Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRethink: Interdisciplinary evaluation of academic workspaces(Architectural Science Association (ANZAScA), 2019)Academic workspace remains an emotive topic. It is bound tightly with each academic’s identity, purpose and status. As universities increasingly focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration to producenew knowledge, the sanctuary of the individual office is under challenge. Inspired by precedents in the commercial world, universities are experimenting with more open workspace environments with a desire topromote collaborationand increasespace utilisation.However,there is resistance withintheacademic community. Given this context, there is a surprising paucity of research into the design and occupation of academic workspaces. This research beginsto fill that gap through a scoping literature review specific to the academic workspaceand anew approach toacademic workspace evaluation (AWE). The AWE approach focuses on the alignment of people, purpose and place, differentiating itself from the predominant post-occupancy evaluation fociofbudget, time, environmental performance and user satisfaction. A key finding of the research has been that change management – as an integral aspect of the project design process –is as importantto the success of future-focused academic workspace projects as theirspatial design.
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ItemTerrains 2015 Mapping Learning Environment Evaluation Across the Design and Education Landscape(LEaRN, University of Melbourne, 2015-09-03)Terrains, as its name suggested, was a cartographic examination of learning environment evaluation. It invited all higher-degree students working in learning environments to assemble and present a short synopsis of their research. Through the careful sequencing of papers, and input after each paper by expert interlocoteurs, Terrains explored how this research addressed evaluation of such spaces, and how this constituted a map of current thinking in learning environment evaluation. As such, Terrains was a working symposium, with new knowledge being generated from the exchange of ideas occurring around each presentation.
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ItemSustainability vs. pedagogy: synergies and tensions to be resolved in the design of learning environments(The Architectural Science Association, 2015)Learning environments in schools are purpose-built spaces. They are designed to be places of learning and are inclusive of the building structure, the furniture, fixtures, incorporated technology and learning resources. In the 21st century, it has become common practice for the design of new learning environments to be driven by issues of contemporary pedagogy and environmental sustainability. However the question that remains unanswered is what are the synergies and tensions between achieving environmental sustainability and contemporary pedagogy within the same learning environment? The purpose of this paper is to stimulate conversation around this topic. The findings relate to three researcher’s observation over a seven year period of learning environments research, undertaken at The University of Melbourne as part of the Learning Environments Applied Research Network (LEaRN) and two Australian Research Council Linkage Projects Smart Green Schools and Future Proofing Schools. Discussion of these observations highlights some of the issues and/or opportunities, which include more targeted research on how to deliver learning environments that are 3D textbooks; holistically integrated biophilic design, and greater occupant control of indoor environment quality.
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ItemEvaluating the pedagogical effectiveness of learning spaces(Architectural Science Association and The University of Melbourne, 2015)This paper describes the development and ongoing use of the School Spaces Evaluation Instrument (SSEI): an evaluation tool developed to gather information about how effectively school architecture supports teaching and learning. In 2009, the Australian Federal Government pledged $16.2 billion towards the Building the Education Revolution (BER). Over the following three years learning spaces were built or refurbished in 9,526 schools nationwide. In Victoria, Catholic Education Melbourne (CEM) encouraged schools to work with architects to design bespoke solutions. This process led to the design and construction of hundreds of new learning spaces, each with different spatial arrangements. Approximately five years on, questions remain about which architectural solutions worked best. To help answer these questions, and inform decisions about how capital budgets should be spent in the future, the Learning Environments Applied Research Network (LEaRN) and CEM collaborated to develop the SSEI tool, including Module 3 – Alignment of Pedagogy and Learning Environments. This tool will be used over the coming three years to evaluate school facilities in the Catholic education sector for the purpose of generating new knowledge about how best to design and use school facilities for contemporary teaching and learning.
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ItemThe other half of the picture: Post-occupancy evaluation for alignment of space and pedagogy(Architectural science, 2015)Prefabricated relocatable learning environments form an important component of school infrastructure in Australia but their light-weight construction means they often require air-conditioning for a comfortable indoor environment quality (IEQ). The ‘envi Sustainable Education Spaces’ were recently constructed by the Department of Education and Technology (DET) in Victoria to showcase a more sustainable alternative to the traditional ‘relocatables'. Evaluation had been undertaken by others to assess the design ambitions to reduce operational energy by 90% and lifecycle emissions of CO2 production by 50%. What was not known was how the spaces accommodated learning and learners. This was the focus of research undertaken by the authors in 2014. In this paper, we present the methodology and findings and argue a case for holistic post-occupancy evaluation in order to paint a more complete picture regarding the costs and benefits of innovative spaces even when innovation is primarily focused on environmental benefits. The research applies a mixed methods approach, utilising quantitative and qualitative data. Commentary by students and staff on the indoor environment quality, including acoustics and temperature, provides useful cross-linking data with earlier studies. This research is part of broader research on prefabricated learning environments undertaken by the authors and others.
