What are sustainable or generative teacher skill sets in teaching and learning within open plan learning environments?

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Education, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This study investigated teachers’ emergent practices as they attempt to provide twenty-first century learning experiences in open-plan learning environments. The broad challenges to the industrial era model of education are coupled with the compelling need to provide contemporary learning processes. The focus on constructivist, student-oriented, collaborative, and personalised learning that is ICT-rich further establishes altered conditions requiring a new set of skills for teachers. This study examines the question, “What are the sustainable or generative skill sets in teaching and learning within open plan learning environments?”. Drawing on a multi-theoretical framework, including structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), relational agency (A. Edwards, 2005, 2009) and affordance theory (Gibson, 1977), this study focused on the heightened agency of teachers and students as expressed through both educational developments in constructivist pedagogies and architectural principles of openness, flexibility, humanism and democracy (Boddington and Boys, 2011; McGregor, 2004c; Melhuish, 2011; Upitis, 2004). In a multiple case study approach over two years I examined three school sites with open-plan design in regional Victoria. Field data included interviews with teachers and principals as well as a group interview with students. Observations of teaching were also conducted across the sites. The fine grain examination of teacher practice provides an opportunity to establish emergent patterns ground in lived experiences of altered school settings. The study found that open plan settings functioned as complex and intensified environments affording a range of practices and system responses. School level responses to the affordances of the space have made collaboration, adaptability and team orientation necessary features of the ongoing practice. The study explores the enablers and constraints in these settings on existing and desirable teacher skills. Metaphors and language to describe teaching practice are also considered in light of the altered conditions. The sustainable or generative skills require an ongoing and reflexive relationship with the brute physical space and the curriculum overlays established at school level.