Governments have invested significantly in recent times in designing buildings for the future based on the notion that new ways of teaching and learning are required for the modern learner. Such designs have been well informed by contemporary educational and architectural theory and embed learning technologies. Technology and flexible learning spaces have been uncritically linked to innovative teaching and improved student learning outcomes but there has been little empirical research that actually tells us what happens in redesigned learning spaces. This text presents critical examples of the effects of redesign in twelve schools. They illustrate how flexibility, connectivity and temporality interact pedagogically and the conditions that are conducive to innovative practices and their sustainability.
Building on the detailed case studies the book:
- illustrates the complexity of teaching and learning and shows how systems can support schools
- interrogates assumptions about what constitutes innovation, leadership, collaborative learning, and learning outcomes with regard to spatiality and connectivity
- also, because the sample of schools is across high and low socio economic locations, as well as primary, secondary and community based schools, the study has much to say about social-spatial inequality.
In addition, while the data derives from conventional case study approaches the research team also developed specific new visual methodological tools to facilitate student voice. In particular, the methodologies indicated significant potential for enabling students and teachers to become co-producers of knowledge about how they teach and learn, while researching their own practices as a form of educational inquiry.
The text concludes with consideration of the implications of redesign for policy and practice, arguing that flexible learning spaces, as learning technologies, can, but do not necessarily, enable pedagogical reform. Furthermore, the authors argue that the focus has to be first and foremost on innovative pedagogies informed by collaborative teaching within these spaces, as a necessary condition under which practice may improve student learning.
About the Author:
Jill Blackmore
Professor Jill Blackmore is Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University; and Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation. Her research interests include globalisation, education policy and governance across all sectors of education - universities, TAFE, schools and community; educational leadership and reform; local/global articulations of internationalisation; organisational change and innovation; teachers' and academics' work; and the changing relations between education and the individual, community, family and the state.Her recent work has focused on redesigning schools and leadership, focusing on issues of spatiality, networking and inequality. Relevant Australian Research Council projects are: -Leadership in the entrepreneurial University: Disengagement and diversity; Redesigning Schools and Leadership; and Inter-agency collaboration supporting resilient students, families and schools in disadvantaged communities. Publications include Performing and Re-forming Leaders: gender, educational restructuring and organisational change (with Judyth Sachs 2007, SUNY); Repositioning the university: Changing governance and academic work (co-editors Brennan. M and Zipin, L., Sense Publishers, 2010), and forthcoming Feminists theorising social justice in educational administration and leadership forthcoming, Routledge). She is co-editor (with P. Thomson and H. Gunter) of a new Routledge book series Critical Theories and Educational Leadership. Blackmore is past president of the Australian Association of Research in Education and currently Managing Editor of the Australian Educational Researcher and on the Editorial Boards of six international journals.
Deb Bateman
Dr Debra Bateman is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University. She is interested in the ways that space affords and challenges the ways that learning and teaching occur. Dr Bateman is an educational futurist, examining change within policy, with a specific focus on curriculum. She has successfully completed a number of funded research grants, and has publications across the areas of futuresand technologies. Dr Bateman has won a number of Australian awards for her outstanding contribution to teaching and learning.
Anne Cloonan
After working as a primary school teacher and with the Department of Education and Early Childhood Education Victoria, Dr Cloonan is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University in language and literacy education. Her research addresses teacher and student learning as they intersect with emerging technologies and language and literacy education. In this area of increasing centrality, her work explores the complexities of literacy education in transition shaped and the opportunities and limitations of new technologies. Anne works with teachers for deep and coordinated teaching and learning of multimodal texts and multimodal literacies and transformed views of what it means to be literate.
Mary Dixon
Associate Professor Dixon is Associate Head of School Research in the School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. Her research interests include pedagogy, identity curriculum, learning in space and place, teacher education, methodology and visual research methods. Current research projects include a Study on the Effectiveness Teacher Education (Australian Research Council Linkage with DEECD, QBS); Moments in Time: Australian History Curriculum (Australian Research Council Linkage with DEECD, HTAV, VCAA). Dixon has published across her fields of interest. She has worked as a researcher for several years in Singapore, Thailand and Nepal. She is associate editor of the Australian Educational Researcher.
Jill Loughlin
Dr Jill Loughlin is a Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy. She has 15 years experience as a primary and junior secondary teacher in both general and specialist classrooms. Her research to date has explored the impact of policy and practices of (re)design in education on the work and professional learning of teachers. Jill's research focuses on how transformational learning cultures emerge in formal and informal education settings and the relational aspects of teaching and learning. Using narrative and arts-based research methodologies, Jill has utilized visual technologies in researching with students and teachers. She has been involved in three major DEECD projects: the OECD Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) Research Project, a Literature Review of Connections between Built Spaces and Learning Outcomes, and as an evaluator of a professional development immersion pilot project in the ILE schools.
Jo O'Mara
Dr. Joanne O'Mara is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacy in the School of Education at Deakin University. Her research work encompasses the fields of Language arts and drama education, with a focus on innovative pedagogy. She is particularly interested in forwarding the use of drama pedagogy to enhance English and literacy teaching and the ways in which digital technologies might be used to do the same. A previous grant was Literacy in the Twenty First Century: Learning from Computer Games. She is active within the broader educational community, providing professional learning in schools and consultancy work to a range of education organizations. Her current research projects include Serious play: using digital games in school to promote literacy and learning in the twenty-first century and Literacy Learning in Playful Spaces: Using multi-modal strategies to develop literacy with young learners. She was involved in the Connections between built learning spaces and learning outcomes (DEECD) and OECD/CERI Research Study of Innovative Learning Environments (DEEECD/OECD) projects. Her forthcoming co-edited book with Catherine Beavis and Lisa McNeice on computer games and literacy will be published in July this year by Wakefield Press
Kim Senior
Kim Senior is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University. Her research interests centre upon challenging and questioning normative and normalizing educational discourses through a focus on pedagogy, practitioner and classroom-based inquiry and qualitative research methodology. She has over two decades experience as an educator in Australia and internationally (Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore) in community-based, secondary, vocational and higher education, with a significant publication record. She is a Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkage Grant that is investigating the Implementation of the History curriculum in primary schools across Eastern states of Australia. This project uses visual research methods to document and analyse classroom pedagogical data. Dr Senior has just completed writing a graphic novel based on her PhD thesis.
Author's Previous Publications
Blackmore's publications include Performing and Re-forming Leaders: gender, educational restructuring and organisational change (with Judyth Sachs 2007, SUNY); Repositioning the university: Changing governance and academic work (co-editors Brennan. M and Zipin, L., Sense Publishers, 2010), and forthcoming Feminists theorising social justice in educational administration and leadership forthcoming, Routledge). She is co-editor (with P. Thomson and H. Gunter) of a new Routledge book series Critical Theories and Educational Leadership.
