“A whole bunch of people came to see the 1976 Sex Pistols concert in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall, and the argument goes that almost everybody who came to see the concert went off and formed their own band. And those bands all became seminal bands in the 70s and 80s, from Joy Division, the Smiths, a whole bunch of great bands were formed by people who stood that night in the audience and said, ‘We could do this.’ It’s one of those events that kick-started a whole wave of stuff. In a sense our workshops do the same sort of thing.”
Peter Jamieson is an educator who has spent the last 17 years designing learning spaces for students and faculty, now at his home institution, the University of Melbourne, as well as schools across Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United States.
Aside from his role as the Strategic Advisor on Learning Environments at the University of Melbourne, Jamieson has also led numerous workshops on learning environment design, including a series of five-day design workshops on behalf of the Universitas 21 network. The workshops have gathered international audiences of academics, architects, librarians as well as student services, audio-visual, and information technology staff, who work on a specific design project at the host institution. Many of the participants have also gone back to their respective institutions and started design projects there.
Jamieson visited UBC in April for a few weeks. Towards the end of his visit in late April, he sat down with us to talk about how he became interested in this field, his philosophy behind the design of good learning spaces, and what he observed at UBC during his visit.
Q: How long have you been working in this area and what does your role encompass?
Peter Jamieson (PJ): I’ve had this role for eight and a half years at the University of Melbourne. The position was created especially for me. It’s an odd position in universities because universities basically haven’t had a role for a non-architect — because I’m not an architect — an educator, to come in and lead the design of new learning environments from an educational point of view. So my role is to ensure that the university, with each project, gets the best outcome for its students and for its academic staff who’ll be using the spaces, and that hasn’t always occurred in the past when we did things as we have traditionally done them for decades. Of course the real challenge for lots of universities is that they already have a large physical estate, a large campus facility consisting of many, many traditional learning environments, classrooms, if you like, and informal learning spaces such as libraries, and we need to repurpose those. So this is not just about building new buildings and creating new spaces in those new buildings, but it’s the challenge that universities face to repurpose their existing facilities, which were designed for a much more didactic and teacher-centered pedagogy, and to create spaces that empower students, focus on learning and what the students do to learn, and also the quality of the learning experience. So we create spaces that aren’t just functional, but in some cases might be beautiful. Rather than just refresh the paint and the furniture, we’re rethinking those spaces and how they might be used educationally and often creating radically different spaces in those old buildings.
Q: How did you become interested in this?
PJ: I think I’ve always been interested in spaces and how they have an effect on me just as a regular citizen, not just learning spaces. And then I was looking at research and study I was doing on the use of teaching with telecommunications and media at universities. This was 20 years ago. And as I got further and further into that, I became acutely aware of how important the physical campus is for students and the quality of their learning experience, and I became really, really deeply interested in that and felt that I could make a difference. No one else seemed to be really interested in it. I couldn’t find anybody to talk to about it. Academics weren’t interested in it. I was working with some outstanding researchers and scholars, who still, 20 years later, are the leading thinkers on student learning in universities and what effective learning and teaching looks like. They inspired me to want to contribute to the field. I didn’t want to just repeat the work that they were doing. I thought if I could take it further, if I could apply their insight into what good teaching and learning looks like to the design of the physical spaces, then we would be more likely to achieve a more widespread transformation of teaching and learning in higher education. I really felt that we couldn’t do that until we had environments, classrooms, libraries, learning hubs, and other kinds of spaces that enabled students to work in the ways that the research was telling us they needed to work if they were to learn more effectively. I just didn’t see how you could do that properly in traditional learning spaces and traditional classrooms.
Q: And I wanted to ask you what you’ve seen here at UBC, any inspiring learning spaces or lots of room to grow?
PJ: I’ve spent a lot of time here. I’ve been here a number of weeks, and I’ve been really interested to observe this campus and the university and how it operates and how it lives within its boundaries, how it occupies the campus. These are important words, I think. We live here. People have a life here. People come to work here, and it’s a large part of their lives. Students come and learn here, but they’re not just learning, in between the learning they live, you know, they have fun and they drink coffee and they walk about and they see things that have nothing directly to do with their formal learning. But this is a rich campus that does provide enormous stimuli for students and for staff. It’s a beautiful campus in many respects. The gardens and the landscaping is exceptionally good. The Japanese garden here is the most extraordinary place on campus. It’s my favourite place on campus, as I tell everybody. I go there regularly. It’s inspiring, and it’s just beautiful. It’s almost beyond words.
