Does a school building have its own curriculum?

By Inge Mette Kirkeby Architect MAA, PhD, Senior Researcher, Danish Building and Urban Research

A step towards conceptualisation of the interaction between children and the school environment

Oral presentation at Det Danske Kulturinstitut in Edinbourgh June 2000

• The interaction between children and school environment
• Social space
• Activity space
• Behaviour-regulating space
• Space as a carrier of meaning
• Space as a carrier of atmosphere
• Closing remarks
• Literature

This paper will attempt to conceptualise the interaction between children and the school environment. This need arises from shortcomings in the discourse of the 20th century which was dominated by a rigid subject-object dichotomy that left nothing "in between". However, in order to build better schools we need an understanding of the interaction between specific design solutions and the well being and learning of children. Moreover a new Danish Education Act (1994) introduced new teaching aims and methods, which means that project work is emhasised and class room teaching less so. The changed ideas about what and how children should learn stress the necessity for a study on school building design. Five different aspects of space are discussed here: Social space, activity space, behaviour-regulating space, space as a carrier of meaning, and space as a carrier of atmosphere. Finally some thoughts are given to the consequences for architectural design.

In earlier times, children gained knowledge about society by taking a direct part in it, for example helping on the farm, in the workshop or in the household. However, children have gradually been taking part less in real work and now learn in specially designed situations instead. Instead of doing "real work", they "do exercises". From this position society is not directly presented, but represented - the school as an institution has therefore emerged. Thus in the following discussion school is seen as an institutionalisation of caring for the well being of children, as well as the transmitting medium of our culturally accepted knowledge and values. According to the German professor in pedagogy Klaus Mollenhauer, it is common for all cultures, that we take care of our children and protect them from danger, and we attempt to make them capable to join our society - that is we hand over to them our own culture.

But what is it that we consider so valuable that we are concerned to transmit it to the next generation? What is really good, useful and vital? What sort of collective memories, what pictures of the world, what values, what cultural aspects?

What is it that we believe children must be equipped with to do well? What knowledge, what skills must they acquire? What tools, what working methods? - And how can they be transmitted?

The answer is not made easier by the fact that many feel our present times to be characterised by changeability, and we find it difficult to predict what kind of society the children will have to be prepared for, and therefore also difficult to foresee, what they will need.

One answer could be that they would need the competence to develop new competencies, and in turn be able to tackle new tasks. Another answer could be that they would need the competence to make strategies. As traditions are ceasing to exist and to a lesser degree to structure our society, the individual is left with a greater responsibility for his/her own life. With Anthony Giddens we can call our society ’post-traditional’. - We may follow the traditions - but as a matter of choice. An individual today continually has to evaluate, judge, and make decisions, to make choices - also what choice not to make …

Current pedagogic intentions in Denmark propose that children should develop a wider variety scope of competencies than we meet in traditional classroom teaching, and Denmark has accordingly introduced a new Education Act in 1994 (The Danish Folkeskole is a comprehensive school that covers the entire period of compulsory education. Children’s ages range from 6 to 16 years.). This Act centers more on the individual, and the individual pupil’s abilities are to be taken into consideration - creatively and practically as well as intellectually.

Project work is seen as an important work method. Here the pupils train working methods and at the same time they train their ability to work individually or in smaller groups.

Moreover ecological aspects have to be integrated in daily life not just as a ’subject’ of the curriculum.

The artistic-creative element must be enforced and integrated in all subjects as a way of thinking - also in subjects like maths - usually considered to be purely abstract thinking.

On the whole different sorts of practice play a more important role than previously. Practices involving many more different levels of intelligence than the traditional listening, reading, answering questions.

The shift in the pedagogic intentions have consequences for the school building. Compared with earlier periods the physical environment must provide a much more comprehensive field of possibilities for performing different sorts of activities.

