Transforming Learning Spaces
Educational environments in constant change.
PhD project by Gertie Kolding
The idea for the research project arose from reflections on how the architectural approach and way of designing influences teachers’ pedagogical spaces of opportunity and what the impact of the encounter is on students’ learning, the way they experience the culture of learning, and the way they create academic and professional identities.
The project is therefore based in an assumption that educational environments are defined through the interaction between place (architecture), pedagogy, and the culture of learning, and that this relationship is expressed linguistically through the identity-forming narratives of the self we construct.
Theoretical concepts and analytical perspectives should help expand our understanding of the complex interaction between different dimensions. We need to cross the subject boundaries between architecture, sociology, pedagogy, learning and culture of learning – and combine knowledge from different disciplines within an interdisciplinary framework.
For this reason, the project draws on several theories, approaches and sources of inspiration from theory of science: Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Gibson’s affordance theory, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy regarding the relationship between the body and the outside world, Pallasmaa’s understanding of the existential wisdom of architecture, as well as socio-cultural theorists such as, for instance, Dewey.
The qualitative methods chosen for the project will in a similar manner be taken from different research disciplines, and will combine ethnologically inspired fieldwork, qualitative and narrative interviews, participant observations, photo documentation, modelling, and future and research workshops.
The advantage of combining linguistic and visual representations is that it provides opportunities for interpreting similarities and differences between linguistic and physical representations, for discussing the visual aspects, and for representing the bodily experiences of users in the empirical data that is gathered. The narrative, in the form of narratives of the self, plays a special role in illustrating the nature of the interaction. This includes studies of what occurs in the meeting between learning perspectives and the ‘affordance’ of space. How the encounter affects the students’ experience of the spatial traces of pedagogy, the emotional nature of the place, and its impact on students’ academic identities, motivation and affiliations.
The fieldwork will be carried out at Roskilde University and Aarhus School of Architecture, as both institutions are undergoing processes of transformation. Any connections in terms of meaning that emerge as a result of the fieldwork will be reflected on and contextualised by means of Kjaer & Richter’s construction of learning and architectural knowledge.
The PhD project is co-funded by Roskilde University, Aarhus School of Architecture and the architectural firm Kjaer & Richter.
Visit Gertie Koldings PURE profile here.
Supervisors:
- Niels Warring, MSc in Social Science & PhD, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University
- Mette Volf, MA in Architecture & PhD, The Didactic Laboratory, Aarhus School of Architecture
Sounding board:
- Liv Bach Henriksen, MA in Architecture, head of pedagogy and learning, Kjaer & Richter
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