It’s true that students seek out conventional structures that contribute to their overall feeling of being in a learning environment. But Nesdale argues that the best learning designs are the ones that go unnoticed.
News and business analysis for Professionals in International Education
Have some pie!
How does space planning enable better learning outcomes and economic gains?
Photo: HOK. “A person needs to walk into a room and a space needs to tell them how it’s going to be used,” she says. “This can be that through colour, lighting and furniture settings.”
“A person needs to walk into a room and a space needs to tell them how it’s going to be used”
“It should be prescriptive,” she adds.
Affecting attitude
Not surprisingly, research shows that behaviour, including vandalism, truancy and attendance improves when learning environments improve. Amjad Khanche, Chief Executive of Sydney-based AIPE has seen first-hand how the school’s new urban campus has directly affected the conduct of its English language, undergraduate and Masters students.
“Usually in the private sector you try to get as many bums in seats as you possibly can, but that’s something we tried to completely walk away from,” he says of the nine-floor campus AIPE opened in central Sydney this summer.
Khanche says the school sacrificed two classrooms on each floor to create break-out areas and more fluid traffic flow, invested in high speed broadband infrastructure and converted a ground level parking garage into a recreational area with basketball and badminton courts.
“It was a hard decision to take 600-700 square metres and not have a classroom there or not have a teaching facility there but it actually keeps all of our other levels occupied,” he says.
He adds that student engagement has improved “dramatically”, with attendance rates up from around 70-72%, to 86-87%.
“People can learn anywhere but they very often learn better in groups and very often informal groups and so half a dozen people with laptops sitting around having coffee is a really good learning environment,” comments Peter Clegg, Senior Partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios in the UK.
“There’s a desire to get people out of curricula-based ivory towers and into more areas where there’s a lot more cross-cultural cross-subject area discussions going on.”
Bringing the outside in
Widening the scope, universities themselves often must integrate into a surrounding environment to further enhance the sense of place it creates for its students.
“Campus universities see themselves at a disadvantage because they’re often separate from the real downtown of life”
“Campus universities see themselves at a disadvantage because they’re often separate from the real downtown of life,” says Clegg. “There’s an interest in the integration of university environments with urban environments.”
With this integration, universities also benefit from economic and social sustainability. Clegg draws on an example of a university using ground floor space for commercial partnerships with banks, bookshops and cafes.
“Quite often we find that ground floor space should bleed in from the street. It’s a good way of funding a development, and it brings urban life right into the heart of campus. It should be public space that is actually part of the city,” he says.
Using the city as an extended classroom also contributes to the student’s unique experience of a place. With locations in the heart of Toronto, Ilan Cohen, executive director of ILAC, says the Canadian English school chain focuses on leveraging what the city has to offer.
“We don’t have a café in the school by virtue of being downtown,” he says. “Why reinvent the wheel when students can walk outside and have one of the best pedestrian areas and cafes in the city?”
Enterprising objectives
The driving force behind why most international and language students go overseas to study is to be more competitive in the global workforce. It makes sense then that education spaces reflect modern work environments.
At the University of East London, for example, Gensler has implanted a multi modal workspace into a multidisciplinary university setting. “Drawing inspiration from the tech sector, there’s a reception area and discussion space, board rooms, and small phone booths to sit and focus, supported by meeting rooms,” says Nesdale. There is no traditional classroom, rather a space that allows students, teachers and businesses to cultivate new ideas.
At AIPE, corporate presentation models were the inspiration for their lecture halls. QR codes are given to students allowing them to interact and write on multiple screens situated around the room.
Similarly, introducing real world technology into the classroom was why Rubenstein at Language in Group didn’t invest in interactive white boards.
“People don’t need to be good at speaking English in our classrooms. They need to be able to use it when they leave our classrooms. It’s the same with technology. You never use an interactive whiteboard when you leave the classroom so the obvious thing was to incorporate phones and iPads into the lessons.”
Exporting an image
Often education institutions are limited to creating inspiring learning environments in existing spaces, be it rented floors in newly built commercial towers or ivy-clad superstructures erected 100 years ago.
The boom in demand in the international school sector, however, means that operators are scrambling to expand capacity, which allows them to begin with a blank canvas.
However, starting from scratch can prove to be more challenging.
Most international schools are extensions of already established British, American or Australian institutions. Educators then are tasked with recreating their schools’ sense of place in a wholly different cultural context.
Going through a due diligence process before sitting down to design the space is critical, explains Simon Lucas of project management firm EC Harris.
“A lot of people, particularly from the UK, who are moving out to China or wherever are thinking ‘we’ve got this school that’s been operating for 100 years, we know how to run a school, and we’ll just pick this up and replicate it over there’ and that quite often doesn’t work,” he says.
“Forget the design and think about how you operate – what you do, what you want to change,” he advises. “All of those things allow you to then capture that ethos in a new way because you want to take this as an opportunity to do new things. Then we need to look at how the design works and the cultural context in which the design is going to sit.”
Most international school development is taking place in the Middle East and Asia, adding another challenge to designing adequate new learning spaces: climate.
“Working in the tropics, large areas of open spaces aren’t hugely helpful because they’re just impossible to hang around in for very long,” says Stefan Jakobek at HOK architecture firm.
Lucas adds that if you don’t design for a courtyard or something that mimics it in Qatar, for example, “you’re going to have massive overheating in June”.
And in Beijing or Shanghai, he advises schools to have very large interior circulation spaces for when kids can’t go outside because pollution levels are too high.
“You need to think of how you are going to maintain the quality of the environment when you’ve got kids trapped inside up to maybe half the year.”
While the international school market is not wanting for students, a supply of quality teaching staff is not as readily available and .starting with a clean slate means international schools can make choice investments that will contribute to their international appeal.
“The quality of the environment is important for attracting teachers at the higher end of the market. If you try to run an international school on a shoe-string you’ll probably become stuck”
“The quality of the working environment for the teachers is important for attracting teachers at the higher end of the market,” says Jakobek. “If you try to run an international school on a shoe-string you’ll probably become stuck.”
Catering to an international crowd on the post-secondary level also requires a reassessment of resources. Foreign students are becoming more savvy shoppers looking for value for money and long-term outcome. Universities who are listening to their needs offer them higher quality, more spacious accommodation and world-class research facilities.
“When you’re charging a graduate student £15,000 then you need to look after them a bit more,” says Clegg. “It comes down to providing a bit more of a home away from home than you would a domestic undergraduate.”
This is an abbreviated version of a feature that originally appeared in Issue 5 of The PIE Review. To read the full article and more from the magazine click here.
Pages: 1 2
Still looking? Find by category:
Add your comment
Latest Tweets
2 Responses to How does space planning enable better learning outcomes and economic gains?