3rd Global Conference
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Friday 9th February - Sunday 11th February
2007
Sydney, Australia
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 1: The Physicality of Creativity
Chair: Phil Fitzsimmons
The Story of a Small School - A Narrative
of Intersecting Histories
Michael
J. Hagan
Director,San Roque School, Santa Barbara, California, USA
“One of the tasks of the progressive educator…is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be.” Paulo Freire
Community-originated,
authentic learning, student-led conferences, compliments and concerns
and appreciation circles, kindness and gentleness, integrated individual
and group units of study, intrapersonal and interpersonal development
are all concepts that will be explored as we tell our distinctive educational
success story.
In
a small school in a little town on the central coast of California,
there exists a community of learners who work together everyday unveiling
the opportunities for hope of which Freire speaks. Moms and dads, teachers
and kids all work together co-constructing an interconnected series
of learning events that provide a common context to engage in an intellectual
journey that values their individual and collective voices. At the
core of this system of education is the very simple and basic concept
of “relationship.” Through the simple
process of paying close attention, the adults in this unique community
work tirelessly to identify the social and emotional needs of children
because of the common belief that addressing those particular needs
is critical to the academic and overall success of the community as
a whole. In this article, you will engage in a virtual experience where
you will visit with some of the members of this community, and gain
insight into the system and practices that are the cornerstones of
its success. In addition, I am hopeful that you, my audience to this
piece, will participate in facilitating our next steps by engaging
in a discussion about your experiences with the students in your care
or with schools, classes and systems that have been the subject of
your own research and analysis by sharing your stories and insights
with me at sanroque@earthlink.net. Join me as I, with your help, unveil
opportunities for hope for our most precious resource, our children.
Children’s Creative Evaluations
of School Physical Environments
Hsiu-Tyan
Chuang
Department of Interior Design, Chung Yuan Christian
University, Taiwan
This empirical study focuses on the environmental features which evoke creative and preferable responses. The purposes of this study are to explore: a) the features of school physical environments which are visually evaluated as creative and preferable; b) the differences of response among individual attributes; c) the relationship between creative evaluation and preference judgment. Employing 46 photographs of ten primary schools in Taiwan as the measuring instrument, this study conducted an investigation to 308 subjects. A principal component analysis and a Varimax (orthogonal) rotation were applied; twelve factors emerged accounting for 59.14% of the total explained variance. Ten environmental designers identified common features of each factor. Analyses revealed that there were significant differences in some factors of creative evaluation and preference judgment between children and professional adults; and between city and country children as well. The Pearson correlations of creative evaluation and preference judgment of all the twelve factors are significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). The results of this study are expected to be helpful for school designers and educators to a better understanding of children’s creative evaluations and preference judgments of school environmental features.