Students embodied experiences in dynamic learning environments: Stories of entanglement within a meshwork
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2025
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Melbourne Authors
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Architecture, Building and Planning
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PhD thesis
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© 2025 Raed Yahya AlBanna
Abstract
Across all design disciplines, conducting research into the human experience is important. While the concept of experience is inherently abstract, it is essential to identify the elements that shape it, particularly within the built environment.
This project focuses on understanding the embodied experiences of students in learning environment settings. It examines the relationship between students' bodies and their learning environments by focusing on their interactions with their teachers, peers and surroundings, including how students use their senses of smell, touch, hearing and sight to learn as they interact with their surroundings, and how school facilities and educational technologies shape their learning experiences.
The relationships between architecture, technology, people, and the ways in which students perceive and express their learning experiences are little understood. Some prior research into classroom environments has framed the learning experience as a process of becoming (Benade, 2022; Benade et al., 2021; Colley et al., 2003; Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012) but these studies overlook students' sensory experiences.
Drawing on relational ideas, this research conceptualised student’s bodies as both embodied and emplaced, and continuously in movement within their interconnected surroundings. The environment is experienced through perception as a constellation of relationships (Massey, 2005), where sensory-experiencing bodies (Pink, 2015) and the environment are part of a meshwork of experiences (Ingold, 2008)—all part of the same holistic system, thus challenging a traditional separation of the mind and body.
Adopting a sensory ethnographic approach, the study aimed to capture the depth and nuances of students' experiences within learning environments, and investigate the following overarching research question: How are student bodies and the learning environment interwoven to shape embodied learning experiences?
Due to the nature of the study (and COVID19-related limitations), a case study was conducted in one school in Melbourne, Australia as a form of short ethnography. In this school I engaged with the students to become part of their environment and studied their lived experiences in depth. The qualitative research also deployed an ethnographic reflexive approach, which involved the use of sensory photography, sensory ethnographic observation protocols, sketching the environment, walking interviews and re-enactments. Through the investigation of everyday school activities, valuable insights were gained into the interactions and activities of the student participants, including the intricate patterns of their bodily-based interactions in classroom and outdoor settings.
The findings were drawn together through a conceptual framework of embodiment, multisensoriality and emplacement, with the aim of outlining insights into the ways in which students experience learning through their bodies. Inspired by work on the anthropology of the senses (Howes, 1991; Pink, 2006), visual findings are communicated as visual representations using dynamic digital illustration techniques, contributing to innovative ways to investigate and convey the human experience through a combination of images and written text in order to communicate complex ideas and emotions.
The findings of this project revealed that students at Pine Tree Primary School engage in co-created, multisensory relationships with their learning environment, particularly in outdoor areas such as The Pines. The study also highlights how children’s habitual spatial negotiations through their everyday movements and student-led attachments occasionally expand beyond their usual routines, drawing teachers and school leaders into larger, shared moments where questions of space, belonging, and decision-making unfold collectively.
Through everyday routines and shared practices—including making cubbies, sharing memories and forming social bonding under specific trees, and improvising ‘secret caves’—students actively shape the spaces surrounding them. Learning unfolds through these movements, sensory engagements, and shared experiences. The students’ collective activism to protect the Pines from being sold demonstrates how their attachments to place are maintained through memory, environmental care, and social connections. Elements like trees, bushes, and swing ropes are not perceived as passive, fixed locations within the school grounds, but rather as components of the relational and sensory entanglement of their daily school lives. These findings highlight the importance of acknowledging children’s embodied, sensory, emplaced, emotional, and place-based experiences to better understand how school environments are co-created and how students’ identities are shaped through ongoing interactions with people, materials, and the surrounding environment.
The findings animate and communicate a unique perspective on the everyday life experiences of students, and are hoped to inspire and encourage viewers, listeners and readers to reimagine and envision a wide range of potential outcomes for students' experiences. Rather than presenting a comprehensive representation of the students' lifeworlds, the findings encourage us to imagine and reimagine what students’ environments could look like in the future and how students might feel in these everyday places.
This thesis offers contributions to existing bodies of knowledge across multiple disciplines, including school architecture, pedagogical practice and educational technological integration. The findings are expected to be of interest to architects, furniture designers, technology designers, educators, and other researchers—inspiring them to more deeply consider the dimensions of students' experiences, to help them make better informed decisions about how to implement changes to positively impact students’ wellbeing, engagement and overall educational experience.
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Keywords
Embodied experience, Multisensory, Emplacement, Sensory ethnography, Dynamic digital illustration, Dynamic ‘learning’ environments, Everyday life, Meshwork, Reflexivity