News and Events
A Snapshot of Smart Green School Projects and Activities 2009 - 2010
Useful Links
Download list of useful websites
2009
October 29 - a busy day for the research team with
1 the launch of TAKE 8 – Learning Spaces,
2 the opening of the Talking Spaces symposium and
3 the first meeting with partners for another ARC grant called Future Proofing Schools.
1 TAKE 8 – Learning Spaces textbook
Architext bookshops (Melbourne and Sydney), or download an order form.
The text was launched at the Talking Spaces Symposium by Chris Wardlaw, Deputy Secretary, Office of Policy, Research and Innovation, DEECD. Price $40 (includes GST) plus $9.90 handling and postage.
2 Talking Spaces Symposium, October 29-31
Presentations, site visits and a workshop sold out to a mix of architects and educators. Early research conducted by the Smart Green Schools ARC Strategic Partnership project team members had shown there was a need for opportunities to be provided for architects and educators to discuss their perspectives on spatial literacy and pedagogical discourse. The $20K ABP Faculty Strategic Initiatives Grant enabled a Talking Spaces Symposium in October. With a desire to provide a forum where communication occurred, numbers were restricted to 100 – comprising architects, designers, facilities managers and teachers. A Research Assistant was employed, symposium brochures produced, publicity arranged, guest speakers booked, and refreshments and transport for site visits organised.
The aim of the symposium, ie to ensure that the stakeholders involved in the provision and use of new and refurbished spaces could meet to hear alternative points of view, was achieved.
Outline of Sessions
1. Peter Stewart (General Manager, Infrastructure Division, DEECD)
2. Elizabeth Hartnell-Young (Group Manager, Research Branch, DEECD)
3. Kenn Fisher (Director Rubida Research)
4. June Factor (Senior Fellow, Australia Centre, The University of Melbourne)
5. Julia Atkin (Director, Learning by Design)
3 Future Proofing Schools Research project team’s first meeting, October 29
Investigators, Clare Newton, Tom Kvan, Dominique Hes, Kenn Fisher, Margaret Grose and Sue Wilks will be working with a team of linkage partners on research into prefabricated learning environments. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant scheme has funded $470,000 to the Future-Proofing Schools proposal for a three-year research program.
Industry Partners on Future Proofing Schools |
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Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (Vic) |
CEFPI (Victorian Chapter) |
Department of Education and Training (WA) |
Hayball Architects |
NSW Department of Education and Training |
Mary Featherston Design |
Department of Employment, Education and Training (NT) |
TeeCH Project |
Department of Education, Training and the Arts (Queensland) |
Rubida Research |
Catholic Education Office Melbourne |
Office of the Victorian Government Architect DPC |
DEECD presentation, October 28
Clare Newton and Sue Wilks presented on the composition, activities and early findings of the Smart Green Schools team to the Infrastructure team at the Department of Education and Early Childhood Education.
CEFPI Conference (Australasia) Darwin, September
SGS PhD students, Ben Cleveland, Ken Woodman conducted a workshop at the Council for Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI) Australasian Conference in Darwin, September 2009. The objective of their workshop was to bring together design professionals (architects) and educators (teachers and school principals) to discuss issues pertaining to the design and use of school learning environments. In line with the Conference’s key focus areas, the workshop identified with the theme, ‘Creating the Future, Challenging the Past: Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Leadership’. The key aspects addressed were, ‘Student Learning’, ‘Culture and Change’, ‘Setting Vision and Strategy’ and ‘Excellence in Pedagogy’. The workshop engaged delegates in an exploration of the future of school learning environments. Delegates were given an un-named and un-dated school plan and were asked to respond to the model and discuss the following questions: How can school spaces be improved to support learning? What is currently impacting the design of school learning environments? Are there conflicts arising between these elements? The resultant discussions generated by the workshop activity were deemed a great success used again in one of the Talking Spaces Symposium sessions.
