The Design Classroom: The Theory and Practice of learner centered education within the Contemporary University

Soumitri Varadarajan & Helen McLean

This book is about the contemporary discourses surrounding the notion of the classroom as both a staging of learning and as a facility for new and innovative learning activities. The book is written from the perspective of a practitioner of learner centered design pedagogy.

Contemporary classrooms are being redesigned, and renovated, with the redevelopment programme articulating a rationale of how the new designs facilitate new ways of learning. The new forms of the classroom are physically visible in universities around the world and can also be apprehended in texts. The physical form of these classrooms may contain features like round tables, chairs with wheels, modular reconfigurable furniture, digital screens on all walls of the room and digital plug-in facility at all tables so any student can project from their computer or iPad to the screen. The texts that discuss the classroom tend to point out shortcomings of the traditional classroom, speak about the advantages of new designs, and connect the practices afforded by the new designs to contemporary and emerging theories of learning. Notions such as the flipped classroom, blended learning and the digital learning are all changing the location of where content is to be learnt, and who from. If the classroom is no longer about learning content from the teacher, then we need a new construct to explain what students do during class time and in spaces where they encounter the teacher.

Teachers, Students and Researchers in contemporary universities that encounter these new designs of the classroom are having to figure out how to function in these new spaces. The spaces do not seem to have specific fixed locations and thus specific roles for the different participants. Teachers can still be found standing in front, though awkwardly and a bit on the side of the screens. The spaces have been designed for the student, though how the student is to learn to use this new space, and how they are to enact their learning using all the features of the new classroom could be unclear to the teachers. A key question confronting the researcher and the user of the contemporary classroom pertains to the theoretical propositions that have informed the visualization of the classroom as a space for new kinds of activities to be enacted by teachers and learners.