boring. Emotion is too often stifled or viewed as a problem, environments are desaturated to the point of complete neutrality, and too many buildings give the word "institutional" a bad reputation.
When we think of teaching as telling stories, and learning as experiencing the world through those stories, then we have to ask, how do we get students viscerally involved in stories? Furthermore, how do we inspire students to create stories, to make their life an amazing story? Is the hermetic vacuum of a classroom where stories are born?
Given our understanding of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1999), and given our perception that learning is transactional with the learning environment (Dent-Read and Zukow-Goldring, 1997, Wagman and Miller, 2003), we propose an approach to the design of educational environments that acknowledges their active, cognitive impact and power.
Here than are 14 environmental typologies we believe worth considering for the school environment as an alternative to the neutral classroom. We'll explore each typology individually in future posts, but leave you with this image: of a school in which teacher's no longer own their classroom, but instead rotate their class among a wide array of individual learning experiences, a host of unique learning environments appealing to the many different intelligences of their many students.
Here are the 14 typologies:
1. The Bar-Restaurant
2. The Campfire
3. The Digital Environment
4. The Garden
5. The Interview Booth
6. The Kiosk
7. The Library Cafe
8. The Map Room
9. The Sandbox
10. The Speaker's Corner
11. The Tent
12. The TV Array
13. The War Room
14. The Workshop
Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, Basic Books, New York (1999)
Wagman and Miller, Nested Reciprocities: The Organism–Environment System in Perception–Action and Development, (2003)
Dent-Read, C. and P. Zukow-Goldring, “Introduction: Ecological Realism, Dynamic Systems, and Epigenetic Systems Approaches to Development”, in C. Dent-Read and P. Zukow-Goldring (eds.), Evolving Explanations of Development: Ecological Approaches to Organism-Environment Systems, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, (1997)