Affordance Theory as a Framework for Twenty-first Century Learning Principles

Abstract

Affordance theory (Gibson, 1979) has emerged as a perspective embraced by architects and researchers involved with the planning of learning environments. While this perspective can relate to the design of learning environments, this chapter presents a reinterpretation of affordance theory. This reinterpretation locates Gibson’s concept of the niche in the foreground. With this interpretation, school buildings may be understood as comprising a variety of places for learning. These different places inside and outside classrooms can encourage learners to become fully engaged in acquiring knowledge and mastering skills (Lave and Wenger in Situated learning. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991; Patel in An analysis of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Macat International, London, 2018). Hence, this chapter will expand the notion of affordances beyond the concept of objects that an individual picks up by engaging with the physical environment toward a nuanced analysis of the role of the affordance(s) within the context of the social situations that guide the learning process. From this analysis, this chapter will examine twenty-first century Learning Principles. Moreover, twenty-first century Learning Principles will be explored in the context of space, the practice of teaching and learning as well as in relationship to affordance theory and situated learning theory.

Introduction

Instead of focusing on why schools, in general, continue to deteriorate as places where students may acquire knowledge and master skills, policymakers, researchers, educational specialists, and designers have and continue to advocate for a re-imagination for the design of the conventional school building (OECD, 2006). At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, new schools were introduced to urban and suburban communities around the world. These new buildings were ostensibly fashioned on twenty-first century Learning Principles. However, with approximately a 60-year span of studies focusing on the contribution of the physical environment on learning, (Blackmore et al., 2011; Higgins et al., 2005; Upitis, 2009) minimal research has been published that recommends how to actually shape and curate the interior spaces (Byers and Lippman, 2018; Patel, 2018). More importantly, there is no literature or research to date that examines how to design twenty-first century Learning Environments that genuinely foster communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.

This chapter will begin with the concerns for reimagining the design for the physical environment of twenty-first century Learning Environments. Unfortunately, the evidence about these designs have not genuinely been substantiated by researchers, educational specialists, and architects (Byers and Lippman, 2018). Instead of exploring the actions prescribed by the principles that guide twenty-first century Learning to ground the designs for the learning environment affordacne theory (Gibson, 1979) has been introduced and embraced as a conceptual framework for examining the interior spatial design of the physical environment. While this perspective has merit for establishing a theorectical framework for guiding the design of the learning environment, the current research sidesteps the concerns encountered by the educators who struggle to work in these new ecosystems. To deal with these concerns, a framework that is grounded in affordance theory ought to begin with an understanding of the ecological niche (Gibson, 1979). By understanding the niche and the affordances that might be associated with it, the foundations may be laid for designing the physical environment in relationship to the actions outlined by the twenty-first century Learning Principles.

To better understand Gibson’s affordance theory (1979), this chapter will examine the concept of the ecological niche and define affordances as perceptual properties in the physical environment of the school building. Additionally, this chapter will examine the limitations of the current research on affordance theory, while extending the concept of perceptual properties in terms of the hard and soft architectural affordances of the building (Martin, 2002). This chapter will also endeavor to provide strategies for designing the learning environment by analyzing twenty-first century Learning Principles in relationship to these hard and soft affordances that populate the classroom and the common learning area. By understanding how the hard and soft features manifest in twenty-first century Learning Environments, the foundations may be laid for a creating Dynamic Places for Learning (DPL) as a theory for the spatial design of schools. Finally, this chapter and the next chapter “An Ecological Approach for Creating Dynamic Learning Environments,” are to be read sequentially. While this chapter examines affordance theory in relationship to twenty-first century Learning Principles, the preceding chapter re-examines affordance theory as it relates to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory (1979).

Twenty-First Century Learning Principles

Conventional schools have been and continue to be designed with classrooms arranged along either a veranda, single-loaded, or double-loaded corridors. Furthermore, the manner in which classrooms are planned in these buildings, generally, reinforces learners to be passive recipients of information. In classrooms, students sit, watch, and listen to the teacher’s performance. While this arrangement of the classroom creates conditions that is perceived negatively for students, alternative learning environments that endorse twenty-first century Learning Principles, which highlight the need for collaboration and communication among students, are noted to be ideal. In these learning environments, learners are actively participating in the learning process (Lippman, 2010; Sfard, 1998). While this vision of the active learner has been appealing to policymakers, researchers, educators, educational specialists, and architects, the guiding principles of twenty-first century Learning are ill-defined when it comes to understanding the learning environment because the principles only address the actions of the learner. Furthermore, the principles neither consider the actions nor the role of the teacher in the learning environment.

Rather than providing precedents for how twenty-first century Learning Principles manifest in the physical environment to support learning, the author charges that interior spatial design of school buildings must be re-imagined (Fig. 1). The belief guiding this re-imagination is that the school building is presumed to be the primary change agent for enhancing learning and engaging learners (Nair & Fielding, 2005; Pearlman, 2014). Additionally, the evidence available for how these buildings function as a change agent to shape the practice of teaching and learning is lacking (Byers and Lippman, 2018). By imposing change on the learning community may be likened to relocating a panda from its bamboo forests in South Central China to the Northern European forests of Sweden. Who is responsible for the panda’s inability to cope in this new environment? The panda? Or the individuals who forced the relocation? Hence, teachers and students are placed in the unenviable position of having to operationalize settings that are vastly different from what they have been accustomed. Rather than investigating the research and understand how learning environments function to support the learners, the learning, and things to be learned, affordance theory (Gibson, 1979) has been introduced as a panacea to deal with the consequences created from interior spatial designs for school buildings that presumably embraced twenty-first century Learning ideals.

