Abstract
The chapters in this book both contribute to, and raise fundamental questions about, the knowledge that is valuable in the creation of good places to learn. Whether one is designing, managing or inhabiting a learning place, there are kinds of knowledge that can beneficially affect the relations between one’s activities and surroundings. What does this mean for research? Are there directions in which learning space research might be steered, or ways it might be organised, that might improve the likelihood of useful discoveries? While we are happy to agree that valuable knowledge often appears through serendipity , in this chapter we also argue that more explicit framings of the nature of useful knowledge can help strengthen our collective endeavours. More specifically, we provide some framing for the production of actionable knowledge in learning space research by: looking at the situations of designers , managers and users of space; attending to both analysis and design; factoring in both fast and slow (reflective , interpretive) modes of thought, and warning against the dangers of narrow ontological or epistemological assumptions. Understanding the relations between qualities of learning spaces and the vitality of valued learning activities is not straightforward. It requires diverse forms of knowledge and ways of knowing—linked in holistic, systemic or even ecological modes of knowledgeable action.
Laws in the field of architecture do not tell designers what to do but lay down the limits within which architecture is possible.
Setola and Borgianni (2016, p. 92).
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Notes
- 1.
Bligh (2014) suggests the term ‘denizens’ to convey a sense of shared lives. We have retained ‘users’, while acknowledging the specific way this frames teachers and students.
- 2.
In the educational/instructional design literature, analysis is also used to refer to a desired state of affairs, as when the capabilities underlying a successful job performance are analysed, in order to specify aspects of a training or recruitment process. We regard this as a special (incomplete) case of analysing what exists.
- 3.
In choosing to analyse something as a space or a network, one is picking a mode of description, not necessarily categorising phenomena as essentially thus.
- 4.
Indeed, one sometimes gets a sense that structure and agency are seen as oppositional forces, such that weakening structures—maximising ‘flexibility’ and ‘openness’—would necessarily increase user agency. This misunderstands the way that structures offer both constraints and ‘enablements’ and that the effects of structures depend upon (are mediated by) the human capabilities and purposes that comprise agency. Archer (2003) provides an excellent account of the core issues here, though she rather neglects material structures and ‘system 1’ thinking—privileging social structures and the kinds of ‘system 2’ thinking that are entailed in having ‘internal conversations’.
- 5.
The other route worth acknowledging is from Gordon Pask’s work in the 1960s and 70s on cybernetics and conversation theory to Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework and her argument for seeing teaching as a design science. See Laurillard (2012).
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Goodyear, P., Ellis, R.A., Marmot, A. (2018). Learning Spaces Research: Framing Actionable Knowledge. In: Ellis, R., Goodyear, P. (eds) Spaces of Teaching and Learning. Understanding Teaching-Learning Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7155-3_12
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