Ann K. Newman: Paradigm Shift Wanted

Ann K. Newman

A couple of weeks ago I was at a higher-education roundtable at Herman Miller, the furniture manufacturer. We were discussing proposition statements created four years ago by a previous roundtable group. One of the propositions was: “Like other organizations, colleges and universities will be expected to deliver more (education) in less space — to increase their “learning per square foot.” This led to a lively exchange about assessment, learning outcomes, where learning occurs, and more.

Classrooms are 3 to 5 percent of a typical four-year college’s space portfolio. Phil Long — director of the Center for Educational Innovation and Technology at the University of Queensland — said in a recent talk that “only 7.7 percent of student learning occurs in classrooms during the daylight hours.” Yet colleges and universities (and consultants like me) continue to focus enormous energy on classroom-utilization analyses, technology, and design. Not that that’s a bad thing, but ….

It seems to me that we are need of a paradigm shift. If learning occurs everywhere on (and off) the campus, then the notion of wanting to measure the learning per square foot in traditional learning spaces completely misses the mark.

We need of new ways to think about coding, counting, and accounting for space. The Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory and Classification Manual, created by the National Center for Education Statistics, was originally developed in 1973 and updated in 1994. The much anticipated revision of 2006 was, for me, a major disappointment. As the manual itself states, “The existing coding structure has been kept almost entirely intact.” There are no enhanced definitions, no new space types defined to account for the enormous technological and pedagogical changes that have occurred in the intervening years, no new ways to account for the rise of informal, non-scheduled learning spaces.

As a space planner I believe in having a language to talk about spaces and their functions, but that language needs to change to accommodate the 24/7, full-bleed, living-and-learning environments that many of our campuses have become. We can’t code every space multipurpose, but we need some way to acknowledge the multipurpose nature of spaces. In addition, too many state-university systems are still wed to archaic formulas, developed in the 1960s, that focus too heavily on contact hours, station sizes, full-time enrollment, and net-to-gross ratios. How much learning occurs during a “contact hour”?

The whole system needs to be questioned. —Ann K. Newman

Ann K. Newman, April’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is head of the planning group at Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott. She is a psychologist by training.