1 Introduction

Both in Italy and abroad, recent decades have seen a proliferation of experimentation and research in which the educational environment has been the focus of reflection/action. Architects, designers, education specialists and teachers have worked—sometimes as discrete groups, and sometimes on mixed teams with each professional category contributing its own specific expertise—to come up with new modes of teaching and learning that recruit spaces (both indoor and outdoor) as powerful allies. In some cases, these projects have required the direct participation of students, teachers, non-teaching staff, parents or local community members. Sometimes, the participatory process was initiated early in the design phase; in other cases, stakeholders were consulted about what projects should be implemented, while in still others the interested parties were only called to give their feedback on the feasibility of different aspects of a project proposal. However, we are mainly referring here to the construction of new school buildings. In Italy, it is relatively rare for schools to be built from scratch given the large number of existing school buildings, which are in need of a different kind of intervention. These inherited assets are difficult to manage as they have already been in use for many decades and are in precarious conditions due to early deterioration, a situation that is often evoked by newspaper headlines proclaiming emergencies and safety issues. However, schools are mainly discussed in the newspapers when classroom ceilings cave in or earthquakes make even recent school buildings collapse; the remainder of the rapidly ageing asset base, for the most part built over half-a-century ago with a 50-year lifespan in mind, tends to receive less attention. Importantly, when we use the term ‘ageing’, we are not only referring to physical structures, or indoor or outdoor spaces, but also to the kind of teaching for which these schools were originally built. For they were designed in the early twentieth century to facilitate listening, repetition, rote learning and assimilation, and therefore required classrooms that were spacious enough to accommodate students sitting in separate rows, and corridors and hallways functioning as areas of transit for students entering and exiting the building and certainly not intended for lingering in and perhaps engaging in laboratory style learning. Yet in these same spaces, a different kind of teaching–learning must now be implemented. Contemporary society demands schools that deal in competences, collectively constructed knowledge, autonomy, movement and reflection right from the early years and this in turn requires a different, more congruent type of physical environment. Hence, the need for effective dialogue, even though this will not always be easy to achieve, between architects and education specialists, students and teachers, school principals and local/education authorities, as well as among all these groups collectively, especially in the case of pre-existing spaces and schools that are already in use.

But do these various professional and other figures really know how to engage in dialogue? Are they truly committed to constructing a common language, in view of the changes they need to effect, experiment with and evaluate? This chapter examines recent initiatives in the field, but without overlooking the wealth of knowledge inherited from educationalists and architects of the recent and less recent past, which is particularly relevant now that the alliance between education and architecture seems increasingly possible and desirable. If we ignore the past, we will end up experiencing certain innovations as though they were absolute novelties, whereas in reality well-known educationalists, whose work we review here, long since affirmed the value of space as a key driver of change in our ways of teaching and learning in the school setting.

2 A Historical Overview

As stated in the introduction, the crucial role of space in the teaching–learning process is a topic that has already been explored by educationalists and teachers, including in the distant past.

We now review a selection of these figures, with a view to recovering wisdom gathered in the past that can lend depth to the contemporary relationship between pedagogical thinking and architectural practices.

