Spaces for Education: Open and Functional
On October 30th at a regular ‘Topical Research and Development in Education’ seminar at the HSE Institute for Educational Studies, Alastair Blyth, Policy Analyst at OECD Centre for Effective Learning Environments, talked about ‘Changes in perception of spaces for self-education, innovation and knowledge exchange’.
What is the relationship between a town and its university? What do the rooms in an educational building tell us? What kind of spaces do we find between the buildings on university campuses and why do they matter? Alastair Blyth, expert in educational policy and professional architect, raised these questions at the seminar“In some countries now, universities are seen to be a major force for regeneration, and redesigning a city’s space”.
The main task of a university building is to promote peoples’ interaction.The concept of education is changing - a university is not just a place where a professor teaches students - today professors and students are studying side by side, together. And this can happen in different ways. For example, the University of Melbourne that re-fitted an old lecture theatre – they took out the auditorium seats and put in round tables where they could work comfortably in small groups and listen to lectures. “Education is after all a group activity, a social process”, said Alistair Blyth and concluded,
“a university should be built as part of the overall concept of a city space. Researchers who study educational spaces see it as their mission to get people out of closed spaces, give them the opportunity to talk and interact, and to make education into a more social activity’.
Participants in the discussion included Teresa Heitor, Professor of Architecture at the Technical University of Lisbon, John Worthington, Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, Elena Bulin-Sokolova, Head of Construction at Skolkovo educational complex, and Irina Abankina, Director of the HSE Institute for Educational Studies.
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