Signifying the Transition from Modern to Post-Modern Schooling... 23impose a specific unidirectional path for everyone and no-one in particular^11 , d) relatively
limited area allocated to non-teaching spaces (e.g. a playground where free motion is
allowed), e) restricted number of entrance or exit points, or f) mechanisms of access control
(automated doors, photocells, etc).
These features are missing from post modern school buildings. The idea behind the
reduced control of students‘ mobility in these buildings is that conditions of increased
mobility allows teams to collaborate and also creates chance encounters, often the catalyst for
emerging ideas. Spaces in this case are designed for facilitating interaction and brainstorming
and encouraging informal communication serendipitous meetings, and impromptu
conversations. In such spaces students and teachers who know one another only slightly may
detain each other in broad pathways (not corridors) where paths intersect in an almost random
way.
Apart from the control of vision and motion in school, framing is also related to families
of items, which are significantly linked and "exposed" to social communication within "social
spaces" (Baudrillard,1972; Bourdieu, 1979). In such a "social space" not only does each
object have a denotation in itself, but it assumes special meanings deriving from the linkage
to other objects, while the linking pattern is significant. As far as the linking patterns of
school objects are concerned, the greater the number of different relationships these objects
can enter into with each other the weaker the framing.
In this case weak framing corresponds to flexibility and adaptability as principles of
organizing the material culture of schooling, thus empowering students to gain more control
over its configuration. On the other hand strong framing corresponds to invariability and
stability, which in turn mean that students are negated to challenge a pre-defined and pre-
organized arrangement of their material environment. To put it differently school spaces
characterized by weak framing tend to be organized around the principles of variability,
reconfigurability, personalization thus bringing the learning subjects into the foreground.
Instead spaces promoting strong framing tend to be organized around the principles of
serialisation, standardisation, and duplication thus bringing the absolute nature of the objects
into the foreground.
The flexibility and adaptability of the material aspects of schooling is delineated with
pedagogies that should be tailored to the subject, the learners, and the intended outcomes.
Student needs and learning preferences vary as well. Spaces that are flexible, accommodating
different approaches and uses, improve the odds for effective learning.
Flexible spaces are defined by OECD as places that can adapt quickly and inexpensively
to changes in the curriculum, to evolving pedagogical theory and practice, to the demands of
the school community, and to the fast developments in ICT (CABE, 2007). In addition to the
aforementioned requirements, flexible and minimally designed or even undersigned places
are in accordance with learned centered pedagogies of post-modern schooling. According to
numerous studies modification and access to natural un-designed areas were found to be
important preferences for children (Francis, 1988). It is exactly this type of spaces that
children seem to appropriate in the most dynamic way, expressing a desire to modify and
change the landscape and an interest in claiming found spaces as their own (Day, 2007). On
the contrary adults have been found to prefer more traditional environments which are safe,
neat, and fixed.
(^11) According to Koolhaas, (1994) corridors are intentionally asocial, and sociofugal.