Projects:
Info:
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
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
How does seating and social grouping differ?
-
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.
-
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?
-
Which spatial feature best supports diverse learning needs?
-
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.