Northern Beaches Christian School (NBCS) is a co-educational K-12 school of 1300 students in the northern region of Sydney, Australia. The school draws from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.In 2005 NBCS planted a research, development and innovation unit within the school – the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL). It was a means by which to support educational innovation at the grassroots. Seven years on and SCIL (http://scil.com.au) is now the public interface of the school with the global education community.

The industrial-era experience of education is centered around ‘separation’ as a key concept (…) The area that presents the greatest challenge – and has arguably lagged behind in institutional planning across the world, is to consider how to create or transform the physical spaces so that they better support learning in a twenty first century environment of constant change (…) In the last decade, there has been some advancement in spatial thinking related to school designs for the future – creating new spaces by altering existing environments or creating new environments for learning.

References

• Stephen Harries, 2010. The Place of Virtual Pedagogic and Physical Space in the 21st Century Classroom. Paper presented in Presented at EduLearn 2010 & ICICTE 2010, published by Sydney Center for Innovation in Learning
• Stephen Harris, Redesigning Spaces Around Collaborative Teaching, in wise ed review, full article available here

Images available here and here