Fig. 1

Credit for image: Peter C. Lippman

Open-plan school building in Tasmania, Australia.

Affordance Theory: Beginning with the Ecological Niche

When exploring Gibson’s affordance theory (1979), generally, the discussions begins with the salient features in the physical environment and the characteristics and properties of them—the affordances. Rather than beginning with describing affordances, our exploration of this theoretical perspective will begin with defining and understanding the concept of the niche; for, the niches in both the natural and human-made environments are locations that support particular affordances (Gibson, 1979). Furthermore, an ecological niche is a term that refers to the place of a species within an ecosystem, describing both the range of circumstances necessary for persistence of the species and its ecological role in the ecosystem. Hence, an ecological niche describes: (1) a specific environmental condition that complements the actions of a particular species (Pocheville, 2015); and (2) how a species or population responds to the resources in the physical environment and how it, in turn, may alter them (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Image Credit to Peter C. Lippman

Furniture curated to create a variety of activity settings in a modular classroom building, Huddinge, Sweden.

Furthermore, the ecological niche is never stable; for, the different species who occupy the niche are always accommodating to environmental changes. These environmental changes include natural disasters, human interference, animal infestation, and invasive species. Hence, the different species are always attuning their environments. The concept of environemnt may be described as relating to or resulting from living organisms and their physical environment. As a species attunes their settings in their physical environment, these actions, in turn, affect the situations of the other organisms who also inhabit the niche (Lo Presti, 2020). Furthermore, when a species substantially attunes/changes their physical environment, they are referred to as ecosystem engineers.

Additionally, the process in which ecosystem engineers systematically modify the niche is defined as niche construction. When a species changes its environment and adapts to it, a coevolution between a species and its niche ensues. Since species continuously change the environment, this evolutionary process may be viewed as dynamic (Lo Presti, 2020). A classroom in a school may be described as a dynamic learning environment. In this human-constructed niche, learners also attune their settings by adjusting the furniture to support the different ways in which they work as well as bring the needed resources, portable affordances (Lippman, 2023), to the setting, i.e., laptops, tablets, notebooks, books, paper, and pencils (Fig. 3). Once finished with the task-at-hand, they can return the furniture and tools to their original locations in the niche.

Fig. 3

Image Credit Peter C. Lippman

Classroom that has been attuned to support the different ways in which learners acquire knowledge.

For Gibson, organisms and their environment of affordances constitute ecological systems or niches (1979). A niche implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (Gibson, 1979). While each niche implies a kind of animal, the animal implies a kind of niche (Gibson, 1979). Whereas each classroom indicates a type of learner, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, each learner indicates a type of classroom in a kindergarten, elementary, middle or high school. Since learning is an active process, learners, who transact socially and directly with the physical environment, can and will alter the classroom and thereby enact possibilities for further action (Odling-Smee et al., 2003). In schools, human activity is constrained and enabled because of the transactional relationship between the learners and their eco-niches (Gibson, 1979, p. 129; Heras-Escribano et al., 2013, 2015). Therefore, the niche may be defined as the hard architecture of the school building. While these settings are formed by the architect, the goal is to craft places that have intention and are attentive to the transactions that will occur within them (Fig. 4). Hence, the niches in the school building include, but are not limited to classrooms, specialized classrooms, seminar rooms, administration offices, cafeteria, teachers’ workroom and lounge, gymnasium, and common learning areas, to name a few.

Fig. 4

Image Credit: Peter C. Lippman

Whiteboard (2400 mm high 600 mm wide)—this soft architectural affordance has been located on a wall for learners to have direct access, High School in Perth, Australia.

Defining Affordances

Niches are defined by hard and soft architectural affordances. Hard architectural affordances are, but not limited to: walls and interior partitions, doors, windows, a grand stair, an amphitheater in the classroom (Fig. 5), window seats, power points (electrical outlets), light switches, and corners. As the hard architecture defines the different learning areas in the school, the soft architectural affordances, which are located in the different niches of the school building, include the furniture, furnishings, and equipment. Soft architectural affordances provide opportunities for learners to settle in a place, an activity setting (Lippman, 2010; Matthews & Lippman, 2016; Tharp & Gallimore, 1997), and work through the task-at-hand. This perspective on hard and soft architectural affordances aligns with Gibson’s concept of affordances, since an affordance is “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (1979, p. 127).

Fig. 5

Image credit to Peter C. Lippman

Hard architectural affordance in the form of an amphitheater which was introduced to a classroom in a 4th and 5th-grade classroom in Huddinge, Sweden.

Affordances as Perceptual Properties of the Physical Environment

According to Gibson, affordances provide an opportunity for action (1979), which are relational (Lo Presti, 2020) and situational. Furthermore, the properties of the affordance emerge through participation with others in the practice of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Affordances, the hard and the soft architecture in the physical environment, are neither a property of the learner nor a property of the learning environment, but a property of both (Heras-Escribano et al., 2013, 2015). The hard affordances that form the niche and soft affordances that are curated to provide a sense of place in the niche are complementary. Furthermore, this view of the learner in relationship to the physical environment, the crafted settings of the building and curated features that have been placed in the settings of the school, embraces a transactional worldview (Altman, 1992). This worldview aligns with the notion that affordances are perceptual properties of the learning environment. As perceptual properties, the probable known function as well as uncovering the possible function of the affordance(s) guides the actions of the learner(s).

