For many years, the Reggio Emilia approach has been in the spotlight of the international debate on early childhood education, attracting countless devoted followers in preschool centres all over the world and inspiring an ever-increasing amount of pedagogical research. At the heart of this educational philosophy, space is considered a 'third…

Inclusive classrooms with complex, diverse students have many challenges, including that of effective physical design. One included element that should be considered is a relaxation station, designed to teach and promote everyday self-regulation skills within a calmer and more private space. A relaxation station is an essential component in every…

This article discusses video games as "attractors" to "affinity spaces." It argues that affinity spaces are key sites today where people teach and learn 21st Century skills. While affinity spaces are proliferating on the Internet as interest-and-passion-driven sites devoted to a common set of endeavors, they are not new, just…

The Professional Master's in Work Management for the Quality of the Built Environment, MPGTQAC has existed at the Universidade Santa Úrsula, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since the beginning of 2015. The body is one of the substantive elements of the course. It emerges as an elective discipline. The purpose of this communication is to refine the…

In Ohio today, approximately 250,000 students--rich and poor alike--are formally identified as gifted. Yet all too often, they sit in "grade-level" classrooms, bored with material they already know and held back by a system that too rarely challenges them. In this paper, Lyman Millard of the Bloomwell Group profiles Menlo Park Academy, a…

The COVID-19 pandemic posed, and continues to pose, many challenges to teaching and learning, most notably the need to pivot from traditional in-person course instruction and experiences to entirely virtual course delivery while maintaining course rigor and quality. Our guiding principle for course modification was the critical need for an…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to share lessons already learned and work currently in progress from one higher education institution's experiences of developing several flexible and technology-enhanced active learning spaces. It further proposes that the potential of such spaces can be more fully realised through the enactment of programmes…

This article addresses the position of community art practices and the role of practitioners in urban cracks. Community art practices raise possibilities for a reconceptualisation of the concept of community and an extension of the concept of art in public space. Urban cracks are conceptualised as spatial, temporal and relational manifestations of…

Good teachers know that the physical environment of the classroom can either enhance or hinder learning. Appropriate room preparation and arrangement of materials reserves class time for learning, while inadequate planning interferes with instruction by causing interruptions and delays. Before the year begins, effective classroom managers…

This article argues in favour of challenging "best practice" generally accepted by the architectural profession by embracing a responsive design approach for creating learning environments. Such an approach accepts that the environment shapes the learner, and that learners influence their environment. A responsive design approach would embrace the…

This case explores various entrepreneurial initiatives introduced by Dr. Ron Dow, dean of libraries, at a private, research-extensive institution in the northeastern United States. The case serves as an example of how entrepreneurial ideas can be applied within educational contexts, specifically, the academic support context of the university…

Student learning is directly related to classroom control established the first week of school (Wong and Wong 2001)--what you do the first day counts, and what you do the first 10 minutes counts even more. This article shares the advanced planning aspects of classroom management that should be in place before students enter the classroom for the…

This article explores how to adopt a gender perspective in the analysis of educational facilities. It argues that social relations are influenced by the physical environment, and that social and physical aspects are often interlinked. Although difficult to measure, including a gender perspective in international research and other projects on…

What features of the physical environment in video game arcades lead kids to be so engaged? How can analysis of arcade space inform language arts teachers' decisions about designing classroom environments? This article presents an analysis of physical space in video game arcades and participants' positions therein to suggest how language arts…

Many elementary school teachers with a passion for teaching social studies are finding that the administratively defined time for direct instruction in social studies is becoming increasingly restricted. Fortunately for the teacher who is convinced that social and civic education should be at the center of the elementary school curriculum, where…