To avoid going too far back in history, let us begin our review with John Amos Comenius, considered by many to be the father of didactics, who designed an organically structured education system based on progressive levels of schooling and ad hoc curricular contents. Beginning in the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, the notion of schooling for large, though not necessarily homogeneous, groups of students, progressively took hold, and the need to develop suitable curricula for collective education came to the fore. The environments where schooling took place, however, received scant attention at first; this is not surprising, given that financial resources for investing in buildings were rarely to be had and unforeseen events were the order of the day. The Jesuits made a leading contribution to devising teaching methods for this new era. It was they who proposed dividing students into classes of different levels, envisaging a steady progression from one class to the next, based on mastery of a well-structured and clearly defined curriculum. As time went on, it was increasingly viewed as important to ensure that the places in which schools were built were healthy and peaceful, and architects were given precise instructions about to how lay out the space. To return to Comenius, the Czech scholar was among the first to recognise the importance of educational materials for children, designing of one of the earliest reading primers, which was multilingual and accompanied by explanatory illustrations. He also believed that learning should not be exclusively theoretical and classroom-taught. At the same time, his interest in enhancing teaching methods, having long experimented with and observed them, included a focus on the places in which lessons were delivered. Of course, it would have been excessively futuristic for that period to envisage constructing buildings solely for the purposes of schooling, especially for students from poorer backgrounds, who were those of greatest concern to Comenius. Although he wrote relatively little on the topic, and himself generally made do with whatever spaces happened to be available, he does remind us of some key principles concerning the educational environment: ‘The school itself should be a pleasant place, and attractive to the eye both within and without. Within, the room should be bright and clean, and its walls should be ornamented by pictures. These should be either portraits of celebrated men, geographical maps, historical plans, or other ornaments. Without, there should be an open place to walk and to play in (for this is absolutely necessary for children, as we shall show later), and there should also be a garden attached, into which the scholars may be allowed to go from time to time and where they may feast their eyes on trees, flowers and plants. If this be done, boys will, in all probability, go to school with as much pleasure as to fairs, where they always hope to see and hear something new’ (Komenský, 1993, pp. 231–233). Comenius’ words offer pointers that are still salient today including an environment that provides beauty, liveability and well-being, the display of selected objects of educational value, the link between indoor and outdoor environments, the importance of play and exercise, and then viewed as inappropriate in educational settings. To leap ahead some centuries, in the interests of brevity, another key figure is that of Maria Montessori, who devoted a significant proportion of her work to the theme of educational spaces and furnishings. We might summarise the first element in her approach to the educational environment, while striving not to oversimplify it, as follows: from the outset, she paid close attention to educational space itself, which she understood as a source of health and well-being, two key indicators of respect for children’s bodily and moral integrity; she believed that this space should be modelled, in the case of the young children she developed her method for, on the characteristics of the ‘home’. Montessori expressed this concept in her own words, at the opening of her second Casa dei Bambini in the underprivileged San Lorenzo district of Rome in 1907: ‘I have spoken thus in order that you may understand the great significance, the real beauty, of this humble room, which seems like a bit of the house itself set apart by a mother’s hand for the use and happiness of the children of the Quarter’ (Montessori, 2013, p. 361). Hence, for Montessori, modelling educational space on the home meant dividing it into differentiated, clearly marked-off areas, which the children would intuitively associate with different sets of activities. This welcoming, warm and reassuring ‘home’ environment was designed to foster a sense of belonging, and also included quiet corners where children could relax, concentrate and think, at their own individual pace. The furniture provided was child-sized, so that the children themselves could easily move it around. The walls and furnishings were in neutral colours, so as not to disrupt the children’s concentration by overwhelming them with stimuli.

The following are the leading characteristics of the Montessori educational environment as it developed over time:

  • made to measure for young children and their specific needs;

  • beauty and harmony;

  • clean, tidy, well-organised surroundings;

  • ease of movement and activity;

  • avoidance of excessive sensory stimuli and materials.

In Montessori’s time, educational spaces were conventionally designed to limit movement, which was perceived as a source of disturbance, and the major emphasis was on control and surveillance. In contrast, Montessori spoke in the following terms about the founding of another Casa dei Bambini in Messina in the aftermath of the major earthquake on 28 December 1908: ‘An impressive and indeed celebrated example was obtained in one of the first Casa dei Bambini to be founded in Rome. The circumstances were still more unusual than in the case of the first school, because here were orphans who had survived one of the greatest catastrophes, the Messina earthquake (1908), sixty small children discovered among the ruins. […] This terrible shock had reduced them to near uniformity, they were numbed, silent, absent-minded. It was hard to make them eat, hard to get them to sleep. […] Little pieces of furniture were made, gaily coloured and of every kind, little cupboards, bright curtains, little round tables, very low and brightly painted, higher rectangular tables, little upright chairs and armchairs. The dinner service was particularly attractive. The plates were tiny, so were the utensils and napkins, and even cakes of soaps and towels were all in proportion with small hands […]. On everything, there was an ornament, a sign of refinement. There were pretty pictures on the walls and vases of flowers everywhere. […] The change in [the children] was really impressive: You saw them running and jumping, as they carried things into the garden, moving [the] furniture of a room to put it in a little square under the trees, without breaking anything, or bumping into anything, their faces alert and joyous.’

