Innovative learning spaces in higher education: perception, pedagogic practice and place

Abstract

Space is relational. As 'innovative' learning spaces continue to become part of the landscape of universities in Australia and internationally, this thesis represents a sociomaterial exploration of enacted infrastructure. The case of 'Knowledge Hub' provides a regional Australian example of the complex realities of practice with/in such a learning space, which embodies innovative principles of learner-centricity, connectivity, flexibility and digital affordance. Through a distinctive methodological approach, students and staff act as contributors and co-evaluators of rich sociospatial narratives of practice, in a participatory reflection on the materialised experience of teaching and learning in new, pedagogically-designed spaces. This spatial enactment, at once spontaneous and fluid, responds to and is dependant on the priorities, values, beliefs, and embodied sense of community belonging of the occupiers. While staff are identified as core spatial enactors who purposefully arrange and enact spaces to support an embodied professional apprenticeship, students are recognised as beginning professionals, who willingly take up dispositions of engagement in and exploration of the 'mess' of disciplinary learning. Staff-students-spaces exist as mutually-constitutive ensemble. In this way, while spaces are integral participants in teaching-learning instances, investment into university learning spaces must equally attend to nurturing the pedagogic relationships that work to enact and sustain them.