Future Learning Environments in Interdisciplinary Dialogue

How can we reimagine future learning environments and educational spaces from different disciplinary per­spec­tives? Two rounds of discussion bring together Dominik Eisen­mann (pedagogy, educational innovation), Lars Keller (geo­graphy, sustaina­bility), Christian Kühn (building theory, archi­tecture criticism), Angela Million (urban design, urban planning), Barbara Pampe (architecture, educational advancement), and Michael Zinner (architecture, school building).

Moderated by: Christian Peer

Christian Peer Let us begin this conversation about future learning environments with a discussion on visions for education and architecture, and how their implementation and further development are perceived and shaped from various perspectives. 

Angelika Million The relatively poor performance of German students in the PISA study at the beginning of the twenty-first century triggered a nationwide debate on how education is understood and which partners education requires, including the built environment, the urban context, and the social environment. This initiated a decidedly more inter­disci­plinary dialogue and marked a turning point in the development of school architecture and urban planning. At that time, together with colleagues, I began to introduce architectural education to children and young people. This led me to research on education and edu­ca­tional infrastructure, exploring on the one hand what architectural mediation can achieve, and on the other, investigating how future learning takes shape within education and educational environments. As a result, new educational networks have emerged that, once they become spatially anchored and have materialized architecturally, we refer to as educational landscapes, which is exactly what we aim to better understand through our research. 

Christian Kühn It is clear to me that there has been a paradigm shift over the last 15 to 20 years, which began in the 1960s and has now been broadly implemented in school architecture, at least in Central Europe. This new paradigm moves away from the traditional corridor-and-classroom school towards more open spatial structures, cluster formations, and open learning zones. At the moment, however, I am not entirely sure whether this architectural paradigm shift has truly been understood and adopted in pedagogical practice on a broad scale. 

Barbara Pampe I agree with Christian Kühn. When we began working on projects on the interplay of pedagogy and space, around 20 years ago, the need and the connection between the two were hardly acknowl­edged. Today, the impact spatial design has on school buildings is widely recognized, and there has been a shift towards forward-looking edu­ca­tional environments. But architectural change alone is not enough. We have to address all relevant dimensions, and the necessary paradigm shift in pedagogy towards preparing students for the world of tomorrow has not yet been realized widely. That is precisely why it is so valuable that you, Mr. Keller, are bringing the perspective of education for sustainable development into our discussion. 

Lars Keller The focus on education for sustainable development is by no means self-evident. It took nearly 30 years after the reintroduction of the concept of sustainability for the topic to find its way into education. We are asking important questions: What do we want from life? What makes life fulfilling? How can we achieve a quality of life that is viable for us while not being destructive? I have been carrying these ideals with me for decades, working for them every day, and time and again I encounter the same entrenched resistance. Change, after all, can be frightening. It is therefore essential to consider human psychology. We need to inspire enthusiasm for positive change, knowing full well that even in sustainability, solutions are not always readily available. Engaging with them can be uncom­fort­able, but the result is ultimately rewarding. In this sense, perhaps we should also create spaces that retain a certain degree of discomfort. Over the past ten years, it has become increasingly clear that a sustainable and climate-conscious way of living requires a fundamental paradigm shift toward holistic, integrated, and transformative approaches. 

AM Without the PISA shock, we might never have arrived at the debates around educational landscapes or the intensive efforts to establish full‑day schooling concepts. That was a turning point in the development of school and urban planning. Pilot projects were initiated to understand how a network of educational institutions functions within a neighborhood; what a school can contribute to a community; and to what extent it is, or can become, an integral anchor of urban and community development. This has since become widely established. If we look at current large-scale urban extensions in Munich, Berlin, or Hamburg, for example, we see clusters of educational institutions intentionally planned together in one location. At the same time, school building consulting has become more professional, and architectural chambers and associations now offer targeted continuing education. So, a great deal has indeed happened in recent years. And yet, there are developments with even greater momentum, as the many crises of recent years show or have shown. For instance, migration flows have caused major cities to experience demographic surges that suddenly require vast amounts of school space which cannot be built quickly enough.