The interaction between children and school environment

For modernism, the subject-object dichotomy had a strong influence on the way one could discuss architecture. Aspects of the environment had either to be objective - thus measurable - qualities of physical objects, or they were considered to be psychological. Too often research ended by telling us that the environment is most important. But the link between us and it was seldom made, so that one might acquire an understanding of how different designs might actually mean a difference for the users.

Therefore this paper focuses on this "something" in-between, on the interaction. Furthermore, the term interaction opens up for an understanding of the relation as something active in character, going both ways.

For this use theoreticians will be drawn upon who discuss the interaction psychologically, sociologically, and phenomenologically.

The view on architecture presented in this paper is that architecture is not a neutral setting. School buildings intervene in the learning processes, and are part of it.

Thus - to the question posed in the title: Does a school building have its own curriculum? the answer must be "Yes".

The interaction is very complex, and in order to analyse it, a distinction must be made between mental and physical space and mental and physical well being and development (see figure a):

A few examples will explain the diagram.

Mental space - mental well being and development: The atmosphere created by the teachers. Do the children feel secure and do they dare to try something new, do they dare to ask questions, to make mistakes.

Mental space - physical well being and development: Stress may provoke allergic reactions.

Physical space - mental well being and development: The layout of the plan can make it more or less easy to establish a small group and concentrate during group work.

Physical space - physical well being and development: Problematic building materials may cause headache and allergy.

No doubt the mental aspect is of the utmost importance for getting a good school. If for instance you have poor teachers, nothing will compensate for it. And certainly it is not the task of architecture to compensate for anything at all! But architecture can establish a rich and stimulating environment, supporting the pedagogic intentions. So in the following emphasis mainly centres on the relationship between physical space and mental well being and development.

The relation between physical space and mental well being and development can for the purposes for this paper be divided into five different "spaces", the term chosen to emphasise the spatial qualities of the matter. It is important to realise that the "spaces" do not refer to different rooms as such, and should not to be understood as rooms placed next to each other, but as five aspects of the very same room more or less integrated into each other, as co-existing. They are dealing with different qualities of the same physical locality.

Social space

Children go to school to be and work together. Otherwise one might as well install them in their own room at home with a computer and access to advanced teaching programmes. This statement is not inconsistent with the expectation that children must also learn something, because learning does not happen in a social vacuum. Readers who are architects, will remember the studios at the School of Architecture, and they’ll know the situation when tutor and student met there to discuss an assignment exercise. And around the drawing table a small social space comes into being, where thoughts can be exchanged.

The new concepts of learning are just about this kind of exchanges with a tutor showing the way. There is more focus on the concepts of ’mutual learning culture’ (Jerome Bruner, 1996), where the role of the teacher is, through questions, to guide the student into the zone of proximal development - the ZPD (Vygotsky's concept, in Crain, 1992). This is the field between the limit which the pupil can reach by his own force and the limit which he can reach by means of tutoring. It also means that children learn - and become increasingly conscious - about their own learning through working with other pupils in a group. Thus it is the task of architecture to provide working places of a size suitable for working in smaller groups.

Moreover children must learn to get on with other children - also with those they like less. If one looks at schools designed by the Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger, you find a basic thought that design must encourage the children to meet each other.

He goes as far as to make this statement (To the author in interview on 23 December 1997): "The most important thing is that school becomes a miniature city." "The children must learn to live together. In our society they are confronted with everything. Nothing is kept hidden for them - the most extreme forms of violence and sex - everything is made to ordinary things. But much to little attention is put to the fact that human beings must learn to deal with each other. The most important thing is that they learn to get on with each other. Maths and language they can learn in all places!"

In schools designed by Hertzberger you also find a differentiation between public and private space, and just outside the more private classroom you usually find a half-private space. It can be used as a working space during times with many on-going activities or when different activities requires places for different levels of audible working together.