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ItemLEaRN Evaluation Module 2: The development of a tool for evaluating the indoor environment quality in learning spaces(Springer Science+Business Media, 2016)Indoor environment quality (IEQ) is the combined impact of acoustics, lighting, thermal comfort and air quality on occupants inhabiting indoor spaces. It is the product of how indoor environments are designed, constructed, occupied and maintained. When IEQ is at substandard levels inside learning spaces, it can impact on how students and educators feel about that environment and/or perform in their day-today tasks. The importance of good IEQ performance inside learning environments is well recognised by national and international Green Building rating tools. The Australian Green Star Education Tool assigned 20% of the possible credits to IEQ performance, making it the second most important ‘environmental’ category after energy; in the United States the LEED Tool for Schools assigned 19 out a possible 110 points to IEQ performance. However in both cases, these are tools that reward predicted levels of IEQ performance based on the design, rather than actual IEQ performance from evaluating the spaces post occupancy.One of the barriers to IEQ evaluation is access to a tool, which communicates succinct and targeted information to a multi-disciplinary audience about the IEQ performance of learning environments. Such tools exist for commercial buildings because of the quantifiable financial gains of operating a business inside an office with good IEQ. For example a 2004 report by the Building Commission Victoria estimated that poor IEQ, annually cost the Australian economy $12 billion. Because of the complex myriad of factors that impact on effective teaching and learning, it is impossible to directly attribute student outcomes to IEQ performance, but it is widely regarded as a contributing factor. To overcome this barrier, the Learning Environments Applied Research Network (LEaRN) at The University of Melbourne has developed a new post occupancy evaluation tool for assessing IEQ performance inside learning spaces (referred to as Module 2). This tool is one of three evaluation modules developed by LEaRN to evaluate the design and use of learning spaces. In 2016, LEaRN Evaluation Module 2 is being piloted inside the new Melbourne School of Design Building at The University of Melbourne, opened in 2014 and awarded 6 Stars under the Green Star Education Tool (Version 1). This paper is a discussion of the tool’s development and the opportunities for refinement, which were raised during the piloting stage.
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ItemUsing video data to research pedagogic practices in new generation learning environments in schools: Development of a framework for analysing and presenting teacher practice(AARE, 2015)This paper discusses the use of video data to research pedagogic practices in new generation learning environments (NGLEs) in primary and secondary schools. Using video footage drawn from a collaborative research project between the University of Melbourne and the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (2013), the paper charts the development of a framework for analysing and representing teacher practice across a range of NGLEs: learning spaces that provide a greater degree of spatial variation, geographic freedom and access to resources for students and teachers than traditional classrooms. Video of teacher practice collected in four Victorian government schools was used as the basis for developing the framework. This footage was initially coded using Studiocode, a software tool that has been employed to analyse teacher practice in classrooms across the world, including by the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR), but not as far as we know used to analyse teacher practice in NGLEs through a human geographic or spatial lens. The paper describes the research methodology, the data collection methods and the analysis framework that was developed to represent data about the ‘intersections’ between people, space, practice and time i.e. the complex spatialized pedagogic practice of teachers in NGLEs. The practical dilemmas and hurdles that were encountered during the process of developing a simple coding system and visual tool that could represent teacher practice in NGLEs are discussed, along with the final analysis framework and representational tool that arose from the empirical data.
