Educational Environments

The intersection of architecture and education is a new and burgeoning area of interest. This book blends architectural design information with theory-based content explaining the foundations of early childhood environments. Colorful photographs of intentionally designed spaces will inspire early childhood professionals and architects alike as they dream, plan, build, and revamp settings. Inspired by the groundbreaking architectural book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford University Press, 1977), this resource aims to glean architectural information regarding important design patterns in an environment and utilize them to provide insight into early childhood environments that are both developmentally appropriate and aesthetically pleasing.

Community Forests play an important role within the overall urban green space. In peri-urban areas such forests represent nature close to where people live and offer unique recreational settings. Moreover, they provide special educational environments, e.g. for children to learn about nature. While the use of peri-urban forests and urban forest management have both been covered separately in recent literature, the linking of the two has not been paid much attention to. In addition, the impact local communities have on forest use and management has not been considered sufficiently.
The objective of this paper is to link recreational forest use and management by elaborating a realistic and sustainable development concept for a peri-urban forest. Moreover, it shows approaches of how local communities can participate in the development process as their involvement is important when these green spaces are planned, designed, established and managed in order to meet the differing demands of urban society.

This paper contributes the example of the participatory development concept for Balfour Forest. The area is located southeast of Migdal HaEmek in the Lower Galilee and Jezreel Valley region in northern Israel. Balfour Forest is a peri-urban forest, and it is part of a replanted Mediterranean forest network around Nazareth. It is thus a cultural landscape that origins from the 20th century, representing the unique legacy of forestation efforts that occurred in Israel for several decades, with some plantings dating back as far as the British Mandate Period.
The case of the Balfour Community Forest is presented and approaches to shaping peri-urban forests according to the (ever changing) preferences and needs of local urban societies are discussed. Such approaches imply that peri-urban forests are managed on the basis of local needs and use preferences in order to become sustainable landscapes.

The paper presents the stages of an ongoing research project that explores the interdisciplinary sensponsive design framework for the integration of intelligent systems in space. The overall approach belongs in the wider scope of ambient intelligence where the environment performs in a sensible way within a specific context, exhibiting behavior and acting beneficially toward human activity. The proposed design framework is implemented and tested within the context of educational spaces, toward the creation of the future classroom where space acts as an educator, an assistant that has an active role to support and amplify the learning process.

The building project can be considered sustainable only when dealing with all dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, social and cultural). Reducing of the environmental impact, promoting human health, and increasing environmental awareness among sustainable users and schools is the most appropriate strategy for renewing and achieving quality education. The purpose of this study is to measure problems related to comfort (thermal, visual and acoustic) and satisfaction of school users (students, teachers, and other staff) and improve the performance of the building by assessing the impact of proposed strategies for sustainability in performance building. This research paper was based on the selection of a sample of governmental schools in Jordan and the study of energy and water consumption for this sample to reach a series of results. The research includes two main axes, the first axis focuses on measuring the problems related to the comfort of school users (students, teachers, and other staff) through the research questionnaire, and the second axis is how to improve the performance of the building by assessing the impact of proposed strategies on building performance through a Simulation Program (Design Builder Program). The need for such research in Jordan is increasing, especially in the public sector (government schools) where there are no indicators to measure sustainable buildings specifically in governmental schools.

The paper presents the stages of an ongoing research project that explores the interdisciplinary sensponsive design framework for the integration of intelligent systems in space. The overall approach belongs in the wider scope of ambient intelligence where the environment performs in a sensible way within a specific context, exhibiting behavior and acting beneficially toward human activity. The proposed design framework is implemented and tested within the context of educational spaces, toward the creation of the future classroom where space acts as an educator, an assistant that has an active role to support and amplify the learning process.

Background: Mergers and acquisitions result in considerable structural and functional changes in higher education. In January 2010, the Fiji School of Medicine and the Fiji School of Nursing were merged to form College of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences of the Fiji National University. The aim of the study was to determine pharmacy students’ perception of  post-merger teaching, learning, and sociocultural environment in the College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences of the Fiji National University.
Methods: The study used cross-sectional quantitative design to survey years 2, 3, and 4 pharmacy students. The 50 items Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) questionnaire was administered to consenting students and responses were scored and analyzed quantitatively using SPSS version 21 software. Results were expressed as mean ± SD. Total and subscales scores were compared across classes. Single item mean scores were also analyzed to provide insight to specific issues.
Results: Mean total DREEM scores for all participants, 129.6 +/- 17.7, indicated a “more positive than negative” perception. Students had “more positive perception” of learning (score 31.3 +/- 4.9). Perception of lecturers (score 27.1 +/- 5.7) indicated “moving in the right direction,” academic self-perception (24.9 +/- 6.4) showed that students were “confident,” learning atmosphere (29.4 +/- 5.8) indicated a “more positive attitude,” and social self-perception (17.1+/- 3.0) was “not too bad.” Specific issues included lecturers ridiculing students, being authoritarian and failing to provide good feedback.
Conclusion: The students had “a more positive than negative perception” of the learning environment comparable to observations in other settings. The specific issues were similar to those seen in medical schools in developing countries. These observations probably imply that the merger did not significantly affect the quality of the learning environment of the new College.

Engaging new students in tertiary study, amidst the storm of their adjustment to university life, should harness conventional physical as well as new virtual spaces to ensure (as urged by McInnis 2003, p.9) learning opportunities are maximised inside and outside of the classroom. When ubiquitous information, merged technologies, blurred social-study-work boundaries, multitasking and hyperlinked online interactions epitomise generational routines (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005); positive, rewarding interactions through virtual space “portals ” may establish the mode and intensity of on- and off-campus student experience. Conventional modes of curriculum delivery and learning support that hinge on presentation of material according to (for example) scheduled topic sessions, contact times and administrative office hours, do not necessarily fully accommodate these new social realities (James, 2002, p.81), contemporary learning practices or transition-informed curriculum design (Kift, 2005)....