Flexibility, Sustainability, and the Design of Learning Spaces
Sustainable Learning Spaces: Design, Infrastructure, and Technology (Section 2)
Instructor Perceptions of a Flexible Writing Classroom
Five Decades Later: Integrating Technology in a Large Lecture Hall
Within and Beyond Walls: Sustainability Implications of Educational Technology Infrastructure
Chapters in Section Two feature stories of reinvention in high-tech and flexible spaces that facilitate the pedagogical needs of instructors and changes in technology. Threads in these chapters include sustaining and maintaining campus and community partnerships to bring new life to once high-tech spaces built in the past or reimagining learning and teaching spaces altogether. Moreover, these chapters explore the major changes and improvements made to spaces that enhance teaching, learning, composition, and communication, and the ways that students and instructors engage technologies.
Focusing on how spaces were reinvented at different institutions, the authors in Section Two explore theoretical and practical issues of redesign processes through the lens of sustainability. While many campuses continue to invest in new classroom and instructional spaces, other campuses are revitalizing existing spaces. Chapters in Section Two investigate sustainable practices from multiple perspectives when spaces are reinvented.
Instructor Perceptions of a Flexible Writing Classroom
Dana Gierdowski, Elon University
In “Instructor Perceptions of a Flexible Writing Classroom,” Dana Gierdowski explores sustainability through redesigned flexible composition classrooms that allow instructors more physical and pedagogical leverage with which to engage students. In this chapter, Gierdowski suggests that a flexible classroom is a sustainable tool for teaching composition, one that can be adapted to accommodate a variety of pedagogical activities and learners.
Five Decades Later: Integrating Technology in a Large Lecture Hall
Rebecca Gould, Kansas State University
In "Five Decades Later: Integrating Technology in a Large Lecture Hall,” Rebecca Gould employs a SWAT (Strategic Ways to Acquire Technology) team approach for the design and renovation of campus spaces. Gould shows us what she found when her planning team took a collaborative approach by working with a group composed of faculty, students, planners, information technology staff, and central administrators.
Within and Beyond Walls: Sustainability Implications of Educational Technology Infrastructure
Owen McGrath, University of California, Berkeley
Owen McGrath, in “Within and Beyond Walls: Sustainability Implications of Educational Technology Infrastructure,” considers audiovisual and information technology (A/V-IT) installations in three instructional spaces that were opened or re-opened within a year of each other: a cutting-edge auditorium inside a new science building, an innovative experimental classroom that replaced a once state-of-the-art video teleconferencing classroom, and a forgotten general assignment classroom that received technology for the first time. McGrath explores how these reinvented spaces involved sustainability considerations from the design phase onward.