On 28 January 2021, Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate of Education and Skills at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), discussed the future of global education, as part of the Davos Agenda, in an article entitled ‘What will education look like in 20 years? Here are four scenarios.’
Against a backdrop of radical educational turmoil wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, Schleicher considered ‘To what extent are our current spaces, people, time and technology in schooling helping or hindering our vision?’
The status quo – standardised content and spaces, a focus on individual learning experiences – was contrasted with a vision of a transformed educational system, which would ‘involve re-envisioning the spaces where learning takes place; not simply by moving chairs and tables, but by using multiple physical and virtual spaces both in and outside of schools,’ and ‘full individual personalisation of content and pedagogy enabled by cutting-edge technology’.
At St John’s College in Johannesburg, these questions were made concrete – almost literally – through the completion of construction in 2020 of our new preparatory school buildings, designed by Mark Pencharz of Pencharc. The St John’s campus is home to some of the oldest and most beautiful of Johannesburg’s buildings. The original Parktown campus was designed by Herbert Baker and buildings were added in 1925, 1939 and 1957 to accommodate a growing enrolment list.
New ways of working in a new space
The new building’s design took place before COVID-19 existed, but navigating the tensions between the traditional and modern were nonetheless top of mind. Pencharz took design cues from the existing campus and integrated the new building harmoniously and sensitively within that idiom, without slavishly copying any particular aspect of it.
But more importantly, the building was intended to offer a space that would support the school’s conception of modern, vibrant, effective pedagogy. The new space was designed to encourage collaboration, complex problem-solving and creativity, and to suggest new ways of working and teaching without destabilising the learning paradigm that St John’s has honed over more than a century.
The building’s design sought to encourage flexibility in the way children choose to approach their work. Collapsible walls allow for spaces to be created to support learning goals, furniture can be moved and clustered to get away from neat, hierarchical rows, and technology is integrated into the spaces so that teachers and learners have instant access to digital environments.
An Innovate Centre on the bottom level of the building is a space for experiential projects in fields such as robotics. Breakaway spaces are incorporated throughout the building to encourage the children to take an active, experimental approach to problem-solving.
Energy efficiency was fundamental to the design, with solar panels providing electricity for lighting and temperature regulation accomplished passively through the intelligent use of materials and orientation, and actively through a smart regulatory system.
In summary, the design allows students and teachers to take a creative, flexible approach to the educational practice that takes place within it. In this, it has proved eminently successful and, as a result, has begun to receive critical acclaim — it was recently announced as a finalist in the Gauteng Institute for Architecture (GIFA) Awards for Architecture.
A flexible approach
Although the building was designed before a pandemic, it has enabled an effective response to it in ways that suggest an ongoing approach to flexible learning that encompasses the best of the old and the new. The flexible spaces allow us to maintain physical distancing in a way that traditional classrooms don’t, the integrated digital technology enables safe collaboration within a classroom environment, and the flexible approach to learning actively engages children in the process, as opposed to sitting at home and being fed an online-only curriculum.
It has been wonderful to observe the children’s reaction to the new space. Simply walking into classrooms that are 80 square metres — double what they were accustomed to — was initially a disconcerting experience. And there was an initial hesitancy around what would be allowed in this new space: ‘Can I sit here? Is this room for us?’
But after nearly a year of growing accustomed to the space, alongside a newfound sense of ownership, there is a persistent atmosphere of excitement, almost urgency, that accompanies the increased agency they have in designing their own educational experience. This is training in flexibility, agility and navigating complexity — without a word being said.
The potential of learning spaces
There is a powerful, and perhaps under-considered, relationship between the spaces in which learning takes place, the possibility of setting and accomplishing learning objectives, and the learning experience as a whole. Spaces that inspire, involve, and subtly suggest values – creativity, collaboration, innovation – have the potential to revitalise and energise the learning and teaching experiences.
The St John’s teachers, administrators and wider family thought deeply about the ways in which education might be altered by the challenges, strictures and opportunities that materialised over the past eighteen months.
This process of intense reflection resulted in a renewed commitment to certain aspects of the educational experience.We firmly believe in the pivotal role of the teacher in developing and populating children’s mental schemas, to set the basis of constructive self-directed learning and a critical approach to knowledge gathering.
We do not believe that a shift to online-only education serves the needs of either teachers or students. And we have committed to our ethos of encouraging creative, collaborative, experiential and experimental learning, underpinned by a concurrent focus on values-based character development.
Resolving tensions and dilemmas
In his article, Schleicher posits four possible scenarios for the future of education but then clarifies:
We can construct an endless range of such scenarios. The future could be any combination of them and is likely to look very different in different places around the world. Despite this, such thinking gives us the tools to explore the consequences for the goals and functions of education, for the organisation and structures, the education workforce and for public policies.
Ultimately, it makes us think harder about the future we want for education. It often means resolving tensions and dilemmas: What is the right balance between modernising and disruption? How do we reconcile new goals with old structures? How do we support globally minded and locally rooted students and teachers?
In a way, the education process rests on our ability to instil a capacity for constructively resolving tensions and dilemmas. St John’s has a proud history of educational excellence and is a school that merges the duality of a traditional, values-based educational approach with progressive, cutting edge and contemporary approaches to education.
Our particular strength, I am increasingly coming to believe, is in our ability to emphasise these tensions instead of avoiding them, and to seek their productive resolution not just in our curriculum but in our approach to pedagogy and the spaces in which it can most effectively take place.