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The Nordic Cooperation Network: The School of
Tomorrow
Reino Tapaninen, Architect SAFA, MArch, chief architect,
Finnish National Board of Education
The Nordic countries have intertwined histories and similar
cultures, social conditions and values. All Nordic countries have
seen remarkable—and similar—changes in the field of
education during the past decade. New curricula and teaching
methods have been introduced simultaneously in all of the
countries. At the same time, administration has been decentralized
to the local level. Organizers of education and municipalities have
more power and responsibility to make independent decisions on
education and school construction.
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The school’s task of creating a strong foundation for
lifelong learning has become ever more important as development and
changes in the world surrounding the school take place at an
ever-increasing pace. This needs to be considered from the
viewpoint of the physical school environment. All Nordic countries
face the need for both new construction and comprehensive
maintenance and reconstruction of existing buildings.
The schools in the Nordic countries face great challenges. Their
cultural, social, and economic similarities are reflected in their
school systems. Therefore it is natural that these countries should
exchange information and experiences in the field of school
construction.
A Nordic meeting was organized in Oslo in 2000 for civil servants
who participate in school administration and planning at various
levels of government, as well as architects, pedagogues, and
researchers. The meeting agreed unanimously to create a cooperative
network on school construction, which will in various ways examine
and clarify what the physical environment means for pupils’
learning. The network participants include all of the Nordic
countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, as well
as the autonomous areas of Faroes (Denmark), Greenland (Denmark)
and the Ǻland Islands (Finland).
At both the national and Nordic levels, there is a great need for
developing cross-disciplinary cooperation and contacts between the
various levels of administration. These should create the
possibilities for the development of “a good
school.”
What makes a good school? This question is asked often nowadays,
from more than one point of view—from the people compiling
ranked lists for evening newspapers to parents choosing schools for
their children. The scrutiny may focus on the school’s
learning results, success in the matriculation examination, or
other national evaluations. The users are interested in how they
feel at school—whether it is a pleasure to work and study
there. For architects, a good school may mean a building that is
aesthetically beautiful in form and detail and blends in with its
environment. All these aspects are equally justified; together they
define a good school. Compared with many other functional
environments, the school affects its users—pupils, teachers,
and other school employees—holistically and in many ways. As a
work and study environment, a place for growth, and a physical
building, the school influences children and youth in their
thinking and in how they perceive the world. In this way the school
determines their future in large measure.
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A good school supports the task to be done there—it
encourages learning and teaching. It provides a setting for growth
and development, creates a sense of community, and encourages
companionship. The school community is a complex network of human
relations, work plans, schedules, and daily activities, for which
the school building constitutes a physical environment with its own
material flows and internal requirements. The school building can
direct and determine the behavior taking place at school—it
places restrictions as well as offering opportunities in support of
the school’s basic task. So it is not for nothing that we talk
about a hidden curriculum concealed within the school building that
affects its users in one way or another, whether wanted or not. The
physical school environment has a decisive effect on whether pupils
like being at school, on the quality of teaching, and on learning
results.
The tasks of the cooperation network are
- To organize an annual Nordic meeting of architects, pedagogues,
and researchers, as well as school authorities, from various levels
of government
- To produce cooperation projects with the starting point of
examining the meaning of the physical environment for learning
- To deal with value issues related to education and
learning
- To find a joint overall conception of learning
- To organize conferences and courses
- To participate in teacher training and thereby disseminate
information about the meaning of the physical school
environment
- To create a separate cooperation network for researchers
- To document, gather, and disseminate information and
experiences
- To present interesting examples and experiences.
The Nordic Council of Ministers has provided some funding, but
each participating country pays the direct costs of its
participation in the network. The network’s administration is
fairly informal. Each country has a contact person responsible for
the flow of information within the country and with the network,
and these contact persons meet once or twice a year to plan and
coordinate future activities. There is no actual secretariat. A
separate research network operates within the cooperation
network.
In addition to the development of a shared Web portal (www.norden.org), the network’s
current and planned cooperative projects include developing
information about the use of schoolyards as teaching spaces; school
libraries as information centers of schools; the implications of
school starting age for school construction; cooperation between
the various school levels; and the school as a multipurpose
center.
