Learning Spaces

A vision of students today

Have you seen this video about university students' views on their education? It begins with a comment by Marshall McLuhan. If McLuhan did say this in 1967, then the scary thing is the quote could’ve been talking about me – I was one of those bewildered children learning in that 19th century environment that McLuhan talks about – in a secondary setting - looking out the window wondering why class was so tedious. At the same time I thought almost everything we were studying was interesting. Just the school bit was boring and slow. When I went back into the classroom not too many years after leaving school as a trainee teacher, I naively wondered why the classrooms were the same. I’d expected radical change - after only about 4 years. That was in the 1970s. Thirty years later and it’s business as usual: in both the K-12 and higher education sectors development is patchy.

Chris Johnson and Cuprien Lomas in ‘Design of the learning space: Learning and design principles’ (Educause Review, July/August 2005, 16-28) talk about the way the physical spaces we build for learning reflect the values of the institutions that provide them. For instance, do large lecture theatres, where students sit passively day after day taking down notes, reflect the educational values we most want to encourage in students? Does frequent use of this space set up a pattern of dependence that is difficult to change? How many of us are modelling active, collaborative, independent thinking in lecture halls? Have you put yourself on the other side of that lectern lately? This is not to say that lectures don’t have a place – but their continued dominance in the expected everyday pattern of students in higher education astounds me.

'It's not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest'. Charles Darwin (Source)