This first spatial aspect is a matter of how the design is contributory to organising social life in school - with big common arrangements as one extreme and one or two persons absorbed in a project as the other. Here the actual physical design leaves room for certain forms of togetherness and excludes other forms. But to a different degree design can create quietness around a small group - as well as directly keeping noise and traffic at a distance and psychologically keeping a distance.

It is a matter of how a school provides a frame for life to flourish at school. It is a matter of sizes, connections, about whether a room has the character of a place to dwell for shorter or longer periods of time. Or whether the character is more that of a traffic road. Furthermore it is a matter of how paths are organised in relation to each other - whom will you meet where and when. If all classrooms for example are situated around a common area, you will meet each other more frequently than if they are located along long corridors. It is a matter of openness and transparency - is it possible to follow the whereabouts of other groups and what they are doing but as well a matter of seclusion and privacy.

Activity space

One of the most direct interactions between man and environment happens in practical activities. A tool in our hand - well known and familiar - may be experienced as an extension of the hand, as part of ourselves and the activity in which we take part.

For many school subjects special equipment is needed. For instance in physics, music, gymnastics. That the school also needs fully updated computer equipment stands to reason.

Still, these kind of needs are crucially important and relatively easy to cope with. It is relatively easy to concretise the demands of a building programme, and architects are skilled in coping with these questions and translate them into form. This kind of respect for functional needs can be called "hard functionalism". Correspondingly, the term "soft functionalism"can be introduced. Soft functionalism is defined as follows: spaces, elements, details in questions are architecturally well defined but can be used and occupied in several different ways. Such spaces, elements and details play an important role in relation to school buildings, because they can be interpreted and used in different ways. This means they challenge the user - the pupils will have to make strategies for a use and eventually negotiate with others before use.

To exemplify this one might compare a swing with a sandbox - in the first case the use is defined beforehand, in the second the possibilities are open.

Or a school divided into special subject rooms compared with a school with integrated handicraft workshops and lab-scapes. In the first case the space clearly communicates one way of using them. In the second the possible use is more ambiguous and asks for more initiative of the user.

We make part of our environment, and just as a part of our self-knowledge is formed in interaction with other people, the interpersonal self, another part of our self-knowledge, the ecological self, comes into being through interaction with the physical environment. The psychologist Ulric Neisser explains (Neisser, 1988): "The ecological self is the self as perceived with respect to the physical environment: ’I’ am the person here, in this place, engaged in this particular activity." "What we perceive is ourselves as embedded in the environment, and acting with respect to it."

An extremely important side to our active handling of the physical environment is that it is not only a question about the activity here and now. It is also a question about the ability to imagine a future activity, and one is able to focus the "detector" upon a certain possibility for activity. Through this the intentionality comes into being, the ability to anticipate future activities, to be able to wish and to want to do.

The intentionality is directed forwards in time and out into the physical environment.

On the other hand things also appeal to us by virtue of what they can. Bridging between appeal and intentionality are the affordances.

James Gibson, who invented the concept affordance, says that affordances are the properties we decode directly, and which tell us something about our possible relation to them. We see that the floor can be walked upon, that the water in the glass is something which we can drink - and children will see that a tree with branches down to the ground is good to climb. He stresses the in-between status of the affordance in relation to the subject-object dichotomy (Gibson, 1979):

"An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and the observer."

In 1989 the Swedish researcher Ann Skantze examined children’s view of their school (Skantze, 1989). The children pointed to a library and a workshop for woodwork as something they liked much. The wood workshop had a pleasant smell, and in the library you could sit comfortable with a book. Here was much to do and to be aware of. You may say that in these two school facilities you find some very clear affordances.

Behaviour-regulating space

There is however, another aspect in the limitation of the number of possibilities, which is not contained in the social space and space for activities - but is closely related to them. It is a special form for limitation that occurs when certain regulating provisions are made to maintain the rules for desired and undesired behaviour in schools.

Within society, school forms its own small society, and great effort is made to maintain its order.

This control has not necessarily a long-term pedagogic scope, but is geared to let the daily life pass in a more or less controlled and accepted way.

