Innovative Learning Environments Expo 4
Monday 25 October, 2010 at the Crowne Plaza, Torquay
Keynote Presentation transcript
What makes a learning environment innovative?
Julia Atkin
What I actually want to do this morning and I feel a bit sorry for those of you in the middle because I use visuals a lot and so you're going to be looking either that way or that way to try and get to the screens. One of the things I'll say too, that I always plan for a session to do far more than I can possibly fit into the session.
So what you'll find is, that there will be some slides that I tend to skip over. But the slides will be available - I don't know when they'll be up, Daniel, on the website - very quickly. They'll be up on the website, so you can get hold of them if there are ones that I go over too fast for you to process at the time. I want to try and make it more of a visual presentation or more of a meaning making session than lots of information that you're trying to copy down.
So let me start with looking at this whole area. I want to think about the title, and I know when they first asked me to speak about what makes a learning environment innovative, I found myself saying, I don't know whether I would have asked that question. So I started thinking about the title and I thought, learning, environment, innovative. I started questioning and thinking about each of those. But I want to start by thinking about innovative and to look at the verb, innovate. So people say to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products. So it could be developing any existing ones.
Innovative: ‘featuring new methods, advanced and original’. Innovative designs, introducing new ideas, original and creative in thinking. So my question became, well, why would you want to innovate? I actually had just back, yesterday, from spending two weeks in Ireland and so Ireland is going to feature a little bit in my talk this morning. Because one of the things that I will share with you in a minute, is a little bit about what happened when I go back into looking at prehistoric structures, back in 6000 BC. If you go back a long way, you will find that really innovation then, in human life, was really about responding to - it's always about your needs and your dreams, if you like. But in the early days, it was very much about needs to survive.
So how people innovated, whether it be using tools for capturing food or game or whatever it was or in building structures, it really was about basic physical survival, human survival. So I want to start by looking at that aspect and then perhaps turn it back more to what Grant was talking about in terms of our hopes and our vision and our possibility in terms of imagining and dreaming. Dreaming is something better.
Let me go back to Ireland - and for those of you who ever saw Ryan's Daughter, this is actually taken on the west coast of Ireland, near Dingle, just outside of Dingle on the little circuit, the Dingle Loop or the Dingle Circuit, whatever they call it. I don't know how dark the picture is over there, a bit too dark, I think. But you'll see up here, there's actually a house and there were a few houses scattered around. If you go back to 6000 BC, they didn't have houses like that. They had beehive structures, like these. So if you think about people living there on the west coast, eking out an existence, 6000 BC, what did they do? They innovated by using what was in their environment to deal with, if you like, their basic needs to survive.
But even in those days, the human mind is constantly innovating, trying to make something better, if you like, whether it be for physical survival or whatever. I guess, going back again to some of the things Grant was talking about, that fear was part of what motivated their design because these fences here were about keeping their stock secure and keeping other people out, if you like. So it was creating a fence, a wall of some form. Let's go inside and have a look at the beehive structures themselves. It doesn't look terribly innovative when you see it but there were interesting innovations that went on in this design. It probably can't be picked up all that well, but maybe when you look at that rock there, what you'll see is that all the rocks had a slightly downward slope on them.
So, of course, if they were flat, the danger was that rain was going to come inside. So all of their little innovations were about making sure that the slopes were going to make sure the rain fell off. But how on earth did they deal with that? Again, more innovation in terms of using local materials to create a roof over the hole. Quite interesting as you went around different structures, to see that quite often they were somewhere out the side of one of these - because I just kept on marvelling at how they made that thing stable and that you weren't lying in there with the rocks coming down on you.
But what would happen is, that you would see some of the structures where a rock would actually protrude out like that and then it would cantilever and so they would actually redesign the stability as they went up, if you like. I was just fascinated as I watched that and it reminded me of a term that architects use a lot, what a lot of designers use, that ‘form should follow function’. So if we want shelter and we want to be dry, we'll make sure that the form actually follows that function, that it matches what you're after.
If you think about innovating when it's basic human survival we're talking about, then in some ways actually it was pretty straightforward. It was about using available materials and innovative design to provide for basic needs. So in some ways you go right back to 6000 BC, I think innovation was quite straightforward. I don't think it's so straightforward when you go past that into trying to design for less tangible aspects of human life.
For example, individual behaviour within a larger collective or designing for facilitating learning. That's far less tangible than building a structure for physical survival. So where did that lead me? Well, that led me to ask the question, who decides for function when it comes to the less tangible things? Pretty straightforward when it's tangible. We need to be dry, we need to be warm, we need food. But when it comes to things about controlling human behaviour or shaping human behaviour, who decides what the function should be? When we're trying to design for learning, who decides what the actual function should be? What is the specific function or the rationale?
