Assessing the Impact of Spaces for Learning on Undergraduate Learners: Building a Community of Practice

Westfields Marriott
Chantilly, VA


The 2011 LSC Colloquium is designed for the collective exploration of basic questions at the intersection of research and practice in the realm of planning 21st century learning spaces for 21st century learners. Attention will be given to research domains as diverse as cognitive science, learning sciences, social psychology, organizational and pedagogical change, and from communities of practitioners equally diverse: senior academic administrators, libraries, pedagogical pioneers, physical plant officers, architects, and other design and construction professionals.

This diversity of experience and expertise brought to the colloquium ‘table’ reflects the reality that planning 21st century learning spaces is a very complex undertaking. It demands the cross-fertilization of ideas around issues such as why and how collaborative learning and other research-based pedagogies work, why and how interdisciplinary teams prosper as problem-solving teams, why and how giving students hands-on, real-world learning experiences motivates them to persist and succeed—and why and how space matters.

This will be a working colloquium. It is a first major step in building a new community of practice, one that shares a collective sense that has been informed by theory and confirmed by practice of how space influences learning. This is a community of practice that actively engages researchers and practitioners that can share data and insights about how spaces enable a supportive learning community to emerge. Colloquium participants will draft resources, to be piloted and prototyped, developed and disseminated in early 2012, which will nurture and inform this emerging community of practice. At the most fundamental level, this colloquium is to catalyze the feedback loops that connect attention to the where of learning to discussions about what and how students learn—and connect attention to what and how students learn to the planning of spaces, to where students learn.

Pre-workshop opportunities include fall webinars and suggested background readings. Post-workshop expectations are for critiquing, piloting, and assessing the various resources for planners drafted at the colloquium. Throughout, a feedback loop will offer opportunity for sharing data and insights about if and how spaces enable a supportive learning community to emerge.


Participants in the 2011 LSC Colloquium will have opportunity to:

• explore questions to be addressed in the process of planning, experiencing, and assessing built environments for 21st century learning
• engage in the critique of those questions with a diverse community of practitioners: provosts and deans, faculty with responsibilities for learning in classrooms and labs, librarians and other administrators with responsibilities for assessing learning, for physical spaces; as well as architects and other design and construction professionals
• examine those questions from perspectives of learning theorists, environmental psychologists, researchers on organizational change
• examine those questions from the perspective of goals for student learning from within and beyond academe
• role-play the experience of establishing an on-campus process for planning learning spaces that begins and ends with a focus on learning and learners, prototyping approaches to determine if and how space matters
• develop a take-home agenda for action to advance local planning of learning spaces: campus-wide or single projects for renovation/new construction.