The buildings are like many university campus buildings all around the world. You have some newer ones, particularly along the Main Mall, where there’s been a real effort clearly, and I think it’s a wonderful thing to do to create greater transparency into the buildings. You can see from the outside into the spaces. They feel safe. They feel inviting. You have a sense of what people are doing within those buildings, all of which is really, really good. You have very generous public spaces within the buildings on the ground level, foyers, if you want to call them that. And to some extent these are beneficial to the university. You’ve got coffee shops in a lot of these places and students and staff gather there. I do think that they could be fitted out better. They’re not particularly attractive.
So I think there’s a missed opportunity there, much more scope to do those better, to make them more inviting spaces for students. Yes, people use them now. Of course, in this climate people will always be looking for space within buildings and shelter. On any campus, students and staff are looking for shelter, particularly students. These foyers and coffee shops provide that amenity and that shelter. But just because they use it doesn’t mean that they’re as good as they should be. They would use these in any circumstance because they need shelter and they want a hot drink on a cold day, but the spaces could be much more engaging. They could be different. They should be more fun. There’s really no sense of whimsy or fun about any of the spaces. They’re all a bit drab, you know, and I think the university could improve in that regard.
The classrooms are as expected. They’re traditional classrooms, as you would find anywhere in the world. But there’s a really significant willingness within the university, that’s very clear, to make necessary transformations to the physical environments where teaching and learning is taking place both within classrooms and outside classrooms. So I think that’s to be applauded.
It’s also a campus that has really superb facilities in terms of its cultural assets. So the Chan Centre, where I’ve attended a theatre performance, is outstanding. There are a number of museums on campus that are outstanding. And these are a really important part of university life, I think, because university life and learning within the university campus should be much more than just the formal course that a student enrols in. There should be an opportunity for students to encounter things that stimulate them, promote interest in areas that they’re not formally studying that enrich them in important ways, so the university touches their lives permanently, beyond the qualifications that they walk away from UBC with. It should be a place that enriches and inspires people, and I think it does that very well.
Q: Have you seen any good examples of learning environments here?
PJ: I’ve seen some good learning environments. The one that most impresses me is an engineering workshop. It’s in a building along the Main Mall, and I kept walking past it at night when I was first here a few months ago. It was filled with students, and I couldn’t work out what was going on. So I eventually went in and introduced myself and told the students who were really welcoming who I was, and I was interested in what they were doing, and they said they were preparing for their final assessment which was happening in a couple of days’ time, and they invited me to attend, which I did. And when I arrived, I was thrilled to see the room packed with students who were there to have their robot cars tested against other student robot cars in a race on a track laid out on the floor. The room had been transformed from the more predictable engineering workshop that it had been when I’d visited into a place where all of the learning and the assessment was taking place on the floor, which was thrilling to see, and there was a huge number of students there, and they were actively engaged and barracking and supporting the students who were being tested and assessed, and it was a thrilling class. All classes should be like that. There were some wonderful lessons to be learned from that from a pedagogical point of view and from a learning space design point of view. I think it’s an outstanding space, and it’s one of the best lessons I’ve ever attended. It was fantastic.
There were lots of things happening in that engineering lab that could inform the design of better classrooms across the university. It’s not just restricted to use in engineering, I don’t believe. We need to think about creating more active learning environments across all the disciplines. I think we’re too limited in our thinking about what active learning is. We create passive learning experiences mostly for our students. Even when we call them active, the activity rarely extends beyond talking to your neighbour and having a discussion. Well, I would think we could interpret the term active much more broadly and have students moving and doing things that they currently don’t do in classrooms. That means academics need to start to rethink their teaching practice and how the students can best learn the things the academics want students to learn in the formal courses. It’s not a conversation we’ve generally had.
There have been slight transformations and improvements over the years usually driven by the use of new digital technologies, but by and large students still sit rather passively in most classrooms most of the time even if they are watching a very expensive, impressive digital display. They’re still just watching. They don’t create. They don’t generate. They don’t build. They don’t critique. They don’t review. These are things they should be doing regularly. It doesn’t happen enough. We should be looking to give the students the greatest value that we can from them being co-located in the physical place at the same time with other learners and their student peers and the greatest benefit from being co-located at the same time with a teacher. If we’re talking about putting more and more learning online, then we need to ask ourselves a fundamental question, how can we make the on campus learning experience the best it can be for the students? And we need to reframe everything in those terms, I think.