How to Aid Innovative Learning Environments
Inge Mette Kirkeby, Architect MAA, PhD, senior
researcher, Danish Building Research Institute
During the last decade, the Nordic countries have undertaken
numerous initiatives to improve learning environments. In the
Nordic countries, local municipalities act as an organizational
layer between the national government and schools, and they are
responsible for school buildings. Different ways of interpreting
the Act of Education lead to “local school cultures,”
which in turn lead to different school buildings. As a consequence
of this decentralization, steps to influence the development of
schools and improve physical learning environments cannot be
normative or restrictive. A much more accepted and constructive way
is to exchange theoretical and practical knowledge—to provide
good examples and new ideas.
The pedagogic changes taking place all over the educational sector
have increased the number of requirements for physical space as a
framework for education. At the same time, existing experience and
knowledge have proven insufficient as a basis for decision making.
Four Nordic and Danish research initiatives have been undertaken to
aid the whole process of creating better schools by enhancing the
dialogue between the different parties and by supporting the
architect during design.
The Nordic Network of Researchers was established at the first
Nordic Network meeting. Because the Nordic countries are small,
only a few persons carry out research on schools, and they need
opportunities to discuss their research with colleagues. Our
research is pointed to practice; if it isn’t applied, there is
no reason to do research. We are interested in carrying out mutual
projects, but have until now been able to find funding for only a
few. A sampling of good outdoor environments was published last
year. We hope to find funding for a mutual project to develop
different methods for evaluating school buildings. How do they
actually work? Do they support the pedagogic intentions as
intended?
In 2001 the Danish Parliament passed the Act on the Educational
Environment of Pupils and Students, which requires individual
schools to evaluate their educational environment. According to
this act, “The educational environment at schools . . . shall
improve the participants’ possibilities of development and
education and shall thus include the psychological and aesthetic
environment. . . .” The Danish Center for the Educational
Environment (www.dcum.dk) was set up to provide
different kinds of guiding material for the schools.
The Danish initiative Rum Form Funktion (Space Form Function) is an
example of how the Nordic countries are trying to increase know-how
about good schools. Initiated by the Ministry of Education, it is
now a “center without walls,” a cooperative effort of the
Ministry of Education, the Danish National Research and Educational
Buildings, and the Danish Building Research Institute. A 1993 law
introduced new pedagogical concepts, and the traditional schools
were not good models for building new schools. Starting in 1998, we
organized three parallel architectural competitions as a way of
exploring different possibilities.
Seven architecture firms were invited to enter the competition for
each of the three schools. We strongly recommended that each team
include a pedagogic advisor, and the jury also included pedagogic
expertise. This clearly made the entries more to the point and also
the discussions prior to the voting more nuanced. The Ministry of
Education covered the costs of the competition, and the
municipalities committed themselves to build the schools.
In addition to the jury report, we published a booklet about the
competition, which includes expert analyses of the 21 entries from
different professional perspectives. Further, the municipalities
agreed to cooperate with the Ministry to collect information about
their experiences. These three schools are almost finished, and the
“lessons learned” are being gathered by a researcher who
has followed the process closely from the beginning.
Another Rum Form Funktion initiative is the University of the
Future, in which we tried out a new method called “analytical
sketch design” at invitational workshops. Analytical sketch
design is a method for solving a design problem that uses our usual
working method, sketching. In daily practice, different solutions
are produced and compared until the best possible solution is
found, and then the process stops. Analytical sketch design takes
its point of departure from this practice, but instead of aiming at
one outcome—the result—it stresses the systematic
illustration of possibilities. This working method makes it
possible to produce a catalog of different design solutions, and it
becomes easy to discuss a design problem. The underlying view is
that systematic reflection does not kill creativity and, on the
contrary, may drive design work forward.
The last example is from my own research, School Finds a Place. It
is an attempt to conceptualize the interaction between space and
children in schools. To grasp this complex interaction, I
distinguish between mental and physical space and between mental
and physical well-being and development. In this evolving theory,
the interaction between physical space and mental well-being and
development is further divided into five parts: social space,
activity space, behavior-regulating space, space as a carrier of
meaning, and space as a carrier of atmosphere. It is my hope that
these research results will enhance the quality of the dialogue
between pedagogues and architects during the formulation of the
program/brief for a school and prove useful for the architects as
theoretical tools while doing sketches.
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