Extract

When considering school design and occupation, what you see is sometimes not the same as what you hear. Using a multiple methods approach, this study describes a case study ethnography undertaken over several years in one school. The outcomes and observations from this research are useful for designers, as well as educators, in order to develop more nuanced understanding of the impact of school design in terms of pedagogy as well as qualitative experiences and values. The case study is one of the template designs constructed across many Victorian government primary schools with federal funding provided in response to the Global Financial Crisis. The templates are interesting because they enable teachers to choose to teach solely in the classroom or spread into the shared adjacent learning spaces. In this paper, the focus is on the occupation of the shared learning spaces from the perspectives of the principal, the teachers and Year Five students. The methods include interviews, observation and photo elicitation.

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