To identify the perceptual properties of affordances in the physical environment involves understanding the process of human transactions (Heras-Escribano et al., 2015). This process of transactions involves: (1) where the learner acts upon the environment; (2) when new information emerges; (3) when the learner detects/picks up this information; and (4) how the learner controls or coordinates their actions in response to that information. The process is a set of dynamic transactions between a learner’s capacity for perceiving—acting elements such as exterior walls, interior partitions, corners, furniture, tools, and resources within the physical environment. According to Heras-Escribano et al. (2013), this is a looping process which explains the embeddedness of the transactions, as well as recognizes the different means by which learners attune their settings to accommodate their working circumstances.

Therefore, perceptual properties are revealed from the actual and authentic social situations occurring in the physical environment, i.e., learners wanting a place where they can feel safe and secure to discuss their project may choose to work under a table (Fig. 6). In addition, students who want to work cooperatively on a project, read a book, draw a picture, and/or research on their tablet may need to retreat from the distractions of the classroom. To work through their tasks, the learner may find shelter under the teacher’s desk, in a tent in an elementary school classroom, or exit the room to a place outside the classroom (Lippman, 2023; Matthews & Lippman, 2016). Affordances as perceptual properties are embedded in the physical environment and become revealed to teachers and learners through their transactions and, then, provide opportunities for them to alter their settings as they work through the tasks-at-hand (Greeno, 1998; Lippman, 1995; Patel, 2017; PEHKA, 2012). Hence, the crafted and curated architectural affordances that comprise the physical environment must be responsively planned to support and reinforce the shared practices, vision, and mission of the learning environment.

Fig. 6

Image Credit to Peter C. Lippman

Learners sitting under a table sharing information.

The Limitations of Affordance Theory When Applied to the School Buildings

Although various designers and researchers have recognized Gibson’s Affordance Theory (1979) to support their design thinking, their approach for integrating Gibson’s ideas is limited. The limitations of the current research are in how affordance theory has been conceptualized. These conceptualizations do not truly connect the actions—thinking, collaborating, communicating, and creating—of the learner(s) with how the affordances of the physical environment encourage learning. Furthermore, the current research does not highlight the transactions in the physical environment nor does it distinguish between the hard and soft architectural affordances that comprise the different spaces in the physical environment of the school building. Lastly, the research does not examine interrelationships between the hard and soft architectural affordances nor the portable affordances. The portabe affordances are brought by learners to the different niches in the physical environment and shape learning as well as influence teacher and student engagement (Lippman, 2023).

Limitations of the Research on Affordance Theory

Some of the limitations of the studies center on the methodologies used by researchers which tend to utilize: interviews; scaled modes of classrooms so that teachers and students may arrange the furniture to determine how best to create spaces to support teaching and learning; and/or photography to interpret how the spaces may be used by teachers and students, to name a few (Frelin & Grannas, 2020; Young et al., 2019). To date, few studies involve direct observations as a methodology for genuinely understanding how the niches in the learning environment function (Carvalho and Yeoamn, 2018; Lippman, 2023). Examples of direct observations include, but are not limited to: behavior mapping and behavior tracking (Lippman, 2010).

Direct observations allow the researcher to evaluate how the spaces are used to support students’ ability to access others, ability to obtain needed resources, as well as view the students’ actions while they were working. Furthermore, direct observations allow the researcher to understand how the hard, soft and portable affordances influence and shape how learners acquire knolwedge and teachers engage with their students (Lippman, 2023).

Designers Approach for Crafting the Hard Architectural Affordances

Even though researchers ground their hypotheses in the findings from their studies and teachers ground their knowledge about pedagogy from practice, educational planners, architects, and interior designers, generally, base their knowledge about the physical environment on normative theories in how people acquire knowledge (Byers & Lippman, 2018; Lang, 1977). Furthermore, architects focus on the form of the building and creating intriguing interior spaces. The hard architectural affordances that shape the physical environment may include folding walls, angled walls, and/or curved walls. Furthermore, the design may limit the number of doors in the room, walls, and corners in the different spaces. Regardless of how the spaces are planned for the school building, designers operate with the underlying assumptions that these spaces will support the transactions of the learner. Hence, designers, generally, conceptualize schools based on how they believe a learner will use the different spaces (Frelin & Grannas, 2020).

As architects base their designs on their normative ideas, the findings from a study on elementary schools by Young et al. (2019) should not be surprising. The researchers uncovered that teachers have a more intimate understanding of their physical environment than the designers who planned them; for, the teachers who are situated with their students in these niches every day over the course of the year should know the idiosyncrasies of their spaces. However, this study is somewhat misleading, because it also assumes architects and educators are motivated by similar goals. Nonetheless, their goals are divergent. As inindctaed above, architects plan buildings with spaces that are intended to support the learner, whereas educators want dynamic places that support the development of teachers’ practical knowledge and their learners’ ability to appropriate knowledge.

Although designers may have fashioned various school buildings, their knowledge about the learner—built environment relationship is limited (Lippman, 2023). Architects are not educators, and for them, designing buildings does not involve an understanding of human behavior (Lippman, 2023; Venturri, 1966). While architects, interior designers, and educational specialists acknowledge the different actions that are intended to occur in the spaces of the school building, they don’t delve more deeply in to how creating, critical thinking, collaborating, and communicating take place. If their focus shifted, architects, educational specialists, and interior designers would become attentive to the intended transactions that routinely occur so that they might best determine how to craft the hard architectural affordances to enhance the opportunities in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools.

