Pleased to see that DesignShare members Prakash Nair and Randy Fielding have published yet another provocative article in Edutopia this month.

In “A Comfortable Truth: Kids don’t have to squirm to learn”, the two school planners discuss why schools continue to put the students’ physical comfort on the back-burner while continuing to support industrial era education models and designs. And why it matters for all of our futures.

A snippet from the beginning of the article:

If we were to assemble a list of adjectives to describe school, comfortable would not make the cut. Many of the places where vital teaching occurs, if not designed expressly for physical torment, are infamously uninviting. The classic model for schools, where mentors must compete with discomfort, can be traced back hundreds of years to the “reading” and “writing” schools designed to give children the skills to access God’s word in the Bible. Little wonder that the school benches from those days resembled church pews and that sterility and rigor were the order of the day.

Taking it a step further:

Though the industrial model was solidly in place as the educational standard, however, a parallel, progressive movement arose in the early 1900s that sought to humanize and personalize education. This philosophy survives and has gathered dedicated adherents along the way, but most mainstream educators at the time it was developed were unconvinced that change was needed, and schools remained much as they had always been. Even after almost a century, John Dewey’s 1915 exhortation that “nature has not adapted the young animal to the narrow desk, the crowded curriculum, the silent absorption of complicated facts” remains largely unheard.

What is the rationale for justifying the lack of creature comfort in today’s schools? Nothing more defensible than the old dodge “We’ve always done it that way.” But schools wear out and are renovated or replaced by new structures. And architects know far more about how people live and work than they once did. So the factory model is slowly relegated to history, like the dinosaur it is. But questions of comfort and rigor remain unresolved. Should schools be comfortable, and if so, why? What follows are eight truths that can go a long way toward settling an argument that probably should have been arbitrated long ago.

While the article goes into much more detail in each of these design considerations, here is the list of 8 design revelations to bring comfort, ergonomics, and ‘human’ spaces into schools to support learners:

• Comfort Matters
• Some Pain, No Gain
• The Breathing and Learning Connection
• Louder is Not Better
• Cozy and Cheerful Wins Hearts and Minds
• Cafes are Not Just for Grown-ups
• Comfort is for Outside, Too
• Emotions Count in Comfort

A great article to provoke and tap into our best instincts.

Also, might be worth re-reading Dr. Dieter Breithecker’s “Beware of the Sitting Trap in Learning and Schooling” article where he speaks out on the decisive nature of “Ergo-dynamic” design concepts.

Also, thanks to recent email from Judy Marks at NCEF (National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities), we were reminded of 2 additional resources:

• The website of the International Ergonomics Association, Ergonomics for Children in Educational Environments Technical Committee is titled: Ergonomics for Children and Educational Environments. This features guidelines, research, information for teachers, links, and more on such topics as school furniture, child and adolescent computer use, backpacks, products for children, and fitness.
• Another very substantive and informative British website is “Ergonomics 4 Schools”