Students in Space: Student Practices in Non-Traditional Classrooms

The discourse of the non-traditional classroom has found itself fundamentally intertwined with the rationalities of creating learning relevant for the future-orientated twenty-first century. In such an imaginary the idea of the conventional classroom – with its four walls, blackboard, ‘closed’ door, teacher-centred pedagogy and student learning conceptualised through the logics of the industrial era – is being renegotiated. This article focuses on an empirical examination of some of the changes to student classroom practice enabled by the material conditions of non-traditional learning spaces. In particular, it highlights the ways in which non-traditional learning spaces have become complex settings through which students negotiate increased learner autonomy, co-operative learning, acceptable classroom behaviour and fluid relations with teachers and peers. The article presents a discussion of the discourse of ‘twenty-first-century learning’ and focuses on non-traditional classrooms as an example of a localised expression of this discourse, supported by ethnographic data generated from field visits to three primary schools in Sydney, Australia to explore student practices enabled by such spaces.