Search results for "School design"
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Mary and David Medd’s work: domesticity in postwar British school design (1949–72)
2021
This article focuses on the schools developed by Mary and David Medd within the Ministry of Education in Great Britain, 1949–1976. Their main contribution to the field of Educational Architecture was the definition of a design strategy known as Built-in variety, where the self-contained classrooms (empty-box-school) disappeared in favour of a variety of dissimilar places. Indeed, the Medds sustained a very innovative view from which primary educational architecture was profoundly reconceptualised, getting closer to a home than to an institution. Actually, the paper argues that it was precisely this driving principle – school as a home – that was responsible for the dismantlement of the trad…
‘The best guess for the future?’ Teachers’ adaptation to open and flexible learning environments in Finland
2021
Finnish education has recently experienced reforms with respect to guidelines forming the curriculum framework for basic education and school architecture. Since 2016, all new schools incorporate open and flexible design, at least to some extent. The more open school design challenges the conventional organisation of space and pre-defined structures and interaction practices. This study investigates how teachers both adapt and are affected by new demands for pedagogy, team teaching and teacher-student relationships. Interview data of 21 teachers of six modern schools are reviewed through thematic analysis. The new school layouts provided some incongruence with the teachers’ aims and their p…