Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemLearning environment affordances: Bridging the gap between potential, perception and practice( 2020)Over the past decade, there has been significant investment into new school buildings in Australia. This period of educational facility growth has given rise to the emergence of innovative learning environments (ILEs), spaces which exhibit a wider range of affordances for learning than traditional classrooms. Whilst ILEs are intended to offer more pedagogical opportunities for teachers and students, little is known about how the affordances of ILEs are being used. This study clarifies the concept of affordances within the context of physical learning environments, identifies how affordances are perceived by architects and teachers, and synthesises a range of strategies to support teachers to take advantage of ILE affordances to enhance deeper learning. The research is embedded within an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project called Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (ILETC), which investigates how teachers across Australia and New Zealand can be supported to use ILEs to achieve deep learning goals for their students. This qualitative research project was conducted as two distinct studies. The first study involved investigating teachers’ and architects’ perceptions of affordances for learning across traditional and ILE spaces in five educational facilities. The second study investigated teachers’ understandings and use of affordances in support of pedagogies for deep learning. An innovative methodological pairing of participatory action research (PAR) and co-design was employed to work with teachers from two secondary schools to develop understandings of the processes by which new learning spaces can be actioned for deep learning. Data were collected through workshops, semi-structured interviews and teacher reflections. Findings show differences in the perceptions of teachers and architects with respect to learning environment affordances, with teachers found to perceive more affordances for learning than architects. A taxonomy of affordances for varied teaching and learning approaches was also identified. Furthermore, strategies were developed to support teachers to take advantage of the affordances of ILEs. These strategies related to connections between infrastructure, school organisation and teacher practice.
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ItemArchitectures of Encounter: Shaping Social Interaction in the Intercultural City( 2020)Globalisation and migration are producing ever increasing intensities of difference in Western cities. People from all over the world are becoming urban in search of a better life, bringing with them culturally distinctive ways of living and being that mark them as different. The sharper the differences, the greater the potential for discrimination, racism, prejudice and weakening social cohesion. Everyday intercultural encounters hold the promise of breaking apart fixed notions about difference. Despite renewed attention to intercultural encounter in open-public space, scholarly research has focused more on social agency with less regard for the agency of the built environment. This thesis explores how the built environment of open-public space shapes intercultural encounter in the everyday life of Western cities, to better inform policy makers and design practitioners. An actor-network ethnography is employed to study the agential qualities of the urban square typology in Copenhagen, Melbourne and Toronto, through document and artefact analysis, nonparticipant observation, mapping, and semi-structured interviews. The data is analysed using a constant comparison framework producing descriptions of human-nonhuman relations of intercultural encounter. This thesis makes four main arguments. First, all intercultural encounters are meaningful, and the built environment has agency to both enable and constrain these interactions. Second, affordances rather than humans or nonhumans triangulate intercultural encounter. Third, the programmes designed into public spaces have agency to enable and constrain intercultural encounter, albeit in conflicting and contradictory ways. Finally, symbolic representations have limited agency to enable intercultural encounter.