Survey on Student School Spaces: An Inclusive Design Tool for a Better School

Abstract

This paper presents interdisciplinary research focused on the collaborative redesign in schools, in which an inclusive design tool was created for assessing student feedback on their school spaces and considering it as input for creating a better learning environment. It was developed by a research team using a participatory approach in schools drawn from architecture, geography, and educational sciences, to provide a comprehensive and intertwined approach to school spaces, communities and learning activities. The “Survey on Student School Spaces” (S3S) tool and its methodology are described here, which is a combination of two procedures: a questionnaire and a walkthrough. The first engages a far-reaching sample of participants and makes use of an online platform, while the latter details and justifies those outputs and involves visiting the school with the participants. The S3S pilot study was implemented in two partner schools, which act as the first project case studies. The data provided by this tool acted as the basis for the design proposal for one of the case studies, which included the students’ feedback and involved all the community in the school’s refurbishment. Finally, a discussion was held on the outputs achieved that may contribute towards a participatory design approach in other schools, the validation of the tool per se, and its potential future development and application.

Learning Environment Design and Use

“…It is certainly international and interdisciplinary. The authors, who are architects, educationalists, but also acknowledged learning environment researchers, are based in a range of countries across most continents, investigating learning spaces and design processes in China [4,5], Australia [6], Europe [7][8][9], South America [8], and the Nordic countries [10][11][12]. Interestingly, the contribution from Australia [2], where so much school building has occurred recently, presents a transdisciplinary review of the international literature to develop an understanding of affordance theory related to school design.…”

“…The authors use of theory to address, but reach beyond, specific aspects of the southern hemisphere's ILE landscape answers Benade's [3] contention that this research area is still dominated, to its detriment, by studies centered on 'descriptively documenting the performance of building fabric or attitudes of teachers' (Benade, 2021: 519). That said, we were always keen that our Special Issue would consider practice as well as theory, and this orientation is evident through the papers centered on pedagogical practices [8,11], student practices [5,7,9], and participatory design processes [8,10,12].…”

“…Looking across the educational contexts of the contributions, a range of educational sectors are evident. Educational spaces and resources in schools and universities feature catering for younger children [8,11], older children [7,10,12], and adults [4,5,9]. The papers include some that focus particularly on ILEs [6,[10][11][12], but others that investigate other spaces for learning and teaching [4,5,[7][8][9], which seems important when it is considered that ILEs, although much discussed, are still out-numbered by more traditional settings, even in countries where they are being embraced [13].…”

“…Turning now to the stage of the design and use timeline that the papers address and bearing in mind the criticism of Blackmore and colleagues back in 2011 [2] of the neglect of stages beyond initial planning and designing, it is good, and encouraging, to see a range. Although some papers do indeed focus on the design phase [6,8,10,12], others investigate spaces in use [4,5], particularly presenting approaches to post-occupancy evaluations, POE [9,11], and users' reflections on buildings in use [7].…”

“…Moving on to the methodologies presented in the different papers, a case study approach is the most used [7,9,11,12]. These papers merge perspectives from various theories, and overlap with empirical studies using a range of designs and methods to focus on the learner perspective represented in different age groups, genders, and cultural contexts and its relationship with the built environment [4,5,7,9,10,12].…”