With the growing of cities and conurbations in Europe, many new schools are built already or going to be built following the developing field of pedagogical architecture. There is a global tendency that schools are transforming from traditional corridor schools to innovative learning environments (ILE) which is a break with a long tradition with school design, and the demands on teaching and learning are increasing. Thus, there is a current need for an increased awareness of the relation between pedagogy and architecture to release the implicit and rich potential for facilitating teaching and learning in innovative (physical) learning environments. The central objective is to support educators, youth workers, educational leaders and teacher trainers collaborating and using innovative learning environments. MOBILE seeks to contribute to an increased awareness on the occupation of learning environment, by extending and developing the competences of educators and other personnel who support learners. Also central will be reinforcing the development of key competences on the occupation of innovative learning environments for teachers and educational staff members. The MOBILE project is a joint project between six participating organisations in three countries: Sophia::Academy and a Teacher Training Centre (D), ICS Advisors and Technasium foundation (NL) and Oslo local government and Norconsult (NO). Each of the six partners has knowledge and competence of different aspects on the physical learning environment, the collaboration will lead to insights and practical tools that are unique to each partner and will lead to a broadening of their own core competences. Sophia::Academy is a non-profit organization in North Rhine-Westphalia that supports development processes in the educational sectorand provides advanced training courses on the subject of "Room as third teacher" in workshops, congresses and specialist days. The Teacher Training Center in Düsseldorf [Zentrum für schulpraktische Lehrerausbildung (ZfsL)] has strong competence on teaching, learning and developing learning programs. On its Campus it operates an innovation centre for ILE (Rhine-Maas Center) which has been developed together with ICS and Sophia::Academy. ICSadviseurs is a renowned Dutch consultancy that has experience with more than 300 participative processes to develop innovative learning environments and school buildings in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Oman. Norconsult is Norway's largest and one of the leading multidisciplinary consultancy companies in the Nordic region. Norconsult’s services are aimed at planning and the company is a leading player both nationally and internationally. Norconsult's School department has broad experience from the educational sector and expertise in planning assignments on school structure, school types, student number predictions and conducting participatory briefing processes for architectural design briefs and conducting development processes for teachers on use of learning spaces. The local government of Oslo promotes energy-efficient meeting places that nurture pupils' development, reflecting the pedagogical functionality and design of learning spaces thoughtfully. The MOBILE project will, through collaboration, discussion and interaction, be carried out within a hermeneutic loop, develop outputs that will support educators to engage more effectively with ILEs. The smart combination of workshops, study trips, internships and seminars with partners from schools and administration as well as invited stakeholders and experts, will gather attention towards the variety of learning spaces and towards the link between learning spaces and pedagogy: Furthermore it will contribute to an awareness of how teachers and learners use the learning spaces. Therefore the project will develop the following outputs: 1. Pedagogical Post Occupancy Evaluation - a pedagogical based guideline for spatial/functional evaluation of ILE on the premises of education (PPOE), 2. Workshops for Teacher Training Centers to offer further education for professional of all school forms (TTT), 3. Index of Innovative Learning Environments (INDEX of ILE) - an autodidactic tool, that helps teacher teams to improve the spatial use of their learning environment by themselves. Through this combination of the different project activities the consortium is able to explore the experiences with ILE (PPOE), to link this to the development of (process) tools that will support future-oriented school development (Index or ILE); including the development of training courses for Teacher Trainers for direct implementation. Bringing these three components together is necessary for a successful implementation and is innovative. And more important: it will add knowledge and develop the field of Physical Learning Environments.
Despite the pandemic, the project starts on time. All activities (LTTAs, MPEs, TPMs, etc.) took place by agilely adapting the timeline to the lock-downs. As the partners could not meet as planned at the beginning of the project, monthly virtual think tanks took their place, through which the partners first got to know each other and which eventually led to efficient working groups on the IOs, using all forms of the design thinking method. The development of the project results thus took place during the project with Miro-Boards in close cooperation with the future users - in Germany colleges, participants in further education and pedagogical days, in the Netherlands in focus groups of the Technasium Academy and as special further education of the school board in Oslo in close cooperation with Norconsult. The restrictions of the lockdown were circumvented with the help of temporary online versions and caused only temporary delays. All planned project outcomes: - Guide to pedagogical evaluation of learning environments, - Index for learning environments - Training for Learning Spaces were completed by the end of the project and have been translated into German, English, Dutch and Norwegian.
In Europe, many schools are currently being renovated or newly built due to the enormous investment backlog. So far there are no binding indicators for assessing the pedagogical quality of learning environments and classrooms. In addition, educators rarely have an eye for spatial potentials and planning/building experts have so far only read classrooms in terms of direction (number of pupils, number of classes...). The aim is to be able to evaluate and improve the quality of educational buildings on the basis of objective and subjective user perceptions and to analyse classrooms not only quantitatively (size, light, acoustics...) but also qualitatively (multifunctionality, flexibility, atmosphere, etc.) and to develop them on the basis of pedagogical-social criteria (forms of work and social interaction, cooperative learning...). The materials should help to reflect on learning environments and to design them autodidactically together with the learners. Last but not least, a seminar concept is to be developed that, as an international pedagogical day or further training, links the developed materials holistically in such a way that participants can evaluate their own learning spaces. There has not yet been such a further training.