Michael Zinner The PISA shock, together with looking at Scandinavia as an example, did indeed have an impact. Many schools were developed and built as pilot projects, often in combination with parti­ci­pa­tory approaches. However, the story comes with a couple of snags. Firstly, a certain disil­lu­sion­ment regarding participatory processes emerged. As always, when something new is establishing itself, there is an “unregulated market phase.” There are no standard certifications for educational building consultancy, and a fair number of self-proclaimed experts entered the field. The still young and emerging demand for educational and organizational guidance frameworks is now being serviced by more aggressively positioned companies offering simple, inexpensive solutions. This undermines genuine participation; “sleeping schools” are moderated to become “pseudo-awake schools.” The second snag is that the crises of the early twenty-first century have caught up with us far faster than we are even capable of imagining. Financial crises (and reduced public budgets), the pandemic (and thus a shockwave of digitalization), and climate crisis (with finally unavoidable con­straints on building) brought a trifecta of funda­men­tally shifted conditions. And many more such shifts will continue to come in the decades ahead. 

Dominik Eisenmann One major challenge that I see is that we have still not succeeded in creating a holistic understanding of the many motivations for change and requirements for the future placed on us as individuals, especially as many of these needs contradict one another. In the classroom, teachers should always keep in mind that today’s children need to learn the skills and abilities that will enable them, as adults, to solve the problems of the future. For me, this includes, among others, the ability to adapt and innovate.

BP The connections between pedagogy and space are understood much better today than they were 15 years ago. At the same time, topics such as inclusion, full-day schooling, and equal opportunities have long been issues in the edu­cational sector, and we are still unable to resolve them satisfactorily. What has emerged so far are only the fragile seedlings of pilot projects.

CP How can future learning environments respond to social diversity, and what role can architecture play in this? 

CK One problem I see is that our school system is relatively expensive—as numerous OECD studies show—particularly in terms of personnel costs. Simply adding more staff is probably not the solution; structural changes are needed. For example, how do you deal with heterogeneity when half of the pupils in Vienna cannot follow the lessons in German in their first year of primary school? As far as asylum seekers or those with asylum status are concerned, it seems sensible and legitimate to me to distribute these pupils—and thus their families—throughout Austria in such a way that schools outside the major metropolitan areas, where pressure is lower, help share the load. These are complex interdependencies and conflicting goals that we need to take a close look at. 

BP In Germany, initiatives like the new “Startchancen” [starting chances] program will hopefully contribute to improving educational equity while also supporting the transformation and enhancement of learning environments, especially in schools facing challenging conditions. In school architecture, however, we have often relied on additive thinking in recent years. To put it bluntly, we’ve met every new challenge with a new type of space: a space for inclusion, a space for full-day schooling, and now perhaps a space for sustainable-develop­ment education. We need to rethink our approach and make better use of the spatial and human resources available in the community. Typologies unrelated to schools also offer potential for adaptive reuse. Such conversions might be simpler and more cost-effective than for traditional schools, whose adaptation to future-oriented educational requirements is often highly complex. All investments being made right now must be tied to qualities that combine future-ready pedagogy with future-ready, high-level architecture. 

AM Most cluster schools and educational landscapes are currently being built or in the planning stages. What they will actually achieve remains, in my view, still an open question. The issue of existing building stock is also crucial, because the vast majority of schools already exist—and most are not part of an education network. It must be clearly stated that crises are already happening: In Germany, rural regions are experiencing a strong shift to the political right; we have dynamic immigration; and, especially in cities, we simply do not have enough school space, forcing us to make use of entirely different types of facilities. I have great respect for what we are currently achieving, especially by the educators in these cir­cum­stances. We are far removed from the homogeneous student populations that, for example, long contributed to the strong PISA performances of Scandinavian countries. With today’s social heterogeneity and diversity, we need learning environments that support inclusive, integrative, and intercultural learning. From an architectural perspective, this raises the question: How do we work with the diversity of building stock? How can we create learning environments that support both formal and informal learning, including learning outside school buildings—in libraries, youth centers, or public spaces, for example? To what extent can new educational concepts be implemented there, and how can they be spatially more effectively supported? How can pedagogy, architecture, and planning collaborate even more intensively? 

MZ The range of architectures for education systems should be diverse. A diversity of spatial infra­structures, for example in terms of increasingly non-standardized atmospheres, would cause “spatial learning” to flow naturally into the system. We should have very small schools, farmsteads as retreat and regeneration sites within edu­ca­tional regions, schools in former department stores, warehouses, and industrial buildings, or even schools that provide only a set of core spaces while temporarily using the spatial resources available in their neighborhood. Property diversity would support the overall engage­ment with diversity more broadly. Instead of focusing solely on “hardware standards” in new buildings, we should also focus on establishing standards for dealing with existing spaces, because working with what is already there makes federal and regional actors think and act differently. 