Alongside this emphasis on the educational value of the overall setting—which was designed to resemble a ‘house’ in which children would feel at ease, enjoy freedom of movement and take direct responsibility for looking after their surroundings, despite their very young age—we find the educational materials that represent the cornerstone of the Montessori method. While Montessori continued to develop her range of materials over time, the first set of basic materials she produced were the so-called sensory materials for 0–6-year-olds, which she designed to foster the development of the five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. She came to identify handling, exploration, concentration and self-correction as the crucial ways in which children interact with the materials. As the children grow older, the Montessori materials are designed to link in with subject-specific learning, and to match the increasingly advanced abilities of the higher age groups. While Maria Montessori’s work in general continues to be of great contemporary relevance, the following aspects of her thinking are particularly salient to the theme of this chapter:

  • the value of an educational environment that has been designed ad hoc to suit the activities that students and teachers will carry out in it;

  • activity-specific areas that are easily identifiable and have been designed on the basis of explicit educational principles and goals;

  • the care of spaces and furnishings as a shared educational task that fosters a sense of responsibility in students;

  • the need for flexible spaces;

  • order and cleanliness;

  • aesthetic and harmonious beauty throughout the entire educational environment.

Another salient figure in the history of Italian education is Giuseppina Pizzigoni, who in 1927 managed, thanks to her entrepreneurial skill in raising the necessary funding, to build her own school with the assistance of engineering duo Belloni and Valverti. The work of this educationalist is included in our review, because the design and construction of her school were based on her specific educational programme and method. She had initially experimented with this method in less than ideal settings, but once she succeeded in obtaining financial cover, she was able to implement it in full, in a building that had been designed for this purpose down to the very last detail. The building is still in existence today, has been used by thousands of students over the decades, and explicitly and concretely embodies the cornerstones of Pizzigoni’s educational approach, as her own description of it gives us to understand: ‘The building must have changing rooms, a well-equipped gymnasium, an open porch with an earthen floor for drilling, spacious classrooms, brightened by large French windows, through which the light comes streaming in and the children can often and easily go out. […].’ (Pizzigoni, 1956, p. 33). Light, constant movement between indoor and outdoor settings, well-kept furniture, a horizontal layout, spaces for large group activities, frequent changes of location to engage in specific teaching–learning activities that cannot be conducted in the classroom (agricultural studies, swimming pool, laboratories): all of these characteristics are determined by the building and in turn constitute the method. ‘Indeed the school, viewed from the outside, is beautiful: beautiful thanks to its architectural lines; beautiful thanks to its decorated walls; beautiful thanks to the layout of its wings which stand out against the green lawns, fields, flowerbeds, kiosks; beautiful thanks to the decor of its bright corridors and its classrooms. […] Decorating rooms has always been viewed as a luxury (“art is expensive” they say); many view it as a distraction to the pupil; others have failed to understand its purpose, and thus made a distorted use of it; few see it as a magnificent educational resource: a spiritual necessity’ (Pizzigoni, 1961, pp. 87—88).

In sum, we can draw useful lessons from Pizzigoni’s main theoretical and methodological proposals, namely,

  • co-designing the educational environment with engineers and architects from project inception;

  • selecting interior décor and furniture that is in keeping with the architecture of the building, and that reflects specific teaching/learning objectives (Fig. 1);

    Fig. 1
    figure 1

    Courtesy of ASOP-Historical Archives of Opera Pizzigoni of Milan, Italy

    Rinnovata Pizzigoni school, Milan, mid-1930s.

    Full size image

  • taking care of the school’s aesthetic appearance on the grounds that a beautiful everyday living environment enhances well-being, engagement, direct participation and academic performance;

  • encouraging freedom of movement within the building by designing it to be high functional and easy to navigate (Fig. 2)Footnote 1;

    Fig. 2
    figure 2

    Courtesy of ASOP-Historical Archives of Opera Pizzigoni of Milan, Italy

    The house of the farmer, Rinnovata Pizzigoni school, Milan, mid-1930s.

    Full size image

  • reducing the barrier between the school and the outside world and making it more permeable, by organising frequent field trips to the local neighbourhood and local area and inviting a range of outside experts to visit the school;

  • treating the environment as a key learning resource.