However, in what way does this governing and controlling of the behaviour of daily life take place? Well in the first case the children will often be told how to behave. But good behaviour can also be shaped without verbalised prohibition. The French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour has an interesting viewpoint (Latour, 1992). He states that the rules of a society can be internalised - thus it becomes a matter of self-discipline. But rules can also be externalised he brings a text titled: "Description of a Door". Vividly he describes how an automatic doorcloser has taken over the task of a human being to keep the door closed.

To continue his thought - readers with children might recognise the situation: Innumerable times one has told them to close the doors in the house. Of course you could put up a doorcloser but maybe they ought to "learn" to remember to close the door they have just passed through. Thus the rule should be internalised - if you put up a doorcloser, maintaining the rule is delegated to the environments - thus externalised.

Latour has another striking example. In an ideal society everybody would drive their car according to the rules and never too fast. But since we do not live in such an ideal world, we put up signs or even controlling wardens. In some cases we establish a "hump" or "sleeping policemen" on the road so that it becomes impossible to drive too fast. Again the observation of the rule is delegated to the environment.

Quite interesting to think about: schoolmasters invented "sleeping policemen" long before the police did: They put mean little knobs on handrails to prevent the pupils - especially boys - from sliding down the rails! They did not rely on the internalisation of the rule.

Observations made during an empirical study of the interaction between children and school environment (Study carried out by Danish Building and Urban Research (Inge Mette Kirkeby) and Roskilde University (Jan Kampmann and Thomas Gitz-Johansen) 1999-2001) teach us that the amount of possibilities offered by the physical surroundings can not be separated from the way these possibilities are administered by staff. Many doors, for instance, were found locked, when it was tried to open them. A rigid way of regulating who may be where and where not.

Space as a carrier of meaning

Part of the interaction is not a matter of being together with others or of actually doing something, but is a matter of an inactivity-based interaction with the architecture as such. A distinction shall be made whether or not meaning and interpretations is involved. As the chosen term says the space as a carrier of meaning deals with the first kind of interaction. The second kind of interaction, not taking point of departure in understanding and decoding, is discussed in the space of atmosphere.

Norms, notions and ideas materialise as we build. They constitute the architectural expression, which is to be interpreted. That is, at the same time one looks at the building, one looks at something "behind". The building refers to something outside itself and becomes a carrier of meaning. This "something" behind can be an approach, a will, a priority, and a view - in school the view upon children and childhood.

The interpretation can be more or less conscious. When you see a symbolism or reference and interpret the building in the same way as a piece of art, the process can be reflexive and conscious.

But the approaches behind can also be transferred without a direct reflection and without any special consciousness.

In a wordless language an appropriately well-built building - built to last - "tells" that society respects the school and its users. Oppositely a lack of interest and confidence in education is reflected in makeshift pavillions.

Interesting research conducted out by Britta Siegumfeldt examines school buildings in Copenhagen built during the last decades of the 19th century (Siegumfeldt, 1992). She also studied medical texts from the same period and she shows that the same figures of thoughts are at work. In the medical periodicals she can point out the same figures of thought: they were obsessed with the key concepts: cleanliness, order, separations and circulation. The same key principles she found in the way the school buildings were structured. In this way the principles of order were grafted onto the new generation - adapted as practices - just because they "are done with the body and are remembered with the body, thus preconscious", she says, referring to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.

It seems obvious that a child will make up different ideas of knowledge and the division into different branches of scholarship whether brought up in a school stricly devided into specialised mono-functional classrooms or in multifunctional free flowing spaces.

Culture also is transmitted by means of examples. The force of example should not be underestimated. Like the habitus it is transferred to the unconscious of "the way one does things".

Buildings also transmit more subtle matters such as symbolic acknowledgement. Worn down and unstimulating surroundings will hardly make teachers and pupils feel acknowledged by the society outside school. If the buildings communicate that ’it doesn’t matter’ one can easily imagine that the users also think ’it doesn’t matter’ with the physical frame of school … maybe even with the content?

The Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard says (Nørgaard, 1998): "I think we have given the buildings for educating children and young people too low a priority. They signal a society somewhat ragged and miserable. Something you don’t need to care about.

It gives a wrong idea of society and community. It is deeply harmful for educating and bringing up the young, when institutions - in which they furthermore spend more and more time - gradually deteriorate because of poor maintenance." "Not that you becomes an inferior person by spending your time in poor physical surroundings, but our idea of the common space in a wide sense suffers badly if we do not experience beautiful common physical spaces".

Space as a carrier of atmosphere

The view that artefacts mean something and thus refer to something outside themselves has been cultivated thorough in the established art appreciation and discussion of aesthetics. It seems obvious, that here our culturally and personally determined understanding will influence the interpretation.

However, not everything has a meaning, and spaces can be experienced in a far more spontaneous and unreflected way.

Children have especially the ability to direct unreflected perception, to which the psychologist Heinz Werner in the 1940s put the term physiognomic perception. This ability to perceive spontaneously is explained by the Danish psychologist Mogens Hansen (To the author in interview on 17 Nov. 2000). "We are able through the senses to form an impression of the world in a non-interpreting way. It means we are receptive and it is by no means a passive act. Sensing requires an intentionality but not necessarily a reflexive consciousness. Afterwards the psyche may edit the impression and construct meaning, and we end in construction and interpretation. But the main point is that not all kinds of interaction with the context start with interpretation, as the semiotic tradition and the tradition for interpreting art tells us."

According to the German philosopher Gernot Böhme, the traditional concept of aesthetics is not adequate any longer (Böhme, 1995). It was primarily used to review art, and as a way to distinguish between good and bad/poor art. It was an ‘aesthetics of judgement’ concerning pieces of art for the exhibitions and leaving something minor to the rest of the world. Instead he suggests that we consider the whole physical setting as something we ourselves relate to with our bodies. It is due to the ecological crisis that we are getting aware of ourselves as human beings with senses and we feel the unpleasantness on our body and with our senses. Not only achieved through intellectual thinking and reasoning. The concept he uses to describe the shared reality between the environment and us is atmosphere.

We do not perceive things as such, we perceive atmospheres. They form the relation between the qualities of the environment and how we feel.

Architects and designers cannot learn much from the aesthetic theories at this moment, he says. It is the other way round. Because architects, designers, advertisers, cosmetologist, designers of theatre settings know how to create atmospheres.

In Danish one can talk about ‘stemthed’ in German about ‘Stimmung’ - which can be translated into something like "atmosphere", "mood" or "to be in tune". The last words with clear references to musical instruments.

"Space has a mood, and architects must be able to tune the space the same way a cello is tuned, says the Danish psychiatrist Kjeld Fredens (To the author in interview 27 Sep. 1997). Furthermore people react to change. Therefore it must be possible to re-tune the space, e.g. by means of lighting. When the teacher teaches the whole class, there ought to be light on her or him. If the class has a discussion, the whole room should be lit, and finally there might be an individual light for the individual pupil. And he continues: "One can play with this tuning - and a dialogue comes into being between the people and the room on an emotional level: We talk to the room and the room talks to us."

The atmosphere of a place may tune us, and we may change mood when we go from a busy street into a quiet church. Talking about schools the corresponding picture could be the change from a densely filled playground to the library where a group of children are reading.

Atmosphere is something spatial. The smell of e.g. freshly planed wood spreads a special atmosphere. Or music which fills a space with sound. Light fills a room and tunes it. It can be coloured by trees outside the window or be filtered through stained glass.

Colour can also "fill" the space. Thus at the same time as a quality as the colour blue defines a thing, the colour also exceeds the limiting surfaces of the thing and influence the room - it creates an atmosphere.

