This phenomenological study explores the challenges 21 formerly incarcerated students identified as barriers to maintaining positive student experiences while enrolled in a college-in-prison program. Employing a thriving framework, the study identified several key challenges, including lack of study space, friction with prison staff, limited…

Seating assignments and arrangements are utilized in every school classroom. This qualitative study explored the perceptions that teachers have on seating assignments and arrangements to gain a better understanding of how they make design considerations which impact their students. The questions that guide this study are: How do elementary…

This paper is a portrait of a public elementary school classroom in light of the relationships, history, and ideas that have formed its physical space. In describing Judy Richard's classroom, the author shows how a creative teacher's commitment to seeing her classroom as a living space inevitably brings her to overstep the narrow limits of the…

Support for the modular system of building construction, touted in the second half of the 20th century as the best basis for academic library building design, appears to be waning. A study of "green" libraries in 2008 revealed that not only has energy conservation become important, but that spaces designed for users rather than books…

Space is both an asset and a burden for colleges and universities. On the one hand, space holds enormous value for institutions; their campuses and buildings are worth, in many cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Space is the medium in which the institution operates. Online courses have proven that education can be conducted anywhere, but most…

How can libraries best assess and improve user space, even if they are not in a position to undertake new construction or a major renovation? Staff at New Mexico State University used a variety of ethnographic methods to learn how our spaces were being used as well as what our users considered to be ideal library space. Our findings helped us make…

It has been nearly 400 years since Harvard College was created, and since then, thousands of colleges and universities have been built across the United States. From the classically inspired lines of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia to the Spanish architecture at Stanford University, every campus has its own personality. It's not unusual,…

Researchers in the Boston University Department of Environmental Health conducted a case study of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative, a project that provides funds and technical support to community groups dedicated to renovating schoolyards in Boston. Researchers described the process by which the Boston Schoolyard Initiative came into being and…

The Park School was designed to fit into and above an outcropping of rocks thus providing varied exterior spaces, reducing the building's scale, and freeing the open spaces for playing fields. (Author/MLF)

Many instructional activities are common to a wide variety of occupations and are easily accessible to all students at the Minuteman Regional Vocational-Technical High School. (Author/MLF)

This article describes the Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) in Boston, MA. MATCH had the highest overall pass rate of any comparable Boston high school: 89 percent of the class of 2005 passed both the English and math MCAS. That's not only 37 points higher than the Boston district average; it is 14 points better than the statewide…

In September 2003, Hudson High School in Hudson, Massachusetts launched two new civic development efforts--clustering and schoolwide governance--and moved into a new building designed to facilitate them. Clustering is designed to achieve a sense of community within a large school by creating small communities of 100 to 150 students. To create…

This publication describes the development and operation of the scheduling plan developed by the Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, school system. The plan, designed to maximize the use of available facilities and to expand the curriculum offering, combines a fifty-hour instructional week, alternative learning opportunities throughout the community, an…

A curriculum used in teaching a mixed group of five-, six-, and seven-year olds is presented in chart form which contains sections for each academic area in an ungraded primary classroom. The charts are divided into the following columns: materials, activities, participation, and comments. Room arrangements, shown in diagrams, are the following:…

The Massachusetts Public School Improvement Act of 1985 charges the Board of Education's Early Childhood Advisory Council with conducting a comprehensive study of future trends in early childhood programs and reporting the findings to the Board of Education annually. This second report provides information in the following areas: (1) national…