We might say that we have shifted here from an educational setting that evokes children’s home environment (Montessori) and offers them familiar and comforting surroundings, to a school building with recognisably specific features that has been jointly designed by architects and education specialists with a view to better catering for students’ educational needs.

3 School Environment as the ‘Third Teacher’

Having reviewed the history of pedagogical reflection on the importance of the educational environment, honing in—for the sake of brevity—on the work of only a few representative educationalists, we now focus on a scholar who revolutionised the status of educational space, according to its top priority within his educational action. This was Loris Malaguzzi, the teacher, school principal and education specialist who pioneered the educational philosophy, implemented in the municipally run early childhood education centres and nursery schools of Reggio Emilia that is known as the Reggio Emilia Approach. From his earliest educational work, Malaguzzi not only viewed the environment as the driving force behind much educational activity but actually elevated it to the status of educator and teacher. Indeed, the term ‘third educator’ to refer to the school environment was first introduced by Malaguzzi himself (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 2017; Malaguzzi to describe a place that must embody a specific set of characteristics. The first of these characteristics is pedagogical intentionality. This is a reflexive mindset that is explicitly shared by the community of educators, assumes a competent, autonomous child, attributes educational value to children’s relationships with peers and adults, and—crucially—informs the design of educational spaces, actions, offerings and observations. Children are viewed as active constructors of knowledge about themselves and the world, and they draw on this knowledge in the context of their relationships with others, deploying the ‘hundred languages’ of which they are bearers and communicators. The adults working with the children set out to build a relationship with them, positioning themselves as guides, helpers and evaluators throughout the learning process.

The second characteristic to be borne in mind is a work method based on the flexible design, implementation, observation and documentation of the educational actions co-constructed with the children; and a constant exchange of views between educators, atelieristas and education specialists. Space is a key ally within this process: it should not impose itself on the children but be appealing and rich with stimuli; it should also be set up to facilitate the gathering of documentation, so as to establish when and to what extent a given spatial layout stimulates action and activates learning processes on the part of the children, and thus to identify ways of improving and enriching the educational environment. The third characteristic of note is that the children experience the spaces in which their learning takes place in a different way to students at most other schools, who generally feel more like guests in somebody else’s architectural framework than like key actors. In the Reggio Emilia schools, learners are continuously directly involved in questioning how to exploit the potential of the school environment, whether through exploration and discovery in small group, large group or school community settings, subject-specific inquiry, or the customization of spaces for specific educational activities, play or social/individual relaxation. The outcome is a flexible, though carefully designed, environment that is modifiable, permeable and customizable as a function of the composition and characteristics of the different groups that use it. In a book edited by Ceppi and Zini (1998, pp. 9–14) on the characteristics of space in the Reggio Emilia nursery schools and preschools, the authors drew on key terms such as transparency, horizontality, transformability and flexibility, polysensory, epigenesis, community, constructiveness, piazza (town square) (Fig. 3), atelier, inside and outside, soft complexity and osmosis to express the non-univocal nature of the Reggio schools’ spaces, the design of these spaces to facilitate immediate recognition of their functions, the ease with which the children can appropriate a given space, the schools’ strong relationship with the city in which they are situated via a constant two-way flow between their internal and external environments.

Fig. 3
figure 3

© Preschool and Infant-toddler centres—istituzione of the municipality of Reggio Emilia

Central ‘piazza’ [square], Diana municipal preschool, Reggio Emilia.

Full size image

The work of Loris Malaguzzi, which places the children themselves with their hundred languages along with educational spaces at the heart of the educational process, marked the beginning of new educational trajectories, in which interaction with the social and political community, as well as dialogue and the construction of a shared language with architects, is now taken as a given.