CEFPI Conference (International) Washington, October
Clare Newton introduced the TAKE 8 publication to the CEFPI international conference. An aim of TAKE 8 is to capture current thinking around learning spaces’ using a mix of authors, case studies and interviews.
INFORMAL LEARNING – a travelling studio, The University of Virginia, October
With Tom Kvan (Dean of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne), Clare and Nicola Dovey took a studio design group of 12 students to a U21 workshop at the famous University of Washington campus designed by Thomas Jefferson. Working with University of Virginia students, the architecture students from 3 years of the course tackled some complex issues around the design of effective informal or non-timetabled learning spaces within a campus environment.
WORKSHOP A city high school redesign workshop, August
Led by APAI student, Ben Cleveland, investigators and linkage partners worked with a team of teachers to help resolve a difficult open plan teaching space. In a morning session elected staff members met to define and articulate a shared vision for an existing space that had not been performing well. In the afternoon they presented the outcomes of their discussions to SGS partners (including Richard Leonard – Hayball Architects -and Mary Featherston – Featherston Design) regarding:
- Social organisation – desired relationships
- Contextualising learning & use of technology – connecting ‘school’ and the ‘real world’
- Why educate students? For what purpose?
- What do students need to know, understand and be able to do?
- How do students learn? How can this be supported?
- Following some general discussion about the SGS Project’s research findings to this date and the morning’s work, the group broke into three interdisciplinary working parties. During the next hour and a half each group tackled the problem of re-designing the space. Approaches and design concepts were discussed with ideas on how best to proceed.
Emerging socio-spatial learning assemblages
Kim Dovey has been undertaking a spatial analysis of a range of innovative school plans as a means of trying to understand emerging socio-spatial patterns connecting architecture to pedagogy. This is a technique with some antecedents in both Alexander’s pattern language and Hillier’s spatial syntax analysis, but also informed by theories of complex adaptive assemblages. (See adjacent example.)
One goal is to develop a socio-spatial language shared between architects and educators involving interconnectivity and overlapping between spaces and functions.
Measuring school thermal comfort
Dominique Hes, Chief Investigator with the Smart Green Schools project, has data coming in from two case study schools – Woodleigh School and Thornbury High School (Victoria). Both buildings reported high levels of comfort without heating in the winter. She has interviewed the designer and the teachers on how the monitoring equipment was used and using the buildings as teaching tools. She has found that not only is environmentally responsible design important, but that engagement of the teacher and a tailored curriculum are also integral to making the most of the educational opportunity of the buildings.
The Woodleigh project involved students from years 8 to 11 scaffolded by the teachers. A teacher described an example of this process in the students’ involvement in materials selection:
… the process of them doing this made them think about how sustainable solutions could be used in a building … but we made sure that we didn’t give them the answers... we gave them the groundwork … concepts, tools, ideas but they needed to put these together to form their own solutions for the building.
Interestingly the two Thornbury buildings showed that there are important teaching opportunities for buildings that are overtly sustainable. Those buildings that are not carrying their ‘greenness’ on their sleeves are used without reflection on its performance. Teaching/learning opportunities are lost. The Thornbury buildings and the reflections of the teachers demonstrate that using buildings as 3D textbooks to support the teaching for environmental sustainability is an effective tool. As one teacher said: “once they have been there and have sat in it, they get it”.
… the process of them doing this made them think about how sustainable solutions could be used in a building … but we made sure that we didn’t give them the answers... we gave them the groundwork … concepts, tools, ideas but they needed to put these together to form their own solutions for the building.
Photo: Thornbury High School General Purpose Classroom (Photographer: Scott Haskins)
Learning spaces as a discussion between designers and educators
As an architect and academic, Clare Newton has been struck by the different languages used by the disciplines of architecture and education each with its own shorthand for capturing and communicating complex ideas. Architects and educators come from different tribes with different ways of viewing the world. These different languages support effective communication when we are working within an academic discipline but can alienate and confuse when we are attempting to work in interdisciplinary ways.
