School Spaces for Student Wellbeing and Learning

This book introduces a new wellbeing dimension to the theory and practice of learning space design for early childhood and school contexts. It highlights vital, yet generally overlooked relationships between the learning environment and student learning and wellbeing, and reveals the potential of participatory, values-based design approaches to create learning spaces that respond to contemporary learners’ needs. 
Focusing on three main themes it explores conceptual understandings of learning spaces and wellbeing; students’ lived experience and needs of learning spaces; and the development of a new theory and its practical application to the design of learning spaces that enhance student wellbeing. It examines these complex and interwoven topics through various theoretical lenses and provides an extensive, current literature review that connects learning environment design and learner wellbeing in a wide range of educational settings from early years to secondaryschool. 
Offering transferable approaches and a new theoretical model of wellbeing as flourishing to support the design of innovative learning environments, this book is of interest to researchers, tertiary educators and students in the education and design fields, as well as school administrators and facility managers, teachers, architects and designers.

“This timely book fills a significant gap in the school design literature by exploring human affect and experience and coalescing design and teaching professions. It exhibits robust research methodologies blending literature reviews and evidence-based field explorations to represent school student and staff perceptions. The collection provides – in effect – a ‘Handbook for the Evidence-Based Design for Primary and Middle Schools’. The first chapter sets a high benchmark for authentic scholarship that shapes the rest of the book in establishing a fluid written structure throughout this seminal work.” —Dr. Kenn Fisher, Associate Professor in Learning Environments, University of Melbourne, Australia