LK Education goes beyond the physical building; it extends outdoors—into open air, greenspaces, and natural environments. What matters is what people do in these spaces and how those brought together in them think. What truly supports human well-being, what brings people together? That is why the primary learning objective in education for sustainable development is for learners themselves to begin asking critical questions about future development—enabling them to even be able to imagine different futures. 

DE I agree. Education must be lived, and today in particular this involves critical thinking, having opinions founded in evidence. An architecture of open spaces can also open the mind; this is quite tangible. As a student at the new Vienna University of Economics and Business, I experienced firsthand how learning and spending time in open spatial environ­ments can be both pleasant and supportive. 

CP And what role does technological change play in our visions of the future of education and learning environments? 

MZ Technological change, simply as change, will remain a given. In the digital realm, we now see how quickly—in roughly five-year intervals—changes are becoming part of everyday reality, even if their roots lie decades in the past (as with the example of artificial intelligence). The positive side is that educational environments, which have historically tended to be a bit sluggish and resistant to change, are now more dynamically connected to the world. The opportunity lies in choosing stability at key points in the system (social care, human attention) in order to stay flexible in others (geographical inde­pen­dence, individual differentiation). If, for example, we cultivate the analogue world alongside digitalization, we increase our chances for positive development. 

AM With technological progress—especially with digital tools and hybrid formats—I see opportunities to address a wide variety of learning styles more effectively than before. It could allow both collective learning (social learning) and individual learning more agency and thus more space—and I mean this also in the sense of physical space and of new temporalities in how spaces are used. Exploring the possibilities of hybrid learning and hybrid learning environments is a major spatial and architectural task for the future.

BP With increasing digitalization, the trades and working with one’s hands are regaining importance in schools. At the same time, everyone should have access to digital infrastructures and media and be able to use them competently, adults as well. Digital technology and media should be used in the right places to foster a culture of digitality that meaningfully advances education and architecture. The built environment as a place of well-being, informal exchange, and architectural education can thus gain in importance.

CP To conclude: How can we overcome the frequently criticized resistance to change in the fields of education and architecture in such a way that enables a socio-ecological transformation while also strengthening society’s resilience in times of crisis? 

MZ We will have to rethink the future of educational spaces—quite simply because new construction will lose importance due to ongoing change in how we build. This is a tremendous opportunity, with atmospheric potential, as the energies inherent in existing buildings have the capacity to bring fresh air into the system.

CK The ROSE, a school in the Tabakfabrik Linz, a 1930s industrial building by Peter Behrens and Alexander Popp, (→ Project 45) is a prime example of just such a transformation of the existing. Working with existing buildings also protects architecture from excessive perfectionism. Building on the existing encourages us to think outside the box, to leave some things open, and to thus remain capable of evolution and expansion.

BP I find it compelling that in the future we may build far less, or even not at all, and will instead repurpose, adapt, and expand existing buildings, including ones not originally designed for school uses. We need to consider how different programs can be combined and how synergies can be created: Perhaps a university is added, a STEM lab, a shared library, a makerspace, or much more—and suddenly we have hybrid educational institutions in our city centers. Achieving this will require collaborative work and project-oriented thinking across responsibilities, departments, and institutional boundaries. We are seeing first steps in this direction already. However, scaling this up requires a different approach to existing buildings, new norms and standards, different planning processes—and courage. 

AM I would like to emphasize that innovation must come from within the education sector itself and be disseminated throughout the entire educational system. In order to create better learning environments, planning and architecture have become part of the dialogue about educational concepts and spatial possibilities. This dialogic approach is crucial, and I believe the need for it remains very high. 

DE If it can be conceived on such a scale and if it can actually be achieved, I find the vision very compelling: The idea of versatile educational centers and learning spaces that also become social meeting places, enabling community exchange while still supporting formal education. 

LK Involving the general public in these educational spaces and processes would also be important—not least to encourage lifelong learning. Of course, not everyone should be able to just walk into a school, but perhaps there is a certain threshold that allows shared spaces and communication opportunities to exist. Students could present and discuss topics relevant to the future there, and engage directly with the public. That would be exciting.