Contemporary learning environment designs bring to life schools featuring loose fitting, flexible layouts that upset the stable certainty of the four-walled classroom. This article presents the argument that adopting a theoretical approach to researching the role of spatiality and space in relation to innovative building design in education will…

This article synthesises longitudinal deliberations between two architects and an educator, seeking common ground about learning spaces in schools. As the impetus for new and refurbished school buildings continues in New Zealand, it is timely to unpack instinctual disciplinary practices to better understand space and place in schools. We undertook…

Empty spaces, open spaces, prefabricated buildings, disused school halls, patches of grass and suchlike have long been the teaching spaces of subjects such as Drama and Physical Education; likewise, ECE and Marae-based learning are other 'marginalised' domains of education in Aotearoa New Zealand today. Subjugated in the educational landscape,…

The Ministry of Education is funding a significant building programme for primary and secondary classrooms across Aotearoa, New Zealand. In New Zealand there is an expectation that new or refurbished classrooms will be innovative, modern or flexible learning environments. This paper reports findings from a critical policy analysis of the discourse…

Public libraries around the world have been re-configuring their sites to include 'makerspaces'--as a dedicated area where learners engage in creating, inventing, designing, discovering, coding, building and exploring. Makerspace activity often involves learning-by-doing and problem-solving, in a variety of topics in Science, Technology,…

Innovations in schooling and the architectural design of schools offer the opportunity to re-examine existing pedagogical practices. Graduating teachers need to be ready to teach and conversant with changing school environments and approaches to school organisation. However, there is a dearth of research that explores the student teachers'…

Enhancing student engagement and achievement in large undergraduate university courses is a vibrant area of research. Many existing studies have demonstrated the capacity of technologically enhanced formal and informal learning spaces to promote learning. However, this literature is dominated by studies that use assessment to incentivise student…

The global emergence of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) has disrupted the conventional grammar of schooling prompting more collaborative and flexible teaching and learning arrangements. While the emergence of a new grammar and its complexity for experienced teachers is acknowledged, the ramifications for initial teacher education (ITE) are…

This is a reflective account of an inquiry learning process that took place as a small country school corrected its name from Tiritea to Turitea. We discuss the process as an example of how boards in mainstream schools can work collaboratively to uphold te ao Maori (the Maori world) in schools and to recognise obligations under the Te Tiriti o…

Immigrant teachers have been more visible than ever before owing to transnational mobility. However, there is a lack of research on exploring their lived experiences in a broader context. With an auto-ethnographic approach, this study delves into the life of a non-native migrant in New Zealand over a period of 6 years. The qualitative data were…

Evaluating the teaching performance of lecturers in higher education is important for both the Universities and the faculty themselves. Having information about teaching performance is essential to bring about change in student learning and assessment, to incentivize lecturers, to appraise lecturers and to make important administrative decisions.…

While research that is embedded in schools is reported widely in education and psychological research literature, studies that focus on how researchers might navigate school-based gatekeepers is minimal. This study addresses this gap. The research presented in this paper reports on the recruitment process that was employed in a study that involved…

The benefits of creating learning communities have been clearly established in educational literature. However, the research on 'community-of-learning' has largely focused on intermediate and high-school contexts and on the benefits of co-facilitation in the classroom. In this paper, we contribute to educational research by describing an approach…

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate about the phenomenon known in Aotearoa New Zealand as "twenty-first Century Learning." In recent additions to the local literature Hirschman and Wood (2018) have noted a lack of critical engagement with this narrative which is fast becoming normalised in New Zealand, and Lourie (2020)…

In Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, current adult literacy and numeracy assessment is skills oriented; at the same time, there is a growing interest in more balanced understanding by also looking at the broad wellbeing-related outcomes of literacy education. In the research project reported below adult literacy learners in three community…