This brief analysis is a call for action with fresh opportunities for leadership and innovation. Teachers, teacher educators, and their allies need to take stock of needs and opportunities to serve as program architects and ambassadors. This is a game-changer because, until now, professionals were charged with faithful implementation and advocacy…

This article synthesises longitudinal deliberations between two architects and an educator, seeking common ground about learning spaces in schools. As the impetus for new and refurbished school buildings continues in New Zealand, it is timely to unpack instinctual disciplinary practices to better understand space and place in schools. We undertook…

The government school has held an integral part in the Australian idea of progressive society, a locus of community definition and pride that is the backbone of social infrastructure. Yet, it took decades from the establishment of the Australian British colonies from 1788 to establish a system of general education. The Australian school had modest…

This paper undertakes an analysis of the "smart school" as a building that both senses and manages bodies through sensory data. The authors argue that smart schools produce a situation of ubiquitous sensation in which learning environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data…

School bathrooms are liminal spaces where notions about intimacy and one's public persona are configured and where issues such as sex and gender are centrally experienced and proved. These learnings are partially scripted by architectural design and pedagogical rules but not fully captured by them. In this article, I intend to historicise these…

The purpose of this conceptual work is to explore ways in which K-12 classrooms can be used as a physical and abstract model for society in which students can practice becoming effective, participatory citizens. The authors framed this manuscript around ways in which the K-12 learning environment can be transformed into "a miniature community…

This issue of the "European Journal of Education" examines a crucially important, though largely overlooked, area in educational design research: architecting and building physical educational environments. Effective policymaking in school design necessitates the negotiated, shared and timely input of key educational stakeholders,…

People with visual impairment often rely on their residual vision when interacting with their spatial environments. The goal of visual accessibility is to design spaces that allow for safe travel for the large and growing population of people who have uncorrectable vision loss, enabling full participation in modern society. This paper defines the…

In this article, I read Hilgard Hall as a text of whiteness to explore how one campus building at the University of California, Berkeley renders racial power relations in the academy. Through the lens of critical whiteness studies, I examine Hilgard Hall's namesake, architecture features, and weighty epigraph, "to rescue for human society the…

While the architecture, educational ideas and material culture of nineteenth century school buildings have been properly investigated, we know less about the actual processes involved in designing and building schools. These processes are explored in this chapter, allowing the influence of local decision-makers, school designers, builders and…

Future learning spaces (FLSs), such as immersive virtual environments, have expanded the architectural studio beyond traditional spaces, offering new affordances for learning communities (LCs) to enculturate design practices. These developments raise a need to assess how different spaces foster intended learning activities. In response, we…

This paper examines the design of school buildings in the last decade of the Portuguese dictatorship (1964-1974) and its relationship with the country's educational policies, geared towards the objectives of industrialisation and economic growth. It also considers the economic constraints placed on the building of schools, the technical and…

This paper examines how drawing classes can contribute to moral education in primary schools. This paper uses class observation, interviews with teachers and students, and analysis of students' work to highlight how the students articulate moral concerns by drawing and designing future-oriented architectures, which aims at preventing natural and…

This article explores the ideological drivers behind learning environment discourses with a particular focus on the built environment and the ways in which the built environment narrates explicit and implicit ideology. The built environment reinforces ways of thinking in the day-to-day ordinary activities of the school space. However, it is…

As digital media have become more embedded in all aspects of architects' design and representational work, a gap has been identified between architectural practices and the ways in which architecture is presented in museum exhibitions, which often rely on traditional media. In this chapter, we study digital creative processes in an architect firm,…