The education sector and educational architecture are some of the areas affected by the pandemic’s outcomes seriously. Just before the pandemic,the debate on educational systems and their architecture was at its peak level. There was literally no time in history that educational reforms and changes in the system influenced the relationship between space and architecture of the learning environments. However, the current pandemic separated the one who is “teaching” and the other one who is “learning” and put them as two different aspects of the “educating” process. In the conventional system, the classes were not ,due to their way of design, able to gather these, seemingly, two sides and fuse them all for the sake of interactive education and collaborative learning process.
Moreover, the virtual classes made this situation even worse! We were discussing educational architecture to use the space wisely and more effectively, creating an innovative and collaborative class layout for better integration and exploring the capacities of opening education through nature by using proper design strategies, creating light and fresh spaces and designing common spaces for informal meetings and discussions. However, all these topics were -suddenly- cast away and deducted to the phrase of “I will share my screen.”
Besides black screens explicitly dividing the students’ relations and discussions, they also distinctly separate the teaching and learning sides at its most transparent way than ever before. For sure, this scenario of “evaporating the space” is quite beneficial for investors who don’t desire to spend more to create ideal spaces for innovative education systems. However, it is evident that the traditional system’s troubles were put on the table during the online education and the methods and architecture of teaching would probably be due to transform in the way of post-pandemic context and discourse.
by meltemşahin