Restructuring and the Physical Context

Designing Learning Environments

Abstract

The educational restructuring movement of the 1980s and 1990s has affected the relation of teachers and learners to the physical context of learning: how people are located, related to each other, move, speak, and use their bodies. To throw the significance of these reform patterns into relief, they are contrasted to practices of the disciplinary mass institution, that is, those institutions which feature the bureaucratic administration of the assembly-line processing of matter, organisms, people or symbols. The movement from adisciplinary to a meaning-centered pedagogy is described. Successful models of educational reform dispense with the homogeneouspace designed for large groups engaged in uniform behavior. Order, once achieved by isolating, silencing, immobilizing, monitoring, and rating individuals, is now sought in sustained relationships and commitment to shared meaningful projects. The new sources of order permit amenities once prohibited: conversation, freedom of movement, comfort of the body, enhancement of relations to family and community, independent activity, responsibility for performance.