Drawing on some moments of uncertainty, if not critical moments, she explored a cross-section of difficulties and opportunities being experienced by various stakeholders working towards the design of new learning spaces. During the research process for Smart Green Schools she has found that the research focus on space, sustainability and education has needed to expand to include other issues such as leadership, school structure; timetabling and professional development. Clare believes that the design of new learning environments is best considered as the design for new learning experiences within a context of increasingly portable ICT. As such, design is best perceived as a partnership between educators, students, design professionals and ICT experts.
Group work and collaborative research activity settings Ascot Vale PS school refurbishment project. (Drawing – Woodhead Architects)
Exploring teaching and learning environments
Ben Cleveland (PhD student) has recently completed a journal article entitled, ‘Exploring teaching and learning environments that support the personalisation of the learning experience: creating equitable pedagogical spaces’. In this paper he introduces the concept of equitable pedagogical spaces and discusses the potential educational gains that may result from the creation of physical learning environments that are designed to facilitate equity of instruction.
Floor plan. Ascot Vale Primary School Multi-age Learning Centre (Prep -Year 6) - school refurbishment project. 100 students. (Drawing - Woodhead Architects)
The paper examines whether the quality of learning experiences in schools can be improved through the creation of learning environments that are intended to facilitate equity of instruction at the micro level of the ‘learning situation’. The paper suggests that the reorganisation of physical spaces in schools may facilitate a dramatic shift in the ability of schools to authentically personalise student learning.
A large country high school
Ken Woodman (a PhD student) is looking at the relationship between the space and learning with an emphasis on flexibility at a large rural high school. He is observing and mapping several learning spaces over the year, and interviewing teachers, students, architects and agencies. He is asking them about their current and ideal learning spaces, what flexibility means to them, and whether space and flexibility affects learning. He is in the process of setting up an action research project to involve teachers and students in using their spaces more flexibly to see what the affect is. He is interested in finding out what and who affects flexible learning spaces and whether they believe that flexible space directly.
LEaRN and the Karolinska Institute
A team from the Karolinska Institute came to the faculty from 16-19 November to meet with Tom Kvan who is supporting them as they develop their teaching and medical facilities. The Karolinska Institute (Sweden) is one of Europe’s largest medical institutes. Kenn Fisher and other members of the SGS team did a workshop on learning spaces. It was interesting to better understand the role of the hospital as a teaching institution and the need for small teaching spaces to be interspersed within the hospital to allow confidential conversations between the teaching teams and students. Attendees from the new Children’s Hospital also described the need for the hospital to provide schooling for young patients.
Please send orders to Stephan Taylor, Smart Green Schools Project, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010.
Price per copy $30AU (includes GST and postage and handling)
Please make cheques payable to: The University of Melbourne (ABN:84002705224)
2010
Engaging Spaces
Since the Partners’ meeting in November, Ben Cleveland (PhD student) has focussed on completing his fieldwork data collection at three Melbourne schools. He is now writing chapters of his dissertation. To wrap up the action research phase of the research at one High School, Ben ran a focus group forum attended by the school’s leaders, teachers and members of its building design team. This session prompted the staff to meet again to further discuss progress and Ben attended as an observer. Data collection from an inner suburban Primary School and another High School is being analysed by Ben ahead of writing the results chapters of the thesis.
Re-Placing Flexibility: An investigation into flexibility in learning spaces and learning
Ken Woodman (PhD student) has completed his fieldwork at a case study secondary school in north-east Victoria. This has involved the spatial mapping of individual learning spaces and interviewing students, teachers, architects and facilities providers. During the last term of 2009 he worked with a group of six Yr 9 students investigate the influence of flexibility on their learning. Through an action research project, the group assessed their learning space, planned interventions, and acted the plan had reflected upon the results. The plan included students creating their own variety of learning spaces by utilising flexible furnishings some of which they sourced and purchased themselves.
