Factories No More - Stephen Harris

Factories No More: The Key Role Design and Furniture Has in Enabling Teachers to Change Pedagogy

Stephen Harris has presented at numerous conferences in the last decade. Key topics have included the role of technology in learning, school design, strategies for shifting school leadership and pedagogy to a 21st century context and more recently on the importance of learning space design as being pivotal to school transformation. Stephen has been the Principal of Northern Beaches Christian School, Sydney, Australia since 1999 and in 2005 founded the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning a research and innovation unit within the school. NBCS has around 1300 day students attending school within a hybrid learning context and a further 200 online students. "Northern Beaches Christian School: one of the most innovative in the world¦" Charles Leadbeater, June 2011.

Abstract: This keynote will focus on the interplay between design and pedagogy, recognizing that under normal daily pressures, teachers will not be freed to move away from their default reversion to factory-mode pedagogies, (no doubt linked back to their own school experience), to 21st century multimodal learning, if a building and its spaces do not both enable and force the transition. In a design process that looks at school design – the very word 'school' will conjure up entrenched perceptions from the experience of all involved. The session will look at the need to commence planning and design from an entirely different paradigm, if teachers are to be empowered to make the pedagogical transitions expected of them, so that 21st learners can experience a model that resembles nothing of the factory models of the past.

Download Stephen's presentation here.

This page last updated: Wednesday 5 June 2013