Pedagogical bodies & technological spaces

During the 2nd half of the classroom design workshop, participants were asked to work within their own group, to come up with a real design model of their ideal future classroom.  They were given a floor plan of an existing lecture theater to act as the bases for their design.   They were also asked to think along three areas while creating the design.  These were (1) student to student relationships in a classroom (2) student to teacher relationship in a classroom and (3) student to subject content interactions.

Although each faculty came up with slightly different designs, there were some common features.  Group discussion and group work friendly furnitures and installations were one of them, and segmentation of the theatre into different functional areas was also common.   Some even suggested to create a ‘real’ theatre where stage performance can be carried out.  Some also talked about the ‘break out’ area where students can easily leave the lecture space and enter into a more sociable space to carry on discussions or conversation among themselves or with the lecturer.

But the individual differences among the different participants in terms of how they interpret the common themes/features and drew their classroom models were also very interesting.   For example, some participants focused more on what sort of furniture options were available for small size group work, while did not think about the space in general, how it might or might not encourage inter-group interactions.  In fact, one of the design was such that students would be segregated into small units of three, and would be seated in a space that would make it difficult for them to move around.

Others have similar designs but worked on transforming existing uni-directional seatings in a lecture theatre into turnable seats, so students can turn around and form a small discussion group of 4 people.  In such design, there were more discussion about teaching and learning, such as how a lecture can be conducted into different parts, where there’d be some lecture time and there’d be group work time, and how such need for flexibility can be incorporated into the space design.  There were also discussion about how a lecturer can navigate through such a space, so that he/she can actively participate and facilitate student discussions.

My general observation was that the focus on teaching and learning issues was largely on group discussion types of learning activities which many of the participants seemed to take it as almost a given condition in the future classrooms.  What I feel was missing was a discussion among the participants about their individual perspective and interpretation of the specific role, function and significance group discussion carry in their teaching, and in students’ learning.  They seemed to assume that everyone understands group discussion in the same way, which I doubt very much.  My second thought was that since this workshop was such a rare opportunity that academic staff would gather and work in a team situation,  it was almost a pity that they didn’t really go further to discuss, debate and challenge each others belief and understanding on more fundamental issues.

So this was an irony I spotted in all this which was that although everyone was talking about student collaborative learning and group discussions, the participants from the three faculties did not talk to each other, left along challenging each other from their own comfort zone.  Most of them had only worked within their own group and showed little interest to interact and talk with people from other groups.  So at the end, there was still this large gap of intellectual exchange left among all the participants.