Ken has commenced the write-up stage of the dissertation. Preliminary analysis of data collected over the past year reinforces the view that flexibility is a contested term that requires a re-definition. As one interviewee put it: ‘I think it is the most misused word in education at the moment because I think we all know what we think it means but we all have different definitions’. He has split the term into three main elements: spatial arrangement, corporeal movement and functional utility. There is a further element of time layering to accommodate long-term use changes. However he believes that this should be confined to the term ‘adaptability’ as suggested by the OECD. The inherent danger in using the term, ‘flexibility’ is the lack of a consistent definition.
CEFPI events
Ben Cleveland and Ken Woodman will be presenting an overview of their research projects, including early findings, at the CEFPI Education Leaders and Facility Planners Conference in Hobart, 29-30 March.
Ben Cleveland is also involved in the CEFPI Mayfield Project and has been collaborating with a team of young designers from architecture firms in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth and educators from Perth on an interactive presentation for the CEFPI Australasian Conference to be held in Perth May 26-28. Peter Lippman of JCJ Architecture in New York is the project’s international mentor.
Ben and Ken have also been involved in organising an upcoming CEFPI workshop. Called ‘Stuff it’ the workshop is to be held between 11am and 1pm on February 25 at The University of Melbourne in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. The session will focus on the importance of furniture in supporting rich and diverse learning experiences. Also collaborating on this project is Richard Leonard (Hayball Architecture), Mary Featherston (Mary Featherston Design), Jo Dane (Woods Bagot – formerly Monash University), Kellee Frith (Swinburne University), and Sandy Law (Law Architects). The idea for this session arose during the Talking Spaces Symposium.
Clare Newton, Dominique Hes and Sue Wilks will be attending the May CEFPI conference in Perth where they will meet with interstate Partners of the Future Proofing Schools ARC Linkage Grant.
SGS Research
Sue Wilks is investigating models and methods (GIS, CAD, grids) etc. that could be used in teacher education to increase teachers’ spatial literacy, a skill many feel they lack. Her research follows many architects’ comments that the teachers briefing them are not able to provide specific brief details because of their lack of spatial awareness. This research builds on her previous research in promoting visual literacy. She has co-written a chapter with J. Wilks ‘Active thinking, inquiry and creativity’ for the forthcoming Pearson text The Theory and Practice of Teaching: Working with Learners in a Knowledge Society (eds Lynch, D & Knight, B). She is also investigating the professional development being offered by DEECD to teachers in association with the BER. According to Katrina Reynen (Acting Manager Innovations and Best Practice Branch) this includes ‘Showcases’ - sessions where educators, usually Principles and a staff member, describe their preparation for, and move into, new learning spaces, and ‘Immersion Weeks’, where teachers, in preparation for moving into new learning spaces, are able to spend a week working with teachers who have already settled in to new spaces. The week usually comprises 3 days in the classroom and 2 days discussing issues that have arisen.
Smart Green Schools hosted a DEECD session featuring Professor Stephen Heppell, a UK consultant to government and industry, a board member of TeachersTV, and the founder of Ultralab, in the Woodward Centre on March 22. Stephen likes to forefront school students about policy matters and preferences in relation to educational spaces, preferred learning modes etc.
Monitoring the school environment
Dominique Hes with research assistant Pippa Howard, have begun investigating how to use environmental monitoring equipment in classrooms to collect data on performance and educate students about issues of sustainability. The equipment they have purchased includes:
- LogTags (temperature),
- sound level meters (acoustics),
- anemometers (ventilation),
- lux meters (light),
- an infrared laser gun (surface temperature)
- and energy usage meters.
Ethics approval has been submitted and consultation has begun with four schools regarding how the research objectives can be met.
For data collection, one methodology is being proposed for all schools and will involve Dominique or Pippa strategically operating the equipment over intensive one-week periods in Summer and Winter (for comparison).
