Designing Our Future Learning Environments

Starts:  Jan 24, 2022 09:00 AM (ET)
Ends:  Feb 7, 2022 05:00 PM (ET)

Designing Our Future Learning Environments

Program Overview:

School designers often wonder how their designs impact the quality of learning within the classroom. Not having first-hand experience in teaching, curriculum design, or different pedagogies, they rely on project-specific input from educators in the schools they design. The pressures of time and budget constraints too often preclude deep conversations about the future of learning spaces. Rarely do designers and educators have the chance to ask how school designs should respond to the broader changes we are seeing across our pedagogical, technological, social, and environmental contexts.

ISS School Operations and FXCollaborative present a special three-part series of round table discussions between educators and school designers. Each workshop will center on two fundamental questions: what’s essential, and what’s evolving? What stays true from one ‘paradigm shift’ to the next, between cultures and across time; and what have we not fully understood about the future of learning that will change everything? 

The findings from these sessions will be published in the ISS periodic magazine NewsLinks. Participants are free to sign up for any or all sessions, but space is limited. Join us!

Workshop 1: Room to Learn

The first session will kick off with a roundtable conversation between architects and teachers, discussing the ongoing evolution of teaching modes and their impacts on classroom design. 

Round table discussion:

● Considering fundamentals: light, air, proportions, boundaries

● Navigating post-COVID hybrid formats

● Designing for flexibility and furnishing

● Enabling experimentation and innovation

● Collaborating across and outside classrooms

● Learning through movement and making

Workshop 2: The School as Society, in Society

The second session will begin with a roundtable conversation exploring the idea of the school both as a society, gathering diverse perspectives from within schools’ internal operations; and within a society, exploring the evolving boundaries between schools and their communities.

Round table discussion:

● Diversity, equity, inclusion in school design

● Facilities management and operations

● Behind the scenes: keeping schools running

● The “mixed use” school: beyond bells and cells

● Schools as compounds: security vs access

Workshop 3: Design Workshop

The third session will conclude the series with an interactive design workshop, in which designers and educators will work together to generate a collection of design sketches, questions, strategies, insights, and lessons learned. 

Workshop topics:

● Workshop 1 Review

● Workshop 2 Review

● Scales of learning: from micro to macro

● Time and space: schedules and calendars

● Schools as buildings: places and program

● Schools as networks: relationships and ecologies