Download the free 'Thinking Space' workshop resource, 122 pages (PDF 5.68mb)
‘Thinking Space’ is a free workshop resource from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), Futurelab and Portsmouth City Council.
Everest Community College, Basingstoke © Dave Morris
The resource aims to support educational institutions who are thinking about, or currently undertaking, redesign and rebuild projects, including those involved in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) and Primary Capital Programmes (PCP).
The resource comprises materials for two workshops, one aimed at staff and the other at students. Each workshop comprises a set of activities spanning two days. Alternatively, each of the various activities can be used as stand-alone activities, based on specific needs or requirements, or worked through modularly depending on available time.
‘Thinking Space’ goes some way to addressing a need that has been identified by educationalists and other stakeholders, by providing a set of activities, tools and techniques that can be used to facilitate workshop sessions, in turn to help people in the visioning and pre-engagement phases of redesign and rebuild projects.
It specifically aims to engage practitioners with activities to support critical and creative thinking about the future of education, related practices, approaches, relationships and technologies, and the implications these might have on future educational spaces. It also offers a set of workshop activities that can be undertaken with students as part of a wider commitment to actively engage and involve them in the redesign process.
Pudsey Grangefield School, Leeds © David Millington Photography Ltd
In practice
‘Thinking Space’ offers a number of starting points for schools beginning the daunting process of thinking about learning space redesign.
For example, the final activity for day one is intended to get students thinking about possibilities relating to future ways of learning and teaching supported by new technologies. Before doing this, the activity asks students to address some key questions around a chosen learning space design, such as:
- What is the atmosphere like?
- What are the main features of the environment?
- What sort of learning and teaching, or other activity, occurs in the space?
- What are the relationships like between students, students and teachers, or others?
- Who do you learn or undertake activities with?
- When does this occur?
- How do you learn? What sort of activities do you do?
- What do you learn?
At the end of the questions, students use sticky notes to add ideas about the use of new technologies to their sketches/designs.
Prompt them with questions such as:
- What new technologies might be present in this space?
- Why are they being used?
- What they are being used to do?
- Who uses them and how?
- How do they change the environment, what it looks and feels like?
- What activities take place?
- Are technologies present that support display, change the ambience and environmental factors, can be used for data collection, editing, sharing etc?
Download the 'Thinking Space' workshop resource
The above is taken from activity 13, ‘New technologies: expanding the design’, in ‘Thinking Space’. To access the full range of activities download the free‘Thinking Space’ workshop resource (PDF 5.68 mb).
Pudsey Grangefield School, Leeds © David Millington Photography Ltd
Further information
For further information on new technologies and built environment education, download the Futurescape08 symposium report, delivered by the Architecture Centre Network and CABE.
‘Thinking Space’ is also available free from ‘Vision Mapper’, a free web resource to support long-term planning and decision making in education.
To learn more about Building Schools for the Future (BSF) and the Primary Capital Programme (PCP) visit the relevant pages on Teachernet.
CABE is publishing a teaching resource, ‘Our school building matters’, designed to help teachers make the most of the learning opportunities created by building a new school or refurbishing an existing one. Developed in partnership with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), the resource will be available to schools from February 2010. To request a copy please email: futureschools@ssatrust.org.uk.