Educators Approach for Curating the Soft Architectural Affordances

As architects are not educators, educators are not architects nor interior designers. Educators have little or no training in curating the spatial design of learning environments. Teachers, however, consider the different learners who will inhabit the spaces, i.e., their emotional needs and where they might be best located in the classroom to learn (Frelin & Grannas, 2020). Therefore, the design decisions of the architect and interior designer can be challenging for how teachers curate their settings. Based on the author’s participatory action and academic research projects, teachers, generally, arrange their classrooms similarly every year, because this is what they know and believe works for them. As a result, the learning spaces tend to be curated in reaction to how the hard architecture has been fashioned. Hence, the furniture may only be organized to take full advantage of sight lines to the whiteboard and flat-screen TV monitor (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7

Credit to Peter C. Lippman

Classroom arranged to fit 30 students.

Based on the author’s participatory action research projects, the typical manner in which the classroom and/or the common learning areas have been curated may arise from a fixed or reactive mindset about teaching thirty (30) or more students in a space, rather than how the affordances, hard and soft, encourage, engage, and enhance the needs of the different children in the classroom. For example:

• Storage Units. Whether the storage units are built-in and/or moveable, by locating them against walls not only makes it difficult for students to access resources, but also means the locations for cooperative group and/or independent work areas results as free-standing tables and/or desks in the classroom. While arrangements for the small social groupings may appear innovative, it does consider the learned helplessness that students may feel when they are located in the middle of a classroom. When sitting at the tables, they are vulnerable; for, they are not be able to settle and focus on their work as they are not only exposed on all sides to various distractions in the room, but also located closely to one another. They are unable to expand and contract their personal space (Sommer, 1969). The movement patterns which occurs on all sides of the seated student by others who pass them to access others, the teacher, and the storage units that possess the resources in the room is disruptive to their learning.

• U-Shape desks/table arrangement. Position desks in a U-shape for the sole purpose that students may see one another across the classroom (Fig. 8). After creating this U-shape, placing additional desks in rows within the U-shape or placing seats on both sides of the legs and base of the U-shape defeats the purpose of this concept. In these examples, the arrangement discourages students’ movement in the classroom, because the U-shape confines them. More importantly, this arrangement no longer allows learners the ability to see one another (Martin, 2002).

  Fig. 8

  

  Credit for image Peter C. Lippman

  Furniture arranged in U-shape with chairs placed on both legs of the U.

• Groupings of students. The evidence indicates that groupings of four (4) are most effective (Bertucci et al., 2010). Although arranging tables to support grouping of four (4) is ideal, the niche may not be able to accommodate this. Some groupings of six (6) and eight (8) may be considered. The rationale for positioning tables or desks to support eight (8) learners is that this arrangement may easily break into groupings of four (4), which will lead to pairs of students working together and, eventually, individuals becoming fully engaged in the task-at-hand (Lippman, 1995).

Like the classroom, the common learning area may be planned with movable storage units, soft-seating and tables with chairs. Generally, this furniture is placed away from walls and in the center of the space. In a number of our action research projects, teachers curated furniture in the common learning area to prevent learners from running through the space. Essentially, the perceptual properties of the furniture that were identified by the teachers were as barriers, blockades, or fences.

While the architect’s intentions for the common learning area may have been to create a more open and modern learning environment with good sight lines through the space, it was not actualized by teachers as a place for learning. The spaces were, generally, cluttered with furniture (Martin, 2002). The rational for cluttering the spaces were due to the way that learners moved through the common learning area. The learners’ activities were viewed as disruptive for learning. Hence, this teacher-centered space was curated to limit and disrupt students’ ability to obtain needed resources, engage with teachers, or participate with their peers (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Martin, 2002; Sfard, 1998). When the space was re-imagined, the furniture was arranged to create a variety of complementary settings, locations, where learners were able to settle and focus on their work (Fig. 9).

Essentially, the educators who have curated their classrooms and the common learning area do not necessarily pick up the interrelationships that exist with the perceptual properties of the hard and soft affordances nor the portable affordances (Lippman, 2023). Furthermore, this inability to pick up the properties of the different features in the physical environment results from teachers’ professional training which is, generally, limited to a set of narrow, prescribed components of managing the “ideal” classroom, rather than the development of environmental competencies and how to exploit the spaces in which they teach. While teachers may have a better understanding in how learners acquire knowledge, this does not necessarily translate into curating spaces that support the different ways that students work effectively. However, when teachers develop the competency for identifying the properties of the different affordances, they are able to create settings that are student-centered (Martin, 2002). In these re-imagined settings, teachers and student can move easily through the setting and access resources, and most importantly, students are able to choose places where they feel safe and secure (Fig. 10).

Fig. 9

Credit image to Peter C. Lippman

Re-imagining a common learning area with moveable storage. The storage units and ottoman seating were arranged to create different locations for learners to work.

Fig. 10

Credit to image which is Peter C. Lippman

Classroom that was re-imagined to encourage movement, while providing students places to settle and focus on their work.

Moving Beyond the Limitations

Young et al. (2019) recommended that architects need to engage…. “with teachers/educators, students and other users of learning spaces to ensure that designs enable the types of affordances that are desired and required within new learning spaces (pp. 716–717).” This notion which populates the literature on the design of school buildings is disingenuous. Fundamentally, the vision for the learning environment, the design of the building and the furniture, has been be determined by the municipality, school district, the school authority, and/or school leadership. These meetings with educators, parents, community members, and students, which have become the norm, are only to engender some discussion about learning, the learner, and physical environment.

