The Sarasota County School Building Program 1955-1960 is revisited through a detailed examination of how architects and educators collaborated to design an innovative group of public schools that provided opportunities for the transformation of learning space. This multi-dimensioned examination is grounded in an historical contextualization of the…

Through their bodily interaction with the designed environment, disabled people can detect obstacles and appreciate spatial qualities architects may not be attuned to. While designers in several disciplines acknowledge disabled people as lead or critical users, in architectural practice their embodied experience is hardly recognized as a valuable…

This paper reports on a number of blended learning activities conducted in two subjects of a Master of Architecture degree at a major Australian university. The subjects were related to "professional practice" and as such represent a little researched area of architectural curriculum. The research provides some insight into the student…

The Decorated School is an interdisciplinary research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The article situates current academic and wider community engagement concerning the purpose and significance of art as part of the school building and grounds in an historical context. It goes on to discuss emerging patterns of…

The inkling was there all along. Back in 2005, in "A Whole New Mind," author Daniel Pink included design--"utility enhanced by significance"--as an essential aptitude for the 21st-century learner. Some attentive independent school educators began looking around. If forward-thinking independent schools are to produce new minds, they maintained,…

Across most of Oklahoma's gently rolling prairie countryside these artistically uninformed structures often provide the only vertical punctuation to a landscape otherwise made of mostly horizontal lines. One of the pleasures of teaching architecture is to participate in the intellectual progress of students--many of whom hail from rural areas and…

At the University of Canberra, Australia, the design and architecture faculty are trialling a range of approaches to incorporating learning technologies in the first year foundation studio to improve student learning outcomes. For this study researchers collected information on students' access to their assignment information and feedback from the…

Transition from small, independent LANs into larger enterprise managed infrastructures is becoming more prominent in academia, business and government. Consolidation of IT resources into larger, more disciplined, and more professionally managed environments has significant advantages however they do bring their own unique issues to solve in order…

When architects discuss the educational facilities of the next century and beyond, the conversation turns to collaborative spaces. They envision flexible and fluid spaces that will encourage creative and critical thinking, and free students to communicate clearly about the task at hand. While these are admirable ideals, there are some fundamental…

Problem solving is essential to everyone's life. People survive if they are nourished, sheltered, and protected--and they construct ways to obtain nourishment, shelter, and protection through problem solving. Though problems vary in complexity--survival at the one end and the pursuit of comfort at the other--we are reliant on our ability to…

In 2010, the (then new) government cancelled the "Building Schools for the Future" (BSF) programme and instituted the James Review. The Review pointed to waste of money in a range of projects and also the lack of national information available on the state of schools' buildings. Since then, the government has announced the "Priority…

Inspired by Ontario's burgeoning interest in postsecondary student mobility, this article examines how elements of Europe's Bologna Process can help bridge the college--university divide of Ontario's postsecondary system. Via discourse analysis of relevant qualification frameworks and program standards, it argues that the current system…

Funded by the UK JISC Institutional Innovation Programme, the Augustine House Experiment sets out to investigate how the location sensing data collected over students' uses of the iBorrow notebooks can be visualised to reveal aspects of the new learning landscape during a 1-week sensing period. Indoor real-time location sensing technologies are…

Many contemporary superintendents face a new challenge, one of ensuring that the school buildings in their school districts are safe, sound, and conducive to offering the educational programs found in twenty-first century classrooms. Despite the growing need to upgrade the physical plants in many school districts, few superintendents have the…

Research has shown that rooms with greater amounts of open floor space have higher test results. Four recent trends that have negatively impacted open space in classrooms: (1) storage of CCSS materials in the classroom, (2) storage of science kits in the classroom, (3) inability to remove unwanted material, and (4) inability to remove unneeded…