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ItemLearning environment evaluation and the development of school facility design guidelines(Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), 2016)Australia has been the site of significant school facility design innovation during the past decade. This innovation was showcased in 2013 in a report released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) titled Innovative Learning Environments, Educational Research and Innovation. It featured case studies of forty exemplary schools from around the world. Of these, seven were from Australia, including six from Victoria.While international attention directed towards the designs of Australian schools is nice, there remains little empirical evidence to attest to the effectiveness of these and other innovative school facilities in supporting desired and emerging pedagogies in primary and secondary schools.The Towards Effective Learning Environments in Catholic Schools (TELE): An Evidence Base Approach project was set up in 2015 as a collaborative research initiative between Catholic Education Melbourne (CEM) and the Learning Environments Applied Research Network (LEaRN) at the University of Melbourne. Over three years (2015-2017) the project aims to develop empirical evidence and subsequent guidelines that can aid decisions about how best to design and use of learning environments (school facilities) in primary and secondary schools.During the course of the project, the pedagogical effectiveness of 36 learning environments in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Melbourne will be evaluated using LEaRN Evaluation Module 3 – Alignment of Pedagogy and Learning Environments. In doing so, the project seeks to answer the following questions: 1) How can Catholic school learning environments be designed and used to best pedagogical effect? 2) How well aligned are contemporary pedagogies with the designs of learning environments in Catholic schools in greater Melbourne? 3) What influence do different building typologies have on this alignment? 4) How can the alignment between contemporary pedagogies and the design of school learning environment be improved?For the purposes of the project, learning environments have been delineated by the adjoining spaces used by a class, cohort or year level at the same school, including shared zones that have consistent physical features. Five spatial typologies (A to E), as identified by Dovey and Fisher (2014), have been used to group learning environments with similar spatial assemblages. These typologies are differentiated by their relative degree of openness, from traditional classrooms (enclosed) to permanently open-plan spaces (open). Using a strategic sampling technique, an even distribution of each building typology will be evaluated over the course of the three-year project to help identify which learning environments (including furniture, fit-out, and cultural practices) are the most supportive of contemporary pedagogies, as envisaged by CEM and the participating schools.This paper reports on progress towards the development of evidence-based guidelines for the design of contemporary schools, as derived from the program of learning environment evaluation described above.
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ItemDeveloping new approaches to the evaluation of physical learning environments: A return to the origins of post-occupancy evaluation in environmental psychology(AARE, 2015)This paper calls for new approaches to the evaluation of physical learning environments and suggests future directions for research in the field. Prior research across the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors has revealed a variety of metrics by which the performance of educational facilities can be measured. However, if physical learning environments are to be considered as spaces that provide a range of affordances for teaching and learning, improved methods are required to evaluate the effectiveness of ‘units of the environment’ as pedagogical settings. For more than 40 years, the field of post-occupancy evaluation has provided direction regarding how evidence can be gathered about the performance of educational facilities in use, yet such work has mostly overlooked the evaluation of learning spaces for pedagogical effectiveness. Research being conducted as part of the Evaluating 21st Century Learning Environments (E21LE) ARC Linkage project indicates that a return to the origins of post-occupancy evaluation in the field of environmental psychology is required in order to support the development of more rigorous methods of learning environment evaluation – methods that can provide valuable feedback about how effective ‘units of the environment’ are for their intended purpose, supporting teaching and learning.
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ItemA school but not as we know it! Towards schools for networked communities(Australian Association for Research in Education, 2016)School facilities are some of the most underutilised public assets in Australia. Yet, opportunities to better utilise and enhance school facilities though offering a range of services to growing communities are increasingly being recognised. Across the country, state governments are endorsing the development of schools as community hubs, based on indications from overseas of better education, health and well-being outcomes for students, as well as benefits to their families and the public. How best to proceed with the development of community oriented schools in Australia however, remains an open question due to a lack of knowledge about; a) what types of services – beyond the academic – should be delivered from school sites; b) how best to utilize existing facilities and deliver new infrastructure that may be required for ‘non-traditional’ service provision; and c) what government funding should be directed to such services and facilities, and from which departments. Curtailing the development of community oriented schools are embedded state government policies and practices that tend to dislocate and dissociate the processes of procuring, designing, governing and using/managing school infrastructure. If the concept of schools as community hubs is to be realised, the policy environment through which such provision must be achieved needs to be scrutinised and updated. The provision of school facilities that can support enhanced social capital, education, health and well-being outcomes for Australian communities requires improved co-ordination between multiple levels of government, as well as non-government agencies, schools and community groups. A means of productively navigating and negotiating these multifaceted relationships is needed i.e. a coherent framework that links research, policy and practice associated with the planning and management of service delivery and associated infrastructure on school sites. This paper explores how such a framework may be developed for the purpose of helping state governments, local councils, schools and community stakeholders overcome the current 'obstacle course' that is limiting attempts to maximise school facilities for broader community benefit.