Education at all levels is being transformed, impacting teaching methods, materials, and the physical learning environment. Over recent years, efforts have been made to align school architecture with contemporary educational practices to create stimulating and responsive teaching and learning environments. In this context, Evidence-Based Design…

For many years, the Reggio Emilia approach has been in the spotlight of the international debate on early childhood education, attracting countless devoted followers in preschool centres all over the world and inspiring an ever-increasing amount of pedagogical research. At the heart of this educational philosophy, space is considered a 'third…

The government school has held an integral part in the Australian idea of progressive society, a locus of community definition and pride that is the backbone of social infrastructure. Yet, it took decades from the establishment of the Australian British colonies from 1788 to establish a system of general education. The Australian school had modest…

This brief analysis is a call for action with fresh opportunities for leadership and innovation. Teachers, teacher educators, and their allies need to take stock of needs and opportunities to serve as program architects and ambassadors. This is a game-changer because, until now, professionals were charged with faithful implementation and advocacy…

This article focusses on the lessons learnt from the collaborative design of guidance for new build schools in England about the processes of school design, construction and occupation. The study involved head teachers, school building commissioners, teachers and wider school communities thinking about the pedagogic implications of the production…

This article synthesises longitudinal deliberations between two architects and an educator, seeking common ground about learning spaces in schools. As the impetus for new and refurbished school buildings continues in New Zealand, it is timely to unpack instinctual disciplinary practices to better understand space and place in schools. We undertook…

School bathrooms are liminal spaces where notions about intimacy and one's public persona are configured and where issues such as sex and gender are centrally experienced and proved. These learnings are partially scripted by architectural design and pedagogical rules but not fully captured by them. In this article, I intend to historicise these…

This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction…

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms,…

School facilities are increasingly seen as essential to achieving educational equity. By foregrounding often taken-for-granted school spaces, this conceptual article seeks to situate school design within broader antiracist efforts in education. To that end, I make a few critical contributions: (a) I shift attention to the social construction and…

This paper discusses the duality between global perspectives and local realities that have influenced the design of the school architecture by examining and comparing state school projects in two geographically distant countries: Chile and Portugal. The proposals and experiences of the "Society for the Construction of Educational…

Recent learning environments research conducted in Australasia reports positive correlations between innovative learning environments (ILEs) and students' deep learning. Yet, understandings about "how" ILEs may support teachers' professional practice and students' learning activities are limited, with little research having been…

From Froebel and the constructivists's early educational theories to more recent posthumanist thinking, early childhood development (ECD) has been understood to be optimal when it occurs at the level of senses and bodies. 'Integration' discourses prevalent in ECD educational policy and curriculum debates have pointed towards sensing bodies in…

The role played by innovative educational environments to support learning for the 21st century has attracted the interest of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development at the global governance level and at the national policy level internationally. This article draws on global, European and Australasian research and data from a…

This article explores the ideological drivers behind learning environment discourses with a particular focus on the built environment and the ways in which the built environment narrates explicit and implicit ideology. The built environment reinforces ways of thinking in the day-to-day ordinary activities of the school space. However, it is…