4 The Dialogue Between Architecture and Education Begins to Take Shape

A case that remains a key point of reference for the dialogue between architecture and education, in this instance initiated by the architectural partner to the exchange, is documented in Issue N. 331(1968) of the architecture magazine Casabella, devoted to what was then termed the new unified middle school (currently called lower secondary school). The issue presented an innovative research project based on a continuous exchange of views between architects and educational scientists, featuring articles by both well-known young architects and scholars of education. The opening article by Giuseppe Gori entitled ‘Design issues for the new middle school in the context of an interdisciplinary education project’ outlined a research project that had involved setting up an interdisciplinary working group and conducting fieldwork to assess design requirements following the introduction of the new middle school. After the background to the study, and the research process, themes and methods had been described, two further sections presented—respectively—the educational assumptions underpinning the research and ‘[…] a design project conducted at the Faculty of Architecture of Florence University, and illustrated by selected undergraduate works and theses.’(Gori, 1968). This line of collaboration had begun some years earlier in 1961, when Florence City Council asked an institute within the Faculty of Architecture to design plans for the construction of two new kindergartens. The students and academic staff had worked extensively on this project, and although the new schools were never built due to bureaucratic impediments, a key reflection process had been set in train. Thus, in 1962, the City Council asked the Faculty of Architecture to come up with a design for a middle school that would be in keeping with the new institution’s educational aims. To this end, the architecture faculty began to work closely with Lamberto Borghi, director of the university’s Institute of Pedagogy. To reinforce this link, and make it more immediately operational, some education researchers were seconded to the faculty of architecture (Gori, 1968, p. 5). This was an innovative project that had no pre-existing benchmark to go by and was therefore modified on an ‘as-needs’ basis. The resulting dialogue, as recorded in Casabella 331, was marked by the attempt to make explicit the theoretical and practical assumptions of two different worlds and the importance attributed by the parties to persevering in the process of exchange that had been initiated, on the basis that only a stable partnership would allow them to continue researching how best to design functional buildings for the young student population. The citation that follows may serve as a useful caution to contemporary researchers, who seem to have only just discovered the need for interdisciplinary dialogue. The intense cooperation then successfully implemented between two highly diverse professional fields had allowed the partners to overcome numerous disciplinary barriers, while firmly and vigilantly maintaining their respective professional focuses. In the words of education specialist Renato Coén, reflecting on the new middle school that was being born: ‘[…] different “content” demands a new “container”. And, indeed, in our case the diversity of content is radical. We do not wish to keep the students immobile, but to invite them to move around; they are not to be kept isolated from one another, allowing them only to relate directly (and according to a prescribed pattern) to the teacher on an individual basis, but situations are to be created that encourage them to freely form ad hoc groups; their activity at school is not to be exclusively intellectual, but is to be extended to other fields such as work, including manual tasks, free creative expression, the use of “leisure time”; and so on. These are the new “contents” for which traditional equipment and furnishings have proved to be inadequate; it is legitimate to believe that they require a more suitable “container”, that is to say, spaces that more or less radically diverge from previously unquestioned layouts, in other words a different “typology”. Precisely for this reason, there is a crucial need for collaboration between education specialists, designers and local authorities. This should take the form of effective, continuous, meticulous collaboration and not a client-supplier relationship. The advantage will be mutual, given that each of the parties will have the opportunity to clarify (and therefore possibly modify) their own ideas, testing the validity of their insights by means of intelligent experimentation […].’ (Coén, 1968, p. 6).

5 Teens and School

Focusing now on the theme of this book, that is to say adolescents’ relationship with education, both inside and outside of school buildings, it is important to point out that lower secondary school (11–14 years) is the period of education when teachers, school principals and in general all the adults involved in the educational process begin to pay radically less attention to the learning environment, which seems to be totally eclipsed by other priorities. Throughout preschool and primary school, a certain amount of care is taken with the preparation of the learning spaces where children spend a significant portion of their lives, but from the first year of lower secondary school, all investment in the educational environment is definitively withdrawn. Preschool and primary classrooms usually have functional areas, posters and other materials produced by the students hanging on the walls, plants in the classrooms and corridors, libraries in the classroom, and carefully arranged colourful exercise books and textbooks. Whether we are looking at a classroom whose furniture and layout are designed to evoke the home environment (Montessori), or one divided into different workshop areas (Freinet) or study corners, an educational investment has been made here that is no longer replicated at the lower secondary level. To directly observe this disinvestment, one only needs to walk from the primary to the secondary section of an istituto comprensivo, where both schools are housed in the same building or even on the same floor, and one will immediately see that the transition is marked by a shift to unadorned corridors, desks laid out traditionally in rows, etc. All attention has been transferred to the abstract domains of learning, listening, concentration, conceptualization, memorization and the assessment of learning. Anything perceived as secondary to these aims is viewed as useless, and even as at risk of diverting precious energy from the pursuit of the truly important objectives. Yet, this is precisely the moment when greater and renewed attention should be devoted to the corporeal experience of students whose bodies are undergoing a process of transformation, bodies that are difficult to govern, and are a source of wonder, curiosity and sometimes fear (Barone, 2005). With these new bodies, which are changing at the speed of light, preteens find themselves stuck in their school desks, very often without any opportunity to move or interact with others. Time goes by in restricted spaces, punctuated by taught classes demanding listening and immobility (Abbasi, 2016). The body can only receive attention during the less ‘educational’ moments, such as recreation, physical education classes, while moving from one classroom to another, or while entering and exiting the school building: at all other times, the action of the body is conditioned by a series of prohibitions or impositions.

