Teachers' Construction of Space and Place

Despite changes in expectations about teaching and learning over the past two centuries, the images of teaching conveyed by school facility design remain remarkably consistent. A repeated image is the teacher as technician using limited resources to transmit knowledge to students. This book explores the relationship between school facility design and schoolteachers' work. Specifically, it examines teachers' patterns of activities and interactions in classrooms and other spaces in the school with students and colleagues, describing how teachers actually use their work environment, how teachers' real use of the school facility compares with expectations as embodied in the school architecture about what their experiences should be, and how school facility design supports or constrains teachers' execution of current images of effective teaching. By examining teachers' work patterns and how they actually use space to facilitate their work, this book contributes knowledge and a shared language by which architects and educators can advance conversations to elicit explicit images about schools as organizations and conceptions of teachers' work, and the facilities needed to support them.