To meet the second objective, which is to use the equipment to educate students about sustainability, unique and individual methodologies are being developed according to the varied responses of school and teacher consultations. At Thornbury High School, teachers have expressed interest in running a number of one-off and on-going activities. An example of a one-off activity could involve students using the equipment to investigate the thermal improvements of a space after double-glazing, by monitoring the room before and after. The on-going activities could involve the drama class, which runs for a semester, and propose using the equipment to explore how the performance space is modified for a show and what this means for energy usage and comfort. At Woodleigh School, teachers in the science department have expressed excitement towards incorporated the equipment into existing lesson plans. A separate idea involves a proposal to build a new eco-toilet and the opportunities that running an elective where students interested in architecture/ building/construction use the monitor equipment to inform their choices regarding design, materials, amount of glazing etc.
At Wangaratta High School, initial discussions suggest that the monitoring equipment may be incorporated into the existing STERL unit on Sustainability, while at Dandenong High School, teachers are interested in using the equipment during a Term 3 'Immersion Week' to explore one of their newly constructed teaching spaces.
Student at Woodleigh helps build wall using straw bales
… the process of them doing this made them think about how sustainable solutions could be used in a building… but we made sure that we didn’t give them the answers... we gave them the groundwork… concepts, tools, ideas but they needed to put these together to form their own solutions for the building.
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So, for example, they helped make the decision about the fly ash content of the concrete [this lowers embodied energy and thus environmental impacts such as Climate Change] and this gave them the practical understanding that you don’t just use ‘concrete’ – there are choices you can make. This carried over to decisions on timber use, etc. and this led to the students questioning the materials chosen for the retaining wall and coming up with the used car tyre concept. |
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Dean’s Lecture Series (Education)
Kenn Fisher (Rubida), a partner with the Smart Green Schools project is delivering a Dean’s Lecture (Graduate School of Education) on October 28, 2010 and the smart Green Schools project will link the Symposium to that event. Dr Catherine Milvain, a teacher educator, will co-ordinate speakers, spaces etc. for the event. Ty Goddard (British Council for School Environments, UK) has been invited. Ty was a visiting scholar with Smart Green Schools in 2009. Other speakers are tba.
COLLABORATIONS AND PARTNERSHIPS
The International Network of Teachers (iNet)
Another outcome of Talking Spaces (2009) has been SGS linking with iNet. Its members are Primary School educators. iNet, focusing on learning spaces in 2010, will be conducting three Learning Walks that will include schools with whom SGS team has forged links. These ‘Walks’ for Primary School Principals comprise a visit to a school that has new learning spaces and a session where SGS research staff will present specific content according to the groups’ needs. It is an efficient way of our making connections with schools. The first event was held at Carlton North Primary School and was attended by 27 teachers from a variety of schools. The format and content of the day were both evaluated by the attendees as being useful.
The Catholic Education Office
The Catholic Education Office in Melbourne and the South Australian Primary School Principals’ Association has approached Kenn Fisher and members of the SGS team to participate in workshops on school design.
TEMPLATE SCHOOLS: A triple-bottom-line review of the BER initiative.
Clare Newton, Robert Crawford, Sue Wilks, Ajibade Ayodeji Aibinu, Toong Khuan Chan, Lu Aye, Kenn Fisher, Dianne Chambers (Faculty of Education) requested an inter-disciplinary ARC seed funding from the University of Melbourne. The grant was one of 24 successful applications from a field of 104 and has received $50,000 to develop a rich methodology to evaluate the implementation and operation of similar template spaces in different locations with different users. Chris Jensen (Environmental Engineer) and Kate Goodman started as research assistants in mid-March.
TALKING SPACES 2: Dissolving Barriers to be held October 2010
Following the success of last year’s Symposium, The Smart Green Schools project will hold a follow up event. This time, as a result of feedback from participants of the 2009 event, the focus will be on linking internal and external learning spaces. It will be held on October 28 and 29 to correspond with Kenn Fisher’s Dean’s Lecture for the Education Faculty. Information and invitations will be circulated mid year.
* Friedlander, M [teacher Woodleigh School] pers. comm., 6 October 2009