Another key focus of attention for this age group is the quest for identity, a topic that is extremely complex and difficult to pin down. (Adams & Marshall, 1996; Erikson, 1968, 2008; Kroger, 2003; Marcia, 1994). Seeking to define one’s personal identity is typical at this age, and hence if spaces at school were designed to maximise the potential for debate, discussion, developing a sense of community, etc., this would offer lower secondary students a golden opportunity to experiment, make mistakes, reflect, start again and grow, both from the cultural and social points of view.

Hence, there is even better reason, when it comes to adolescents, to view educational space in terms of its multiform potential across the social, cognitive, cultural, disciplinary, pedagogical and organisational domains. Spaces that are designed to generate and nurture a sense of community will contribute to laying key ground for subsequent developments in terms of conscious citizenship, as McMillan & Chavis (1986), reminded us

Strong communities are those that offer their members positive ways to interact, important events to share and ways to resolve them positively, opportunities to honour members, opportunities to invest in the community, and opportunities to experience a spiritual bond among members (McMillan & Chavis, 1986, p. 14).

A sense of community requires the perception: that we are listened to, both when we make requests and when we make proposals; that we are directly involved; that we receive recognition when we carry out actions to benefit the community and not just ourselves. It is of great value to teenagers to know that they have the power to significantly contribute to tangible improvements, and the school environment is a place on which they could feasibly leave their mark, rather than remaining a ‘see-through’ presence that never leaves any trace of itself or of its growth or development throughout the infinite stretch of days, months and years spent at school.

6 Transforming Learning Spaces with Teens

As Abbasi (2016) has pointed out, adolescents at school need dedicated support that can come from the educational environment itself and must display at least the following two characteristics: interventions that respect both individuality and sociality; the opportunity to simultaneously engage in cognitive-cultural inquiry and identity seeking inquiry. In her own research with this age group, Abbasi (2016) identified four case studies conducted in Australia in which reflection on the search for identity in adolescence informed the transformation of educational spaces (Australian Science and Math School-ASMS, Canning Vale College-CVC, Senior College-MSC Mindarie, and Reece Community High School-RCHS). All involved the direct participation of teenagers, who in relation to existing school infrastructures, proposed the creation of flexible spaces of both formal and informal learning both inside and outside the school. Specifically, their proposals translated into the creation of

  • smaller and more private places for study and relaxation for individual students, small groups and larger groups;

  • places for social advancement.

The direct participation of teenagers made a key difference to these proposals, as the motto of a group of Chicago teens expresses: ‘Nothing about us, without us’. This slogan was cited in another project on developing spaces by and for teens in out-of-school-time programmes (Coffey & Maali, 2007). The researchers found that if adolescents were not given the opportunity to participate constantly in a project from the design phase onwards, the project would systematically fail. The reason for this lack of success was primarily due to the adolescents’ characteristics of independence and awareness, which prompted them (legitimately) to ask for their voices to be heard on matters concerning them. Furthermore, the environments in question were outside the school and therefore the parents did not necessarily feel responsible for them, so success was reliant on the strong involvement of the students at every stage in the process. A key recommendation emerging from this case was therefore to include teens in project design and implementation. ‘For example, one Boston area program, Zumix, developed an educational component integral to their design process. They paired teen council members with their architect to conduct site visits to other teen centres and community centres. There they examined the elements of good design and also noted where the design might have been improved. This component was built into the planning timeline and was one factor in architect selection. Other projects have been used the artistic talents of their teen participants to help shape the “look and feel” of their renovated space.’ (Coffey & Maali, 2007, p. 5).

