Rob Walker was a visiting scholar at Swinburne University of Technology, School of Design during October 2010, as part of his ongoing work on designing spaces for education.
Environments for Technology Enhanced Learning
Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne has become a focus of attention for architects and educators in the UK who are involved in the design of classrooms and schools.
Over a period of more than twelve years, the school has been the site for a collaboration between teachers and designers, who have all been influenced by the educational ideas developed by the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. This is not a conventional one-off building project, the designer, Mary Featherston, has worked with the school from the start on a series of projects adapting conventional buildings in response to the implementation of an evolving pedagogy.
In an early design phase, groups of children made site visits to settings which included a science museum, a radio station, a graphic design practice and a furniture designer/maker. These visits led to important principles for the redesign of their classrooms – which are set up to integrate computing and other technologies, provide spaces for different groupings and support different kinds of educational tasks.
The school has been the subject of several research studies and is currently being developed as a case study by Ensemble. The aim is to provide an exemplar and a set of semantic tools which can be used by Educational Studies in supporting student projects. There is also interest from students in other areas – in Design and in Social Science.