Ultimately, these meetings are a rouse in which the learning community is compelled to accept the design for a new twenty-first century Learning Environment. These environments are presented to the learning community as open, integrated, and flexible. While these qualities may be appealing, the characterizations for what makes these learning environments open, integrated, or flexible are, generally, imprecise. Since the vision for these settings is ill-defined, the actual focus of these meetings should be on, but not limited to, the following:

• understanding the true purpose of the meetings;

• fully engaging educators and students;

• seriously engaging designers and educators in the literature and research on what and how a twenty-first century Learning Environment work;

• creating (translating and assembling the information of the literature and research to plan) Dynamic Places for Learning.

Understanding the True Purpose of the Meetings

Given that the outcome for the learning environments has essentially been pre-determined, the meetings between the builder/school district/municipality and the stakeholder/learning community should address the concerns associated with crafting twenty-first century Learning Environments, i.e., understanding what these settings are or are not, as well as identifying what works and what does not work in these environments (Byers & Lippman, 2018). For example, many of these environments are planned as open-plan school buildings, where noise is an issue (Mealings, 2022; Rivlin & Wolfe, 1985; Weinstein, 1979). Since there are fewer architectural features, walls and doors, in the spaces to isolate the noise, students may be told to be quiet. This concept of telling students to be mindful of how they should not communicate with one another, essentially, contradicts twenty-first century Learning Principles. If students cannot communicate with one another, they are unable to collaborate and critically solve the task-at-hand. Hence, the core twenty-first century values, which are grounded in critical thinking, communication, creation, and collaboration, cannot occur if students are discouraged from engaging socially with others.

Therefore, the focus of the meetings might be on the use of the space (Gislason, 2010; Lippman, 1995; Martin, 2002), i.e., understanding how individuals and small social groupings function in the different niches in the physical environment. From this understanding, the concerns with how the hard architecture affordances are fashioned and the appropriate soft architecture affordances may be identified and responsively integrated into the physical environment. Nonetheless, this endeavor of understanding how groups of students use space, i.e., when, how, and why, is more difficult to appreciate and comprehend. Hence, these notions are seldom discussed in depth at these meetings, nor have they been examined thoroughly in the research on learning environments (Frelin & Grannas, 2020).

Fully Engaging Educators and Students

Another misconception of the recommendations by current researchers, (Young et al., 2019) is with understanding the educators and students actual level of engagement (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in the visioning process of the school building. Based on the author’s experiences working with different learning communities, educators and students, generally, are peripherally engaged in the design process. Even when they believe that they are fully engaged. The author’s experience working as a school designer suggests that the complexities of the different settings cannot be realized from viewing a set of floor plans and/or three-dimensional images. For example, during the design development phase of a proposed high school building in Australia, the architect presented their concept, a floor plan, to the principal and a number of teachers (key stakeholders) who represented the learning community. The general concept for the design clustered classrooms around a common leaning area. In the heart of the common learning area, the architect located a grand stair which connected two floors. This was a significant feature in the building.

Nevertheless, the purpose for this feature was unclear to the learning community. Hence, the learning community requested that it be removed. By removing the stair, they felt that they would gain more floor space which would support a variety of different learning activities, i.e., construction projects and robotics. In response to the learning community, the architect acquiesced and removed the grand stair from the design. At no time did the architect counter the learning community with their reasons for including the stair in the design. Furthermore, the architect never countered the learning community with questions about how the new space would be used, nor how many people would use it at any one time. Lastly, the architect never provided the literature nor the research that might explain how the stair or an open-planned space might encourage learning, engage learners, and enhance the things to be learned.

Hence, the notion of fully engaging teachers did not actually take place. Even though the learning community believed that they were completely engaged and made thoughtful and responsive decisions about the physical environment, the ambiguity of the setting, with or without the grand stair, will only become revealed when the learning community operationalizes it. At the same time, the architect will be absolved from their responsibility, since they executed what was dictated to them by the client. Since the focus was on the feature, rather than on how people would use the setting, the educators are left to determine how to make this setting function. This account reinforces the differing motivations of architects and educators. While the educators were fixated on how the common learning area might function, the architects’ knowledge was limited to the building. The architects did not attempt to understand how the interior spatial design, with or without the grand stair, might influence the behaviors of the people who will occupy the common learning area, nor how the common learning area might shape the people who activate it.

Legitimately Engaging Designers and Educators

To create a responsive school building, the design process cannot be focused on reproducing the generic models of what are presumed to be twenty-first century Learning Environments (Deed & Lesko, 2015; Deed et al., 2020; Frelin & Grannas, 2020; Lippman, 2010). Many examples of twenty-first century Learning Environments have de-evolved into buildings that populated the international landscape for the past two centuries. The only difference between what is deemed conventional from what is considered new and improved is that there are no doors to the spaces (Bradbeer, 2022). Hence, a responsive approach for designing school buildings must be holistic and fully engage designers, educational specialists, and educators (Byers & Lippman, 2018; Frelin & Grannas, 2020; Gislason, 2010). When educators’ and students’ visions are sincerely welcomed and accepted, the designer and educational specialist must:

• understand the routines which occur in the learning environment (Byers & Lippman, 2018; Lippman, 1995);

• gather evidence from examining the literature on the theory and research in the fields of school building design and education (Byers & Lippman, 2018);

• analyze the themes from the workshops which thoughtfully engage educators about the pedagogy of their places and translate these findings into responsive architectural solutions that extend beyond conventional and current practices (Lippman, 2010).

