Page 31 - THE Journal, October/November 2018

vendors while maintaining a wide variety of options, have teachers observe other classrooms that had already implemented the ideas they were considering and avoid putting too much furniture into classrooms — Spence said the project was mostly a success.
One of the keys to pulling it off was “re- ally keeping the focus on instruction and realizing that resources such as furniture and technology serve to enhance that instruction,” and not merely to create new seating arrangements.
That idea was echoed by JoAnn Hindmarsh Wilcox, principal architect
at Mahlum, an architecture firm based in Washington with a specialty in designing for education, when asked how designers can create spaces for teaching practices that will change in ways we may not be able to predict.
“I think the best educational space in some ways beautifully supports education but also gets out of the way,” Wilcox said.
“Daylight should be present, but without providing glare or obstacles to technology in education. Flexibility in the way in which walls move or don’t move should allow for different types of education to happen re- ally fluidly and quickly,” Wilcox explained. “It shouldn’t be an event that the architec- ture is asked to be flexible — it should be part of a daily piece.”
Wilcox said that getting the basics right — the orientation of the classroom, appro- priate daylighting, an efficient and flexible structural grid — goes a long way toward creating schools and classrooms that can adapt to new approaches to teaching and learning.
“One of the things that I’d suggest is
that as architects are laying out space they work to understand how the space might transform under different pedagogies,” Wilcox added. Perhaps the “design firm can create diagrams of that same building or that same space in the different pedagogy models the district might be considering in the future and make sure that their design is flexible within those models without requiring renovation. I think that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”
“I think the best educational space in some ways beautifully supports education but also gets out of the way.”
— JoAnn Hindmarsh Wilcox, principal architect, Mahlum
Resources such as furniture and technology serve to enhance instruction, not merely to create new seating arrangements.
Getting the basics right — orientation, daylighting, structural grid — goes a long way toward creating schools that can adapt to new approaches to teaching and learning.
LEARNING SPACES
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