OJU02200 Learning environments enhancing student-involving interaction (5 cr)

Content

The course is organized around relevant phenomena and activities that are linked to all of the six skills mentioned above. The students learn about and practice these skills in various courses during their studies, but in this particular course they are invited to build a spatial and social understanding of learning.
The scope and sequential order of activities is the following:

Basics
1. Cultural skills: how to “read” the schoolscape? What does it “tell” to us about the organizational culture, the languages, the various cultural groups in the school? Intro lecture and guided reflection on student teachers’ previous experiences.
2. Intellectual skills: building an understanding of schoolscapes through research. Basic methods in schoolscape research. Planning an own mini schoolscape project (e.g. observing the schoolscape of the school in which their teaching practice takes place; conducting a self-ethnographic study on their own learning environments at the university; asking students/parents/teachers about their experiences with schoolscape; comparing in- and out-of-school learning, etc.). Lecture and group work. Students can develop projects that they carry out individually or in pairs.

Focusing on phenomena
3. Communication and interaction skills: how interaction takes place in various schoolscape settings. Communication and interaction in and out of the school (cf. ‘learning in the wild’). Schoolscapes enhancing mono-/bi-/multilingual communication. Lecture and the analysis of research materials in small groups (prepared videos and transcripts with translation if needed). Collecting ideas for enhancing students’ involvement in interaction through schoolscape design.
4. The ethics of schoolscapes: agency, participation, belonging, authorship vis-à-vis schoolscapes. Community planning and negotiation/contestation of schoolscapes. Narrating local histories through schoolscapes: constructing and erasing identities. Lecture about participatory ethnographical methods. Group work on research materials from ethnographical projects (images, interview excerpts, texts from media, etc.)
5. The aesthetics of schoolscapes: physical learning environments shape the visual literacy of students. Schoolscapes are evaluated and classified by school community members. Trends in schoolscape design: institutional aesthetics through history (a brief overview). School community members’ evaluation of schoolscapes: practicality, approachability, coziness, human-scale design. Students prepare and share materials from their own (already running) mini projects and analyze them in groups.
Towards innovation
6. Schoolscape-aware pedagogy: summarizing the results of students’ own projects. Student conference as a closing event of the course: students prepare presentations/posters to share and discuss their results with others. Doing so, they especially focus on how the project/course helped them in understanding and perhaps redefining their role as a teacher, and what strategies/methods they built for their (next) teaching practice period.

Completion methods

Contact teaching, assignments and/or exam.

Assessment details

active participation in the course activities;
reading the assignments;
carrying out a mini schoolscape project, present it in the closing conference, and report it in a short essay/video/vlog/blog post…;
writing the learning diary.