December 2007 — Features
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A Movable Feast
"You want [your students] to be able to take in information, assess it, digest it, and assemble it to solve problems as a team. If your students are sitting at tiny desks in rows facing the front of a rectangular classroom, it's going to be difficult to achieve that goal."—Menko Johnson, Crestview Middle School
"What you're seeing all over the world is that people are using wireless networks, and a variety of collaboration tools have emerged to take advantage of that technology. Consequently, tools that allow people to come together physically and virtually must be part of any classroom design."
Challenging Expectations
One of the biggest roadblocks to achieving integration of the physical and the virtual in K-12 classrooms is a set of timehonored presumptions of what a classroom should look like— such as, it should be rectangular, and have a front and a back.
"Right now, most school districts have what are called ‘educational specifications,'" explains Henry Sanoff, distinguished professor in the School of Architecture at North Carolina State University's College of Design. "This is a laundry list of specs for every room that goes into a school, including the size of the rooms. It's like a straitjacket. Some districts are more flexible, but by and large, the ed specs have dominated the production of schools for decades. That's why all schools tend to look alike. And the advent of computers hasn't changed that."
Oblinger says that shaking up expectations of what a classroom is supposed to look like is a good way to get teachers thinking in new ways about what they are doing. "The environment sends a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle cues about what's going to happen in the space," she says. "The concept is called built pedagogy. It suggests that the way a room is designed dictates the teaching approach, or sends teachers into certain mental defaults.