The atmosphere influences how we feel, and it is sensed directly. It does not refer to other distant worlds, but when our thought often wander off through long chains of associations because the memory is often linked with and evoked by atmospheres.

Let me finish with a quotation of Kjeld Fredens (idem): "Children learn better when they feel well. When they are learning a text, the text is the one half; the context is the other half. Learning and situation belong to each other."

Closing remarks

How may the approach to architecture discussed here influence the design proces compared with the design philosophy of modernism - especially the functionalism of the first part of the 20th century?

The apparent similarities are the concern for how physical structure space co-organises social life, and the concern for how design influences the possibilities for acting according to functionality.

On the other hand, it differs through distinctly not accepting the object-subject dichotomy characteristic of the period of modernism. On the contrary, it focuses on the in-between status of the interaction, and works with a far more blurred borderline between people and things.

It also takes a broader approach than the rather mechanical functionalism, and introduces "soft functionalism" as counterpart to "hard functionalism", and includes the concept of atmosphere.

Emphasis on the interaction opens up for the possibility to free oneself from the straitjacket of the modernistic design idiom "form follows function". Form was considered as generated of and legitimated by the functional needs in a deterministic way, believing one could come to a solution through rational thought - speaking in the words of Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc, 1990): "There aren’t two ways of being right on any given question."

At the same time there seems to be certain reluctance on the part of some architects at the moment to take their point of departure in function - probably out of fear for falling back into the routine of the modernistic design approach.

Unfortunately this may lead to an obsession with form for form’s sake. Postmodernism allowed a new interest in form and especially in expression as a first showdown over modernism. Then being overfed by the richness in references and expressions of postmodernism, some architects have since turned towards a neomodernistic architecture aiming at as few references as possible. Still, it is to a great extent purely a matter of form and appearance, which - if it is done at the cost of performing daily life tasks and well being - can be hard on the user. Instead of being a matter of how it is to be within architecture it becomes a matter of judging it from the outside.

But today we have achieved at certain distance to modernism, which enables us to handle functionalism in another way. A functionalism where you want to create a building as suitable for the tasks to be performed and pleasant to be in without taking away from the architect the responsibility for the choice of form and expression. Possibly one might talk about a "neo-functionalism".

The study of schools gives an appropriate opportunity to study the interaction between the environment and people, because when observing children, it becomes obvious how they incessantly relate to and interact with their physical environment. They move, explore and integrate things in their activities. Further it is easy to imagine that their early experiences of design will influence their appreciation of the physical world in the long term.

Literature

Bruner, Jerome (1996) The Culture of Education. Harvard University Press.

Böhme, Gernot (1995) Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Suhrkamp.

Crain, William (1992) Theories of Development. Concepts and Applications. Prentice-Hall, pp 193-221.

Gibson, James (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Latour, Bruno (1992) Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts. In: Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Edit. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. The MIT Press, pp 225-258.

Neisser, Ulric (1988) Five Kinds of Self-knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, vol. 1, no 1, pp 35-59.

Nørgaard, Bjørn (1998) De kulturbærende folkeskolebygninger? In: Rum Form Funktion i Folkeskolen. Temahæfte. Byggedirektoratet, Undervisningsministeriet og Kulturministeriet.. (Inge Mette Kirkeby’s translation), pp 58-62.

Siegumfeldt, Britta (1992) Renhed og rammer. Lægers og arkitekters arbejde med ny folkeskoler i København 1880-1900. Forskningsnoter 10. Institut for Pædagogik, Københavns Universitet.

Skantze, Ann (1989) Vad betyder skolhuset? Skolans fysiske miljö ur elevernas perspektiv studerad i relation till barns och ungdomars utvecklingsuppgifter. Pedagogiska institutionen, Stockholms Universitet.

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel (1990) The Foundations of Architecture. Selections from the Dictionaire raisonné. Introduction by Barry Bergdoll. New York: George Braziller.