From this insight, designers can potentially offer a vision for the crafted building that is grounded in educational practice as well as provide insight for how the settings may best be curated to support the pedagogy of the place (Fig. 11). Furthermore, educators must also become fully engaged in the design process by not assuming designers and educational specialists have the appropriate knowledge for crafting a school building, understanding their concerns, nor having their best interests in mind. Only when designers, educational specialists, and educators sincerely and openly communicate with and listen to one another, will there be opportunities for responsively crafting dynamic learning environments.

Fig. 11

Image credit to Peter C. Lippman

High school building crafted with corner complementary settings, where teachers may curate and student may attune to settle and focus on the task-at-hand.

Creating Dynamic Places for Learning

While educational specialists and researchers (Young et al., 2019) assert that educators must develop a better understanding of the hard and soft architectural affordances of their learning environments, this appeal presumes that educators:

• can review a set of drawings to determine how the different settings will support their pedagogy and comprehend that learning environments are dynamic, are not perfect, and are always evolving (Byers & Lippman, 2018; Lippman, 2010);

• choose the furniture for their settings (Frelin & Grannas, 2020), and, then, identify the nuances of the soft architectural affordances of the classroom and the common learning areas in relationship to the perceptual properties of the hard architecture of each niche to create safe and comfortable places for learning (Carvalho & Yeoman, 2018; Frelin & Grannas, 2020);

• understand what an open learning environment is, and, then, be able to curate the furniture so that students and teachers are able to move easily through the different settings to access others and resources (Frelin & Grannas, 2020; Lippman & Mathews, 2018; Martin, 2002).

While early childhood education and elementary school teachers, typically, have autonomy to curate their classrooms/niches, our participatory action research projects in early learning centers and primary schools suggest that there is a sincere interest in understanding how the hard and soft architectural affordances as well as the portable affordances complement one another, as well as how these features can be used. When there is interest, these settings will evolve throughout the school year to support the different ways that each learner acquires knowledge in the room and where they are best able to participate with others.

Nonetheless, based on our action research projects in middle schools and high schools, some educators do not have an interest in understanding the hard and soft architectural affordances of their classrooms. For these teachers, there is no need to understand them. Each space in which they perform is similar to one another. These spaces also include similar affordances. Rather than considering how the affordances may be re-arranged in the classroom to engage learners and cultivate teacher engagement, they see their purpose as providing information to students and managing their behaviors (Frelin & Grannas, 2020; Martin, 2002).

Another reason, which may be appealing for architects and educational specialists in wanting teachers to develop a better understanding of the affordances in the settings, this approach absolves designers any responsibility of making an effort for acquiring knowledge about learning theory and research. Without this knowledge, designers will continue to craft buildings as they do currently. While the building may be designed with intention and based on best architectural practice, these buildings are, generally, not attentive to learning, the learners and the things to be learned.

A school building that has been designed attentively suggests that the interior spaces are thoughtfully crafted. When spaces are thoughtfully crafted, the hard architectural affordances may be identified and the soft architectural affordances may be selected and curated to create activity settings in the classrooms. Furthermore, when the spaces are responsibly crafted, the complementary settings in the common learning may be identified by the users. However, if the common learning areas do not include these differentiated places, complementary settings may be defined with soft architectural affordances—furniture (Lippman, 2023). When these settings are planned as distinct locations in the common learning area, planned outside and adjacent to classrooms, they are viewed as safe and secure places to work, support smaller social groupings, and allow teachers to access them easily from their classrooms, they are not only complementary, but are also understood as dynamic. Hence, the notion dynamic suggests that the settings have been attentively designed to support the different transactions that occur routinely throughout the school year (Altman, 1992; Byers & Lippman, 2018; Carvalho & Yeoman, 2018; Lippman, 2010).

To create a dynamic learning environment, designers and educational specialists must, first, acknowledge the pedagogy of the place, determine the purpose of each niche, identify the hard architectural affordances, and determine which soft architectural affordances might be most appropriate for these settings to support learning and know the portable resources that will be brought to these spaces (Carvalho & Yeoman, 2018). A dynamic learning environment that embraces twenty-first century Learning Principles provides places for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. In the following sections, these principles will be described to guide researchers, educators, educational specialists, interior designers, and architects in how these principles can manifest in the classroom.

Communication: Communication may be described as providing learners the ability to become skilled at effectively sharing and distributing ideas using a variety of styles, modes, and tools, including digital technologies, to a range of audiences (Postareff et al., 2015). While this definition suggests the desired outcome of being in a twenty-first century Learning Environment, it does not inform the reader of the different levels of the formal communication that routinely occur in this niche/classroom. Within the fixed time period for when a course/subject convenes, the following exchanges may occur:

• A lecture, which is essentially a monolog, provides information that learners need to know in order to work through a series of tasks, i.e., in learning geometry, students are provided with postulates and shown how to use them. Furthermore, the form of communication is both verbal and visual. Hence, the teacher will need a place in the room to present information and be able to clearly display the information to a group of learners. This place for the presentation to display concepts may be at the front of the room. This display area may be a wall, which supports a whiteboard (possibly the length of the wall and/or the height of the wall), TV, and electrical power outlets in the wall for the TV. The hard architectural features must be planned to support the actions of the teacher. Incidentally, if this scenario occurs in an elementary school classroom, a rug may be placed on the floor in front of the display wall. Even though middle and high school students may not, generally, sit on a rug, a space similar to the elementary school setting must be created for the teacher to see and easily access each student (Lippman, 1995). Hence, the soft architectural features must be placed to allow movement to and from this location in the room (Martin, 2002).