It was really good for me today to see that one of the sessions this morning is really about looking at how schools have looked at their educational rationale and how that’s driven what they're doing. Because really when it comes to things that are less tangible than physical survival, what it comes down to is the beliefs and rationale of the people who’ve got the control. That's what actually is going to guide how things are designed. So it was quite sobering for me, not long after seeing the beehive structures to spend some time looking at this structure, which I hope, again, is showing up over there. I don't know how dark it is, can you see what it is? Not really. Can you see what that is? Then if you look through that little hole, that's a cell in the old part of Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, where at least 4000 prisoners were held before they were shipped to Australia.
It had all sorts of other functions in society at the time, not just for holding convicts that came here, it was also about a lot of the Irish uprisings, a lot of people were held in there as well. The interesting thing about where Kilmainham Gaol took me in my thinking, was that - this is the outside of the gaol - that there were two prison reformers who actually took those old structures that you get a bit of a glimpse of, maybe through that keyhole or the warden's hole, to actually reform prisons. These were two individuals who became in a position of power to control the design of prisons.
It was going on their belief or their rationale. Amazing that his name was John Howard and John Howard, who lived between 1727 and 1790, had a philosophy or a belief that the nature of man was that all men are sinners. Because all men are sinners we need a prison and the function of the prison - this is actually reforming the gaol - so, the function of the prison was a means of enforcing repentance and reformation of evil-doers. You're going to force that on them, that they were going to repent and that they were going to also reform their actions.
So if that's the function, what's the form or the means, if you like, to capture that function was they were going to prevent communities of vice by separate confinement in different cells, in individual cells. So you keep them apart and you'll stop developing communities of vice. He believed that you bring to bear a strong moral influence for reformation on the isolated prisoner, that you'll actually get some changes in human behaviour. So here's one individual whose strong beliefs were shaping the way that the gaol started to be re-worked a little bit.
Then there was another one, a little bit more humane, a fellow called Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham, his belief about the nature of man was that men are rational, sensory beings who judge all things in terms of pleasure and pain. You might say - going back to Grant's talk - fear and hope or hope and fear, the pleasure and the pain. He suggested that governments exist to create a system of rewards and punishments in a way that promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. So if that's what he believed about man - notice it's all men - what was the function of prison? There were women in the prison, by the way, not when I was there but previously.
The function of the prison, in his mind, was to create a totally controlled environment in which deviant behaviour can be remodelled or reconditioned into socially acceptable behaviour. So if that was the function, and he believed that pleasure and pain were the things that actually drove human beings, then what should the prison be like? We needed a new kind of prison design, in his mind, what's called the Panopticon, and that was going to control all aspects of the prisoners' sensory experience. Because if we could control their sensory experience, because they're sensory beings and we could deliver pleasure, they'd want more pleasure and they'd want to get away from the pain.
So his Panopticon - and he also had the three Ss - separation, surveillance and silence and here's the Panopticon. The idea of the Panopticon was that the warders would walk around - and whether you can see this top layer here - but they would walk around behind those arches and from those positions, they could see every separate cell in the gaol. But notice here, there is an introduction now of bringing in some natural light, because this was going to be a positive human experience that these individual men, who were driven by pleasure and pain, would actually want.
The interesting thing here is this stairway, it could only be used by the warders. It could not be used by prisoners. They had to come down the spiral staircase and the spiral staircase was deliberate because you can't run down a spiral staircase, you can't stampede. So it was going to control them. Now, why am I going through all of this while I'm thinking about the Panopticon and the surveillance and the silence and the separation, so I guess I'm wondering, what are our beliefs about the nature of learners and learning and how do they guide our design of learning environments?
If we take the same idea, that really what it comes down to is if you're designing anything, it needs to be a representation of what your beliefs and your rationale are. But what are our beliefs about learning and about learners? To what degree does 18th or 19th century thinking still shape our designs? Supervision, surveillance, separation, silence. How many of you actually here are teaching in secondary schools? Can I get a show of hands? Not very many. But I would suggest, and hopefully it's changed a lot, but I'm turning the clock back from now to 1981 when I started teaching in high schools in Australia. My pedagogical advice in 1981, firstly, ‘don't smile before Easter’ and the second one was ‘a quiet classroom is a good classroom’.
So in 1981, I would suggest that high school pedagogy was still very strongly embedded, if you like, in the thinking that came from 18th and 19th century. If you follow some of these images through - obviously that's a while ago - that's a relatively recent photograph from Europe. So what is the legacy of the 18th and 19th century thinking? There's a modern school design, I couldn't get over how similarly it looks to the Panopticon.
So, let's get away from that. What I'm really suggesting is, if we're going to actually have - I'm sort of challenging us because, in a way, the mental models that we developed, and I know there are some young people sitting in the room, but if you're anywhere near my age, the mental models you came through in terms of schooling, were strongly shaped by the 18th and 19th century thinking. Think about it when you started teaching, what about those three Ss, silence, surveillance and separation? How many of you sat and collaborated?
So one of the reasons why I'm bringing this up is that our own mental models will feel comfortable in what we grew up in. When Daniel was talking about letting go of the grip, one of the hardest things is to let go of the grip of the mental models and patterns that you were actually schooled in yourself. So I'm really deliberately challenging by asking about the prison design because I still think there's lots of that thinking, that actually still waves through schools.