Re: The importance of architecture

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 08:44:15 +0200

At 17.47 -0700 97-09-22, David Dirlam wrote:
>the typical classroom style used since at least the days of Ur
>benches for students to face frontward and look at the professor.

Well... I don't know about Ur... but there have also been other trends,
like the peripatetic (walking around) teaching of Socrates. Actually the
Jones&Williams paper gives the historical account of the presently dominant
tradition by tracing the transition from the BIG schoolrooms of the
monitorial system to the "traditionally" sized, furnished and "manned"
classrooms of frontal teaching.

(Re-run: Jones, Karen. and Kevin Williamson. 1979. Birth of the schoolroom.
Ideology and Consciousness, 6: 59-110.)

Anyway, classroom architecture: in the late sixties//early seventies the
"open clasrooms" of Henry Pluckrose were a trend in the Swedish school
system. Sometimes the idea went a bit out of hand, there were schools built
to resemble office landscapes (no nooks for the favourite primate workgroup
size). Currently there's a lot of "Montessori inspired" rearrangement and
refurnishing going on in early childhood education here. Perhaps in
furnishing for older ages, too.

I'm not as worried as Deborah about architecture being neglected -- but an
_integrated_ treatment is certainly missing.

Eva