• When the whole group is meeting, participation ranges between low, moderate, and high levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement depending on the student and how the teacher interacts with them (Lippman, 1995). After the lecture, students will break-off into cooperative groups and work. These smaller social groupings, generally, are no more than four students (Postareff et al., 2015). These students will meet in an activity setting with their portable affordances, i.e., textbooks, notebooks, and laptops (or tablets). Whether the narrative is about primary, middle, or secondary schools, each group will need a place to gather, locate their resources, and have direct access to power points to charge their laptops (Carvelho & Yeoman, 2019).

• The activity settings in a classroom can manifest with tables and chairs, high benches and stools, and/or soft-seating and tables (Fig. 12). By placing desks and benches perpendicular to walls, students may settle and focus on the task-on-hand as well as have direct access to the electrical outlets that may be used to power their laptops. These arrangements allow members of the group to have continuity as they share ideas verbally and with their digital technologies. Therefore, the soft architectural affordances are located to provide safety and comfort as well as accommodate the portable affordances that the learner transports to the settings (Lippman, 2023). During this period, the cooperative group members are talking among each other—brainstorming about how they will solve the problem-at-hand, identifying the different tasks, and, then, determining who will work to solve the different tasks (Lippman, 1995). Hence, communication, overall, is verbal. When the whole group is meeting, they showcase moderate to high levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement (Lippman, 1995, 2023).

  Fig. 12

  

  Credit for the design to Peter C. Lippman

  Re-imagining the classroom with a central space to gather and activity settings placed along the walls of the classroom.

• Once tasks have been identified, students may choose to work in pairs or independently (Lippman, 1995). During this phase of cooperative group work, the group, generally, will continue to work in their assigned or chosen activity setting. When they are in this setting, they will talk to one another, research on their laptops, and focus on completing their tasks. Even though students are working separately, they continue to inform one another of their activities, i.e., talking and showing each other the information from the screens of their laptops (or tablet) as well as from their notebooks (Lippman, 1995, 2023). Communication during this phase of the project is both verbal and visual. When the whole group is meeting, they showcase high levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement (Lippman, 1995, 2023).

Collaboration: Learners who work together develop strong interpersonal as well as team-related skills, which include effective management of team dynamics, the ability to make substantive decisions together and learn from and contribute to the learning of others. By engaging with one another, the learner may develop self and social awareness (Postareff et al., 2015). By working with others, learners develop self-identity from their accomplishments, which are appreciated and valued by the other members of the group (Lippman, 1995). Once again, the narrative about twenty-first century Learning Environment does not describe the different forms of participation that take place in the different formal learning environments of the school. The levels of engagement are peripheral, guided, and full participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Patel, 2018).

• When the teacher is lecturing, collaboration with the students may be described as peripheral. Peripherally engaged suggests that the learners are somewhat participating in the lecture of the teacher by asking questions, taking notes, and sometimes moving to the whiteboard and displaying what they have learned. Hence, the reason that low, moderate, and high levels of participation may be observed is that the teacher is the lead performer lecturing (a monolog) to their audience, the students. In addition, the teacher’s performance occurs away from the students who might be sitting on a rug or at tables facing the teacher who either is sitting on chair or standing adjacent to the whiteboard and TV. At this moment, the teacher connects with each student visually. Not only is the teacher somewhat removed from their students, but the concepts being presented are new and as such initially may be described as out of reach of the learner.

• Once students are working cooperatively within the confines of their activity settings, the collaborations involve guided participation, which: provide access to a variety of peers, generally four (4), with varying levels of skill with a given activity (Bertucci et al., 2010); influence the distinct types of engagements, verbal and otherwise, that occur routinely; encourage learners to explore the allowable range of activities permitted in the activity setting; and allow opportunities for students to create, reflect on, and design their activities and respond to their self-generated changes. While these activities are taking place, the role of the teacher is one that is always available, but employs the appropriate levels of adult direction and monitoring to allow for developmentally appropriate latitude in what learners do and how they do it (Mathews & Lippman, 2016; Tharp & Gallimore, 1997). During these moments of collaboration, the learners tend to remain in their activity settings—sitting on chairs at a table, sitting or standing at a high bench, sitting on the floor, or sitting on soft-seating.

• Full participation occurs when learners have individual tasks to complete for their cooperative group. Depending on the task, learners may remain working at the soft architectural affordances that define their activity setting or move to another area of the room with the portable affordances that support their endeavors such as working on the floor under a table (Fig. 13). Additionally, students may also look for the hard architectural features for completing their tasks, i.e., sitting against a wall or in a corner in the activity setting, or leave the classroom to find a place to settle in away from the distractions, of the classroom, i.e., the noise and feelings of crowdedness (Lippman, 1995, 2023; Mathews and Lippman, 2016; PEHKA, 2012).

  Fig. 13

  

  Credit image to Peter C. Lippman

  Learners have located themselves under a table—an activity setting. Students are guiding and fully engaging on their tablets.

