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A collective of educators and students engages in immersive art- and design-driven practice to reimagine higher-education and primary-school teaching and learning at, and beyond, the University of Teacher Education. 

Rooted in curiosity, care and attentiveness to diverse histories and voices, the collective offers open-ended impulses that anyone can adapt, question or extend across a growing constellation of educational hubs.

© 2025 Emerging Space Collective (CC BY‑NC 4.0)

Method: Classroom Time Capsule

Overview:

This reflective design exercise invites participants to compare today’s classroom with their own school experiences—surface shifts, question ingrained habits, and envision more inclusive futures.

  1. Illustrated Comparison (10 min):
    Show a photo of a contemporary classroom. Individually sketch side-by-side thumbnails: on the left, your memory of a classroom from your school days; on the right, what you see today. Annotate both with brief notes on layout, technology, materials, and social dynamics.

  2. Guided Prompts:
    As you draw, consider:
    • How does seating and social grouping differ?
    • What role do boards, screens, or maker-materials play?
    • How does movement through the space feel possible or constrained?
    • What surprised you, and what would you have wished for as a learner?

  3. Tandem Exchange (5 min):
    Pair up and present your sketches. Listen for how your partner’s background and identity shaped their school-day memories and current observations.

  4. Sharpening the Lens (5 min):
    In pairs, use two deeper questions to probe one another:
    • Which spatial feature best supports diverse learning needs?
    • Where might power or hierarchy be encoded in the room’s design?

  5. Plenary Outlook (10 min):
    Reconvene to share key insights—avoiding value judgments—and highlight how past influences linger in current practice. Finally, co-create two forward-looking ideas for reimagining the classroom to honour multiple ways of engaging, moving, and learning.

Cultural & Contextual Sensitivity:
By grounding analysis in personal histories and collective reflection, this method fosters a respectful, critically aware approach to designing next-generation learning environments.