Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy

Kate Darian-Smith · Julie Willis

Sep 2016 · Taylor & Francis

About this ebook

Designing Schools explores the close connections between the design of school buildings and educational practices throughout the twentieth century to today. Through international cases studies that span the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australia, this volume examines historical innovations in school architecture and situates these within changing pedagogical ideas about the ‘best’ ways to educate children. It also investigates the challenges posed by new technologies and the digital age to the design and use of school places. Set around three interlinked themes – school buildings, school spaces and school cultures – this book argues that education is mediated or framed by the spaces in which it takes place, and that those spaces are in turn influenced by cultural, political and social concerns about teaching, learning and the child.

About the author

Kate Darian-Smith holds concurrent appointments as Professor of Australian Studies and History, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, and Professor of Cultural Heritage, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has written extensively on material culture, memory studies, Australian and imperial history and heritage, with recent publications including Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (2013) and Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (2015). Kate is an editor of Australian Historical Studies, has served as an adviser to government and cultural institutions and has a long involvement with the international development of Australian Studies.

Julie Willis is Professor of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research concentrates on Australian architectural history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With Philip Goad, she is the editor of The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (2012) and she was a major contributor to Hannah Lewi and David Nichols (eds), Community: Building Modern Australia (2010). Her current research includes writing a new short history of Australian architecture; examining the development of the modern hospital; and, with colleagues from history and education, leading a project examining innovation in the design of twentieth-century schools.