Learning and Teaching Committee

Subject: Developing Learning Spaces

The Centenary Lecture entitled “The Campus is Dead, Long Live the Campus by Associate Professor Peter Jamieson from the University of Melbourne challenged us to build on the strengths we have and to further enhance the student experience by thinking differently about the physical environment in which we work and study. We know the campus is well liked and the majority of teaching space is considered fit for purpose – our students tell us so. Peter suggested to us that we could do much better.

In his lecture, Peter stated that higher education institutes should ensure their campuses embody their values and priorities. The physical environment should declare an institution’s aspirations. He said that “Universities are hosts to communities of scholars” and need to have “designs to enable students to learn with and from each other with classrooms assisting teachers to enable this.” He reflected that too often lecture rooms and other spaces try to please all users and suffer from this with the resultant spaces not being able to enrich people as they should.

When we look at the creation of new spaces or the development of existing ones we are often constrained in our thinking by the current layouts and furniture. We invariably look to maximise the number of students who can fit in the spaces we are creating and look to minimise the building footprint to constrain costs.

In the workshop the day after the lecture 25 people from academic departments and support services plus two students and two architects we are currently working with discussed what learning should be like and how we could create spaces that reflect these ideals. We discussed how we can create spaces which empower people rather than constrain them. In thinking about space design we used metaphors as a way of thinking about the feel of the spaces we were designing. We also looked at working in groups, effective group size and how different furniture designs can create different opportunities.

Learning and Teaching Committee is asked to consider how we want to take this forward as a University:

Do we want to be more imaginative with our provision of the spaces in which we teach and learn?
Do we want to build on the workshop and the lecture to establish some principles of good practice?
How do we identify opportunities and priorities for the development of learning and teaching space?
How do we get engagement from staff, students, support staff when we are considering the development of new spaces and input to capital projects in a timely and productive way? This is something we have discussed but have struggled to come up with a process that can feed in to our governance structure in an appropriate way.

Author - Anne Mumford

Date - 22^nd May 2009