The purpose of this paper is to present how a well-known tool in design and architecture – visual design elements – can be transformed to support teacher representations of teaching and learning.
The presentation shares experiences from a university-wide pedagogical development project, at Örebro University (Sweden). The aim of the project was to develop learning environments, with a start in pedagogical needs and a pre-established educational philosophy, rather than interior design and current spatial conditions. The project came to initiate a dialogue among teachers on how spatial conditions could support, and develop, teacher’s pedagogy as well as students' learning.
One outcome from the project was visual design elements, so called Room and Activity Diagrams (RADs (Hansson, 2022) i.e visual representations, of various, and a variation of, spatial arrangements for different types of learning activities, such as lectures, seminars, and workshops. Thus, a RAD could be understood as a visual tool – or design element – to support teachers in their ideas on teaching in learning in relation to a specific space. During the project the RAD:s were transformed from being static representation of general learning spaces – like the lecture hall – to becoming dynamic representations of complex learning processes developed in an inductive process.
Theoretically, we draw on an Activity-Centered Analysis and Design model (ACAD) that consist of four dimensions in a learning situation – physical situation (set design), tasks (epistemic design) and social situation (social design). The fourth dimension – emergent activity – acknowledge the complexity in learning, and that students and teacher have agency and interact and re-act during learning. This implies that the emergent activity cannot be designed. However, design can influence activity, through the tasks that are proposed, and through the shaping of the physical and social contexts in which the activity unfolds (Goodyear, Carvalho & Yeoman, 2021). Furthermore, we build on the idea that teachers in HE need support to develop their didactical spatial competence (DiSCo) (Leijon, Malvebo & Tieva, 2021).
In the presentation we share examples of how RAD´s prompted teachers to unpack a complex learning situation and supported a dialogue on how spatial conditions could support, and develop, teacher’s pedagogy as well as students' learning. We will also discuss how visual design elements like RAD´s can be used within higher education pedagogy to foreground the interplay between people, pedagogy and practice in a variation of learning environments.
2024.