Students' seating selection is a significant physical variable that has implications for both teachers and students. These seating preferences have been linked to students' personalities, motivation, and academic performance. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the cultural influences on these preferences. In this exploratory qualitative…

Physical classroom environments for young children and the quality of those environments have typically been studied by utilizing various rating scales. Research is limited on early childhood educators' perspectives and decision-making processes in striving to create optimal physical classroom environments during the school year. This qualitative…

The study of topological policy cultures highlights a tendency in policy spaces to undo the effects of topographical and cultural distances and differences. In contemporary education policy trends, such traits are present in the attempts to reimagine classroom spaces. A case in point is Future Classroom Lab (FCL), a physical classroom concept…

Changes in student expectations and attitudes combined with research on the positive relationship between active engagement and student learning have many college administrators and planners in higher education reconsidering classroom design. One element of classroom design that has the potential to address the unique needs of an increasingly…

This research investigates the influence of color-filtered lighting in relation to biophilic design, specifically within the preschool learning environment where design elements impact early childhood development. Among various architectural design components, research underscores the pivotal role of lighting in affecting children's pleasantness…

The environment shapes the foundation of healthy development and learning. The aim of this colloquium is to share the authors' recent research efforts to center children as necessary codesign partners in their built learning environments. To do this, the authors believe that it is important to reposition preschool inclusion as a bottom-up, or…

Special education comprises specially designed instruction, at no cost to parents, to meet the unique needs of children with disabilities (IDEA, 2017, Sec. 300.39). IDEA further states that specially designed instruction can be implemented in the classroom, in the home, in hospitals and institutions, and in other settings. Placement decisions are…

To ensure quality and equitable education requires an understanding of how all learners function within a learning environment, and the ways in which teachers' pedagogy can support inclusive practice. Drawing on research from a rural school in Western Australia, this paper identifies how furniture can be used as a tool to support student agency…

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of an active learning space (ALS) in supporting student development of effective communication as a transferable skill. A fourth-year medical science course was taught in two different settings, an ALS and a fixed-row classroom, by the same instructor. Participants preferred the ALS for…

This qualitative study examined a group of 41 bilingual preservice teachers who participated in a multi-year professional learning course lab project. The project implemented the change laboratory (CL) methodological framework during the same semester that the participants were teaching students in their field placements. The data analyzed for…

This article describes an evaluation of a campus wide Active Learning initiative to examine instructors' experiences teaching in Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) at a Canadian University. ALCs at this university differ in size, layout, and audio-visual equipment. The participants were 21 instructors from different disciplines who had taught…

There is a paucity of research that has effectively listened to children's voices on matters important to them and has asked them how they would like to be listened to. This study used a playful approach to listen to children's voices about play spaces in their primary school. The research questions were: How can a playful approach be used to…

On September 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly known as the 1994 crime bill. The most far-reaching piece of criminal justice legislation Congress ever passed, the bill incentivized states to pass harsher sentencing laws and build more prisons. Among a slate of punitive and…

This article studies the invention of the classroom in a time of crisis -- the one experienced after the independence war and in the framework of the Republic of Colombia building process (1819-1830). At that time, the expectations about the future were greater than the experiences about the past and there was confidence about the role of…

This research addresses the problem of the imposition of educational spaces in multicultural contexts. The research is of qualitative nature, based on an interpretative hermeneutic paradigm. It uses collective case study design. The selection of participants was non-probabilistic and intentional, and snowball sampling was used, selecting 15…