Critical Thinking: Learners develop the ability to evaluate information by recognizing the patterns and themes that emerge. They also form their analysis, acquiring knowledge and appling it to real-life situations (Postareff et al., 2015). Based on this definition, critical thinking involves collaboration. To collaborate suggests that knowledge is socially constructed—divergently (brainstorming) and convergently (identifying and choosing a course of action). The social construction of knowledge occurs when students are peripherally engaged as well as during cooperative group activities, which involves guided participation. During these moments, learners are acquiring self-awareness, social awareness, and spatial awareness, for which they are learning about themselves, others, and where they work best in the crafted and curated learning environment. For example, an amphitheater in a classroom becomes the place where the whole class may gather. In addition, this place may also support small social groupings (Fig. 14). Hence, this crafted feature in the environment perceived as a place for large group meetings may nonetheless be a place that the students identify as an area where they can settle and work as well as have places to locate their resources and as a means to extend and define their work area (Lippman, 2023).

Fig. 14

Credit image to Peter C. Lippman

Amphitheater in the classroom is a place to gather the entire class, but may also serve as place that supports smaller social grouping ad independent work.

Creativity: Whereas critical thinking involves collaboration and communication, creativity may be described as an independent activity that occurs when the learner is fully participating in acquiring knowledge for themselves. In order to work through the tasks-at-hand, individuals identifying (picking up) opportunities for themselves, socially, but more importantly, learning to ask the right questions to generate hypotheses and systematically work through the tasks-at-hand (Postareff et al., 2015). During the moments of creativity, the learner may choose to work alone in a corner, at a high table or under a table; however, the choices guiding the use of space may be driven by the activity, i.e., creating a poster may require a high table, where the student can stand. At this high table, the student may tape the poster to the table, design it, and, then, add color to it.

Even though the notion of creativity may be understood as an independent activity, learners, when they are generating hypothesis, sculpting, or solving math equations, may also acquire knowledge from others. By moving through the classroom and seeing what other activities are taking place, individuals can appropriate knowledge. While creativity involves the full participation, mindfulness, of the learner, it also recognizes that learners may appropriate knowledge by peripherally engaging with others (Lippman, 1995; Martin, 2002). Moreover, this notion indicates that the learning environment is personalized not only for the teacher to move through, but more importantly for the learner to have access to others.

Conclusion and Discussion

Historically, when the school building becomes the focus for educational change, the outcomes have shown an incongruency between the physical environment and how teaching and learning occurs (Lippman, 2010; Rivlin & Wolfe, 1985; Weinstein, 1979). The incongruency may result from the motivations and goals of the design professional, who has been colonized to believe that the practice and business of architecture are to craft a brand—a building where the interior spatial design of the rooms is dynamic. Even though these dynamic buildings may feature a variety of niches with hard architectural affordances, i.e., a grand stair, common learning areas, a resource center (a.k.a. library), and/or a makerspace (a.k.a. multipurpose rooms for technology, robotics, arts, and crafts) with storage rooms, white boards, and flat-screen TVs, the crafting of the spaces is, generally, based on assumptions rather than an understanding of how these places will be used (Lippman, 2010). Overtime, these dynamic buildings are, typically, renovated to make them congruent with the pedagogy of the place (Sanoff, 1993, 2002).

Rather than producing or reproducing a brand, architects, educational specialists, and interior designers should strive to create dynamic places for learning. In these settings, the concepts for the building are grounded in the evidence for what has worked, what has not worked, as well as developing strategies for educators and learners to work through the social and physical constraints of the settings (Byers & Lippman, 2018). Although the focus of this chapter has been to extend the dialog on learning environments, specifically on Gibson’s Affordance Theory (1979), this chapter has also shed light on the study by Young et al. (2019), reinforces the research of Frelin and Grannas (2020), and, most importantly, reifies and buttresses the work of Lippman (1995, 2010, 2023). Rather than examining learning environments as fragmented, these places must be understood as complementary as well as continually evolving organisms.

These organisms are structured to support the learner, learning, and the things to be learned. When envisioning the school building, the function, the anticipated activities of each of the niches, and the different features—the hard and soft architecture—must be considered contextually. As the building is being planned, the architect and educational specialist must embrace a transactional worldview (Altman, 1992), which recognizes that teaching and learning are situated not only in time and place, but also humans are transformed by their activities with others and their tools (Rogoff, 1990, 1995). Building on a transactional worldview (Altman, 1992), the activities that occur within the primary niche, the classroom or the common learning area, influence the actions of other learners in their respective activity settings and complementary settings, which, in turn, shape the transactions that occur within the primary, secondary, and tertiary niches.

To create school buildings that support the learner, the learning, and the things to be learned, the author has proposed an approach for creating Dynamic Places for Learning, where the term dynamic is identified by usually continuous and productive activity and change in behavior. By using the term dynamic, the author is suggesting a system that may be characterized by constant evolution, activity, and human development, which is not confined to new school buildings. Hence, the notion of Dynamic Places for Learning embraces the idea that any and all places are evolving and can be nurtured and curated to support an active social environment (the learning community) and an active physical environment (the hard architecture of the building), the soft architecture (the furniture used by the social environment) and the portable affordances (laptops, tablets, notebooks, and textbooks, to name a few). The framework for creating Dynamic Places for Learning does not differentiate between old and new or between open and conventional school buildings. The author is arguing that we need to see all educational facilities as places where all learners have the potential to participate with others and acquire and master needed skills. Paramount to extending the dialog on crafting the dynamic learning environments is the past and current research (Byers & Lippman, 2018). Based on the findings from the literature and research, this foundational theory, Dynamic Places for Learning, can be laid which thoughtfully and responsively extends the dialog for a more holistic and comprehensive approach for creating learning environments.