The Principle of Choice

“How can the principle of choice be leveraged into planning and designing high-performance settings for learning? This is the question we ended with; we did not begin with it. We started with a lot of discussion about students, about the experiences of students as learners, and about the potential of empowering the principle of ‘choice’ […]

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Planning and Designing for Inclusivity

“Our group was drawn together by the similarity of our individual introductory reflections on what keeps us up at night. Each of us said something about not being quite sure we have a clear understanding of who our learners are, about the students for whom we are planning learning spaces. Speaking as an architect, this […]

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Assessing How Spaces Enable Comfort and Belonging

We began by exploring questions of diversity, sparked by a question from a person on our team about how to meet the needs of the individual learner in a time when the focus is on team-learning and we soon focused in on this question. We were intrigued by the notion of a learning space as […]

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How Can Space Facilitate the Process of Making Knowledge?

How can space facilitate the process of “making” knowledge, including demystifying failure, nurturing, and embracing students as assets, and promoting life-long-learning? Our group saw this as an important question as we began to think about students as assets in the learning process. We understand failure as an integral part of the process of generating knowledge […]

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The Yardstick: A New Metaphor for the Process of Planning

Our team began thinking about the dichotomy of approaches to planning learning spaces. One group is concerned about the educational mission and the other about the design work. These are two different perspectives on the process of planning. Architects are thinking about the start of the design process, the solution at the end, and the […]

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Experience of the User Learner

“What spaces should be designed for is to motivate students to take risks. So a space has to be comfortable enough for them to get out of their comfort zone. This is not an audacious question, but an audacious proposition. I am sure that on campuses like this where GPA is important, you have students […]

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How Do We Disrupt the System?

We were asked to articulate and visualize the most audacious question to be asked by a planning team of academics or of academics and architects at the very beginning of planning. We intend to challenge the current planning process, by asking this question: How do we disrupt the system?

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Thinking Metaphorically about Spaces for Learning

We began with an overarching discussion about student-centered, student-focused, student-driven learning spaces. We were fluid about the particular spaces we were thinking about: a lecture hall, lab, makerspace, whatever. Our feeling was that the ideas we were discussing spanned many different kinds of learning and learning spaces, from libraries to spaces for career counseling, and […]

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Process Orientated Guided Inquiry Learning

POGIL uses guided inquiry—a learning cycle of exploration, concept invention, and application that is the basis for the carefully designed materials that students use. POGIL activities focus on core concepts and encourage a deep understanding of the course material while developing process skills that help students become lifelong learners and prepare them to be more […]

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