Many of the projects just reviewed had some of the following defining features, identified as valuable by the teens:

  • creating a familiar and recognisable space;

  • using natural light;

  • using furnishings and other features to evoke a homely atmosphere;

  • generating a sense of well-being;

  • encouraging the use of creativity;

  • creating murals;

  • creating a space with artistic objects created by the teens themselves;

  • creating a space for artistic performances;

  • fostering autonomy;

  • providing free access to snack bars, toilets, games, computers, TV, friends and spaces for quiet relaxation;

  • creating spaces for group interaction;

  • creating ad hoc spaces for meeting adults;

  • keeping the spaces created clean and safe;

  • enabling movement and freedom of action.

If these specific features have been successfully developed by teenagers for extra-curricular settings, surely some of them could appropriately be transferred to places of formal education, especially schools.

Unfortunately, when we turn once again to the school setting and Italian secondary schools in particular, we realise that most of the time we are referring to a space-time in which teens spend many hours of their lives, incurring a large cost in terms of effort and dissatisfaction, with little or no choice in the matter, almost never consulted in relation to learning contents and topics, methods of learning and organisation, furnishings or the management and use of space. This lack of investment in teens has the effect of undermining their potential (Zuccoli, in Cimoli (ed.), 2017, p. 60). It is as though we were trying to make teenagers into mere executors of tasks, in way that is completely at odds with the current economic crisis, which in contrast pushes us to deal with the prospect of an uncertain future by deploying autonomy, creativity, inventiveness and, in some ways, entrepreneurship. A branch of educational research known as student voice, which is critical of this imposed classroom-taught model, has been committed for some time now to giving voice to students, from young children to older adults. Student voice (Grion & Cook-Sather, 2013; Cook-Sather, 2002), which is extremely widespread in the English-speaking world, has attempted to catalyse change over the years, in terms of having students participate in decision-making processes: ‘Of the many contemporary world crises, one of the most important concerns growing disillusionment with representative forms of democracy that are increasingly seen to offer only intermittent, condescending and ineffective involvement’ (Fielding, 2012, p. 47). Some studies within the Student Voice paradigm have focused on observing educational spaces with a view to identifying ways of enhancing them. For example, in research with teens from three countries—Italy, France and England—the desirable characteristics nominated by students included a clean environment, an abundance of laboratories, the opportunity to return to the school environment after school hours, good quality furniture and materials, and a flexible timetable (Grion, Devecchi, & Colinet, 2014). A study conducted in five lower secondary schools in the Milan area (Fianchini, 2017) yielded similar findings: the students completed questionnaires and participated in focus group discussions, proving competent in observing school space and offering solutions for its improvement, although they perceived direct involvement of the student body in processes of change as impossible. In all the surveyed schools, the classroom was the place where students spent most of their school time, outdoor spaces were little utilised, except for physical education classes and longer breaks, laboratories were infrequent, and rarely did lessons depart from the ‘classroom-taught’ model to invite higher levels of participation or deploy active methodologies that also involved the transformation of space. The students also focused on sources of well-being or the lack of well-being, flagging uneven air temperature in the classroom, especially for students seated near the radiators, a lack of natural light, the constant noise of traffic when classrooms overlook busy roads and furniture that is too small for growing bodies. Their proposals for possible change included greater freedom of movement for students within the school, the opportunity to return to school after hours to work in small groups, or at the informal level, and making the school into a meeting place by revisiting and enhancing the use of space. With respect to other studies on space (Fisher, 2016), the students’ reflections here mainly focused on issues of aesthetics, functionality, flexibility, as well as the impact of space on learning and academic performance. The students’ willingness to participate confirmed the observations of Julia Flutter:

Recent initiatives offer an invaluable opportunity for the principle of student participation to be built into the fabric of schools and to create space for new ways of learning. But we have to remember that, for students, the physical conditions of school are often the familiar face of a much deeper set of issues about respect- feeling that you matter school, that you belong, that it is “your school” and that you have something to contribute (Flutter, 2006, p. 191).