Building the Education Revolution (BER) as part of an economic stimulus package. In the context of a global financial crisis, the Government called for 'shovel ready' projects requiring state education departments to develop template designs to speed the delivery process. Three years later, new facilities have been completed in over 1100 government schools in Victoria (DEECD, 2012). This article outlines research by an interdisciplinary team to track the early occupation of a template design used in Victoria. The design template was unusual: it enabled schools to continue using traditional classroom teaching or to slide open walls to form larger neighbourhoods suitable for team teaching. Our research linked different methodological frameworks to undertake post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of the new spaces. POE strategies are often driven by construction and project management perspectives rather than focus on organizational issues and user behaviour.
Hospital settings can, and should, create educative spaces and learning opportunities as part of their holistic care for young patients. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence for creating high quality, child-centred learning environments within paediatric settings. We explore the impact of physical spaces on learning; the literature on developmental stages of learning for children and young people as it relates to learning environments; and the literature on learning in out-of-school settings, particularly as this applies to children who are separated from their daily communities. As all paediatric settings can create opportunities for the ongoing educational development of their patients, this paper presents a way forward for this approach to holistic care.
This paper discusses the opportunity afforded by a substantial research grant to examine three aspects of recent school design and learning. First, spaces that support effective learning, second, the role of the building in achieving sustainability, and third, pedagogies and practices that support one and two. Schools are complex systems in which the physical environment interacts with pedagogical, socio-cultural, curricular, motivational and socio-economic factors as well as providing benefits or costs in environmental terms. Limiting the research focus to exemplar case study schools will enable a more comprehensive study of the schools as 3D texts. Through proactive research methodologies, students, teachers and architects will collaborate to manipulate the spaces to suit different learning modalities. Students will help collect environmental data and therefore learn more about climate and energy. They will also participate within teams to further their problem solving, communication and organizational skills. Teachers will become more aware of and hopefully skilled at managing space both environmentally and pedagogically. Architects will have the unusual opportunity of experiencing and analyzing their designs through the eyes of users. While this ambitious research is in its infancy, the interdisciplinary approach and support from nine industry partners is relevant for other researchers who are seeking to have an impact on design practice using an action research methodology. The research is timely.4 Following in the footsteps of the United Kingdom, Australian state and federal governments have committed to reinvigorate our aging school stock. This research led by an interdisciplinary team, was developed in partnership with Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, the Victorian Government Architect's Office, and seven design firms with expertise in learning environments. The research has been funded by the Australian Research Council
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