What we can do on campus differs enormously from what we can do online. Students should be enriched by being present with their learning peers who are equally bright, equally interested, equally motivated. You should gain the benefit of being involved with and engaged with and learning with and from those other students who are part of your class. They should be the most fundamental learning resource in the room. We need to construct opportunities for that to happen, and we need to create environments where that’s happening all of the time. At the moment, that’s not really the case for most students. If you ask them how they learned, if you map the way students learned over the course of a day or a week or a semester, it would be pretty restrictive in terms of the range of things they did, pretty repetitive, and not very demanding in may respects. We need environments, classrooms, and other spaces that promote a much wider range of ways of learning and inspire academics to want to teach in the wider range of ways, too.
Q: Is UBC designating resources towards these types of projects?
PJ: I think, at the moment from what I can see, from all of my engagement across UBC with a wide range of very senior people, a number of operational staff, a number of academics, I think people are going about this in the right way. I think there is a recognition that things need to be done differently. I think the university is marshalling its key participants at the moment and putting in place procedures where the right people are sitting at the table at the right time to contribute appropriately to projects. That’s important. I think the university also understands the kinds of spaces that it needs to create. And in doing so, it’s probably already informed itself of the kinds of spaces it doesn’t want to create. So even though you don’t necessarily quite know where you want to go, you definitely know where you don’t want to go, and that’s really important so that you don’t waste time and resources creating something that’s really just a tarted up version of something that’s been done for the last 100 years and that doesn’t really work.
Sometimes people make that mistake with the application of new technologies. We install lots of new digital technologies in some of these spaces thinking that the technology in itself is the answer. At Melbourne, we’ve often gone the other way. We’ve reduced the amount of new digital technology we’ve put into some of the classrooms or other learning spaces, and we’ve tried to focus on different types of furniture, more comfortable environments, environments that the students feel they have a sense of ownership of, environments where the students have control over the setting and how it gets used, environments that provide basic amenities like writing surfaces or tables or other spaces where students can put things. Often, what students want more than anything is territory, an area where they can actually put the things that they need to learn with, so things don’t get reduced to what can work through the laptop or what I can do through my iPhone. We should be sometimes putting those devices away completely. Why can’t we create with a pen or with a marker pencil? Why can’t we build things? Why can’t we be involved in a whole range of learning activities that don’t necessarily begin with a new digital device?
And that’s been the emphasis that we’ve tried to bring to projects at Melbourne. It’s really easy to load these spaces up with new technologies and think that’s the answer, and then you end up with the wrong chairs, the wrong tables, too many people in the room. You end up with a really superficially new experience, but it’s all superficial and not necessarily great education just because it’s involving computers and other digital devices. So, we’ve really tried to emphasize the materiality of our spaces, the character of our spaces. We’ve tried to create spaces that are memorable that students can distinguish from other spaces so they don’t all feel the same. We’d like students to leave the university with a rich experience that they’ll remember positively a long time after they’ve finished, and I think UBC is actually having those conversations at the moment which is really exciting to see and very encouraging.
Q: And what kind of feedback have you had from students and maybe also faculty members when you’re talking about doing these types of projects?
PJ: Well, the academic staff, the faculty members, are really open to the idea of doing things in different ways, doing things better. They can see the limitations of the current classrooms that they teach in. They understand that they have to work within the limitations of those spaces. All spaces provide opportunities and limitations. Spaces enable some things and impede other things, so we know what we can and can’t easily do in a lecture theatre and in a tutorial room. So we need to think about what sort of things we want students and academics to do and then design those spaces accordingly. The students that I’ve spoken to tell me that there’s not enough shelter. They tell me there are not enough spaces for them to sit and work, so they’ll occupy the Barber Learning Centre by sitting on the floor and up against the walls because there’s nowhere else for them to go. They’d prefer somewhere to sit properly. They just can’t find it. And that happens elsewhere around the university, of course, where students are sitting on stairwells and in passageways, reading, sometimes just socially, speaking with and engaging with their friends, but they shouldn’t have to resort to that, by and large. That’s real evidence, if you just don’t have enough appropriate space for students to occupy in the way that they would really prefer to occupy it. No one wants to sit on the floor mostly and eat their lunch. It’s not a great place for people to have serious conversations about serious learning issues or assessment tasks for a long period of time. So, how do we address that? We need to really rethink those foyers that I think are not sufficiently used at the moment in many of the buildings. If we refitted those and did them with a bit more thought, they would be much better spaces for students to occupy and learn in, and I think there’s a missed opportunity there.
Q: Once you’ve completed these projects how have students or faculty members responded?
