Stories of Educational Spaces: A Tool for Addressing the Past, Present, and Potential Future in Design and Adaptive Reuse of Educational Spaces

Educational transformation is known to be challenging (Woolner et al., 2018) and require the participation and collaboration of the users in the development processes (Bøjer, 2019; Woolner, 2018). This paper will discuss the making and use of a tool for collaborative school development, ‘Stories of Educational Spaces’ (SES) (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/tools/ses/). The tool was developed as part of the project ‘Collaborative Re-design with Schools’ aimed at creating activities and resources to raise the awareness about and involve educational professionals and school users in physical school space, its use and design. In the workshop-based tool SES, the participants use storytelling to explore the past, present, and potential future of selected spaces in a specific school environment. The participants work in smaller groups where they are asked to narrate stories and complement them with photographs or drawings. At the end of the workshop, the stories and images produced are the outset for a joint discussion in a larger group.
With the activity of tracking and imagining the archived, lived and future architectural and educational (hi)stories of a building, the tool may serve several purposes: raising awareness and developing competences of the pedagogical use of the physical environment; creating a shared place affiliation among the participants; laying the ground for adaptive re-use of existing buildings or architectural elements in local and self-driven development projects; and collecting inputs for both smaller and larger renovation projects of existing buildings.
The paper presents the core thinking in the development of the tool and the first experiences with its use (in Iceland, Denmark, and UK) leading to further reflections and re-adjustments. It focuses on the task of storytelling as a fundamental element in the tool (Lewis, 2011), connecting spaces, places (Ellis & Goodyear, 2016) and people with the past, present and future through real and imaginative (hi)stories. Through this, the tool facilitates collaborative engagement by acknowledging people’s starting points, connecting various aspects of a school environment, and facilitating the exploration of ideas and possibilities (Woolner, 2018). The paper also discusses how the differentiated use of the tool in three specific cases, taking place in three countries on different educational levels with different groups of participants (teachers, students etc.), has influenced the approach to and handling of the tool.