The "sage on a stage" is looking increasingly like a potted plant. While there will always be a role for a great teacher who can command a room, colleges and universities today are putting greater emphasis on student collaboration, small work groups, and interactive learning. Unfortunately, the classrooms of yesterday, with their focus on a single…

Things are changing. For starters, ebooks, apps, and the web are now a part of students' daily lives. So how do school librarians determine the best way to turn their library space into a learning center that is right for today's rapidly changing digital world? In this article, the author suggests five design considerations that school librarians…

This paper investigates enactments of human subjectivities with a focus on how subjectivities may be studied if spatiality and temporality are taken up as constituting forces in the production of subjectivities. By reading poststructuralist feminist theorising, agential realism and empirical material diffractively through each other I re-situate…

This paper proposed a method for developing capacity for lifelong learning in open spaces, defined here as places without predefined learning structures or objectives, through the cultivation of aesthetic literacy. This discussion will be situated within fieldwork performed by the authors in Helsinki, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia, in 2013. Based…

School districts in Canada are part of a growing international movement that puts strong emphasis on school design to serve the diverse needs and learning styles of students for the 21st century economy. Diverse, purposeful spaces for individual and group activities, "schools within schools," support for cross-disciplinary collaboration…

There is a growing consensus that an appropriate classroom environment will aid the performance of the pupil with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). There are, however, very few design guidelines available when considering ASD and the school environment. Such guidelines that do exist tend only to be in general terms. Therefore, this article seeks to…

This study provides a novel observational method to observe repetitive seating patterns chosen by students in a classroom. Although prior work that relied on self-reports suggests that students claim the same seats repeatedly, the main hypothesis of the study was that in a repeated use of a public space, people tend to occupy the same position,…

The aim of the current study was to examine the assessments of parents of the quality of early childhood education (ECE) in Greece. Five hundred and fifty three preschoolers' parents participated in this study providing quality and importance ratings based on the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale Parent Questionnaire (ECERSPQ) for the…

This report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on "Participatory Design of Academic Libraries," held at the University of Rochester's River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and…

This paper addresses the role of school ground as outdoor learning resources for environmental education. The opportunities to use school ground are particularly prominent in tropical climate, where the weather permits plenty of outdoor learning activities. A study in primary schools in Jakarta explored the relationship between the spatial aspects…

This article focuses on how girls create places of meaning and opportunity through collective movement. It is based on an ethnographic study of the everyday experiences and mobility of 10-13 year old girls living in a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. The girls ventured for a sense of freedom and a "place of their own" to pursue their…

As a society, we have a responsibility to provide an inclusive built environment. As part of the need to promote inclusion, there is now a growing trend to place pupils with special educational needs (SEN) into a mainstream school setting. This is often facilitated by providing a specialist SEN resource base located within the mainstream school.…

This study explores how kindergarten spaces and materiality can be vital for children's exploration of participation and how the physical environment enables children to interact and position themselves in play and meaning making. Methodologically this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with two groups of 2- to 5-year-old children in two…

Wayfinding is the method by which humans orient and navigate in space, and particularly in built environments such as cities and complex buildings, including public libraries. In order to wayfind successfully in the built environment, humans need information provided by wayfinding systems and tools, for instance architectural cues, signs, and…

This is the first article in a six-part series on the elements of a collaborative classroom: furniture, social media, video/web conferencing tools, collaborative software, interactive devices, and mobile devices. With most universities facing tight budgets, convincing administrators to invest in expensive new classrooms is a challenge. Many higher…