PJ: The response to our new projects at Melbourne or the other institutions where we’ve been doing this work has been overwhelmingly favourable. Academics who might have not been certain about what we were doing or why we were doing it have almost always been won over by the finished project, when they can see how it’s going to improve their possibilities to teach better. This is their workplace. Giving them a better workplace is usually a good thing. And most academics can see that.
The students have always embraced these improvements. There’s a sense that the campus becomes much more their place. The spaces are occupied on their terms. They’re much more comfortable. They’re more contemporary. They’re more colourful. The materials often create much warmer, inviting spaces if we do it correctly. They might be better decorated and just much better places to be in for any amount of time, regardless of whether you’re studying or not. I don’t know anybody who can’t appreciate a good place. We know that people genuinely respond to good design and good places, and we should be trying to achieve that on this campus.
Q: Can you think of a project you’ve worked or seen that is exceptionally inspiring?
PJ: I’ve been privileged to work on a lot of projects at Melbourne University and at other institutions in Australia and internationally, and it’s hard to single out one project from another. What’s common about the very best projects is that people are prepared to take a risk. It involves the academics who are participating in the project moving into an area where they’re unsure of the outcome. It involves the architects and the other people collaborating on the project to move into an area where they’re unsure of their contribution and what the outcome might be. That’s what happens when you create something. In a sense it’s what we’re asking students to do at important times in their own learning, to move into areas that are unknown, to not be on safe ground all the time, to take a risk in their own learning. And we need to remember that the only way we’re going to create the best learning spaces on campus is if we work in similar ways.
There’s enormous satisfaction when you go through that process and everybody has an opportunity to contribute fully to the best of their abilities, and people do it in a generous way that allows everybody to participate and to share in the process. When you do that, the process will be rich, and I assure you, with people acting with the very best interests of the project at heart, you always arrive at a point that’s worthwhile. There will be things about the project that you’ve achieved that you never knew you could possibly achieve, because somebody’s pushed it in a different direction. We should have some courage. And maybe we create environments often in universities where we don’t want to take that risk, where we don’t want to be seen to fail. And these projects often involve the expenditure of large amounts of money, so we don’t do this frivolously, but I think we need to do it in a creative way, and where risk is always part of the process. We shouldn’t try to eliminate the risk, so that before we start the project, we already know where the outcome is going to be. There’s no invention in that. There’s no creation in that. We’re just duplicating something that someone else did somewhere else. We should be trying to create something that works for us in this context at this point in time.
Q: Earlier you were talking about the foyers on campus. Did you see any foyers that are examples of good design?
PJ: There’s a great one in Forestry. There’s an informal learning space in the Forest Sciences building which is fantastic. It’s one of my favourite places on campus. There’s a wonderful sense of place about it. It’s got great light, great materiality. It’s got living plants in it. Students can work in various ways there. And you can walk up through the stairs, and it works on several levels. So as you travel through the space, there’s a sense of journey through the space. You can’t necessarily see everybody. There’s a sense of mystery about it. You can work in groups but be separate from the larger group, but still be connected to them because you can still physically see people who come into the space. It’s a terrific project. It’s a really inspiring space. I really like it very much.
You need more of those spaces on campus. They don’t all have to be as expensively done as that. Good design doesn’t have to be expensive design. But we have to create places that get more traction out of the area for students. There’s often not enough furniture in these spaces. There’s often not the right mixture of types of furniture in these spaces, and they’re not the most interesting spaces to sit in. So how do we change that? How do we improve the lighting? How do we improve the quality of the furniture and the seating, so we create settings where students want to be in rather than they have no choice. We know that students often form great attachments to their libraries where they study, and they remember those places long after they’ve left university. That becomes the embodiment of the university. Long after they’ve forgotten the people who taught them or the people they learned with, or the material they learned, they’ll remember the great space within a library that they studied in or the very comfortable warm space where they felt cozy and secure, and they could really get involved in their learning. So we want to create a wider range of those types of places on campus so that we connect more to a wider number of students in that way. That’s what people remember, and that’s the sort of campus we need to create.
This article was published in the May 2014 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of articles included in the issue:
- 2014 CTLT Institute: June 3 – 10
- Flexible Learning Open House: June 9 – 10
- CTLT Journal Clubs on SoTL and MOOC & Open Education
- Team-Based Learning: Effectively Flipping Your Course
- Looking for an Engaging Learning Resource for Your Students? Create It!
- A Space of One’s Own (currently viewing)
Find out more about the CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues.
