The Didactic Significance of the Postmodern Architecture of the First Inclusive Primary School in Tel Aviv

Abstract

The school is a multi-sectoral creation with a diverse spatial structure, in which various layers of assumed and unpredictable functions can be implemented. Therefore, a school can be not only a place for didactic activities but also a meeting place, a square for competition, a theater, a temple, a factory, a family, or a barracks. The school’s public space changes its functions along with the time of day and the schedule of classes, which also affects its use by students and teachers, who give its crevices intimacy and privacy to hide from the eye of the authorities (panopticon). As long as the school architecture is not changed, it will not be possible to include children as learners for themselves, for their own development along with socialization, and there will be no change in didactic thinking in teachers, which will lead to the necessary innovations in the education process to make it more effective and valuable for each child. Changing the paradigm of thinking and didactic activity is not only a matter of obtaining an adequate level, substantive, and methodological scope of education but above all, taking into account the everyday environment of students at school.

1. Introduction

As Andreas Schleicher writes ([1], p. 26): “Contemporary education does not provide answers to all challenges, will face in the future, and simply following today’s educational leaders is not enough. Some challenges are too difficult so that one country can meet them. In search of the best solutions now today, the best educators, researchers and decision-makers from around the world join forces.” One of the methods of comparative research is an individual case study. The subject of such a study was the first inclusive primary school in Tel Aviv, which I had the opportunity to visit and conduct ethnopedagogical research with its teachers.

The subject of scientific analysis was the postmodern architecture of this school, seeking the answer to the question: To what extent is the model of constructivist education of children and youth with special educational needs possible thanks to new architectural solutions. Does the change in the internal school architecture facilitate the abandonment of the class-lesson system in favor of supporting the individual development of each child while ensuring socialization? The aim of the article is therefore to draw attention to the possibility of introducing a constructivist teaching paradigm into public education, which can be achieved by changing the space and places of learning.

Representatives of social sciences have no doubt that the organization of interpersonal space in the workplace or education is an indicator of attitudes toward people. Therefore, in various parts of the world, humanistic school architecture is also developing, which is to serve the human being in it, and not just the daily performance of didactic tasks under the supervision of teachers. The development of critical philosophy and humanistic geography sensitizes us to phenomena related to the place and space of learning of the young generations. “Space matters: not because of the trivial and obvious reason that everything takes place in space, but because where events take place is inextricably linked to how they are shaped” ([2], p. 9). School, school classes, their places, and spaces are not only physical categories but also a bio-psycho-socio-cultural experience of events, climate, and interpersonal and intrapsychic relations that affect the development of each person’s identity. In retrospect, we read their registers from memory, trying to maintain or remove them.

The subject of ethnographic and pedagogical research will be a case study. It was important to look for an answer to the question: To what extent is it possible to organize learning places for children in primary schools differently thanks to new architectural solutions? The key for this project was to determine whether it is possible to have a school architecture that would enable individualization and socialization of education for children with special educational needs? As the Polish architect Janusz Włodarczyk wrote: “Education is too serious a matter to be left (only) to teachers, since the space surrounding us is important, the quality of which is decided by architects” ([3], p. 27) The subject of ethnographic and pedagogical research will be a case study. It was important to look for an answer to the question: To what extent is it possible to organize learning places for children in primary schools differently thanks to new architectural solutions? Do spatial architectural solutions matter for the well-being of students and teachers? Can school space as a place of teaching and social situations be treated with care by architects to make it friendly to children and their teachers?

2. Theoretical foundations of the relationship between school architecture and the educational process

Michel Foucault opens his thesis “The Birth of the Clinic” with a sentence that is central to my research on the crisis of school education, and it goes like this: “This book is about space, language and death. It’s about the look” ([4], p. 5). For several decades, I have been calling for a change in the educational space, which along with the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the digital revolution, has been calling for a radical change so that the teaching-learning process maintained in the classroom and classroom system ceases to serve the authoritarian formatting of a young person by maintaining language and necrophilic educational policy [5]. Since the birth of the modernist school, successive generations of students are doomed to stay in closed rooms for many hours, which are in buildings with an architectural structure inadequate to the changing world and humanity.

The school, in its current architectural structure, excludes the possibility of using the latest knowledge in the field of psychology and pedagogy, because it maintains the myth of its alleged reform, which is based on the inviolability and immutability of spatial conditions, in addition to many other pathogenic factors in the organization of the education process, its financing and standardization pragmatics of the teaching profession. “The unveiling of the truth and its recognition have the same genesis. So there is no fundamental difference between the clinic as science and the clinic as pedagogy. In this way, the master and the apprentice form a group in which the act of re-knowledge and the effort to attain knowledge are accomplished in one and the same movement” ([4], p. 145). Both are prisoners of a space in which only the teacher can secure a minimum of freedom and independence, as long as his classes are not subject to school supervision at a given moment.

The illusion of freedom, creativity, and innovation is also great thanks to the closed school space, the changes of which are possible without the intervention of central educational authorities, but require a revolution of subjects, and thus mental, cultural, and volitional changes among adults responsible for the process of educating young generations. It seems necessary to open up to all shades of colors of human experience, which combine space, language, and potential destruction. This is how the polish school is dying and along with the toxic educational policy, the language of education science is being eliminated. The rulers of education have a problem because they are trying to oblige teachers to carry out the education process in the material and physical space that has been available for centuries.

The human body, mind, and psyche (soul) develop or experience barriers to maturation and growth depending also on what environment they live in every day, what laws apply in it, in what structures they are stimulated and enforced, and thus, what consequences they lead to in each student individually and in school social groups. M. Foucault was right that space is reflected in every person, conducive to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and experiences, but also various types of losses, diseases, and disorders. Its structure “(…) makes location in the organism a subordinate problem, but it defines a fundamental system of relations: embracing and subordinating, and introduces divisions and emphasizes similarities” ([4], p. 21). It is not without reason that the creators of alternative models of private schools already in the second decade of the twentieth century took into account the need to change the place and space of learning as a fundamental condition for the humanization of the educational process, not without reason referred to as the pedagogy of “new education” [6, 7, 8].

The postmodern era made more visible a cultural configuration that Margaret Mead referred to as prefigurative culture. “The child becomes the direct teacher of the adult to the extent that true education becomes identical with the source of what is true. In every child, things constantly renew their youth, the world regains its original form: it never matures in the eyes of someone who looks at it for the first time” ([4], p. 91-92).

Undoubtedly, an important category for analysis is space, which can be considered in various ways due to its different connotations. However, it is difficult to adopt the approach of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre to this category, who proposed “(…) four concepts of understanding space as:

• Pure form (transparent, clear), in this sense it is free of content, thus excluding ideologies and interpretations;

• A social product observed prior to any theorizing based on empirical description. It can therefore be a product of human activities, be the result of human work and in this sense be a place of people and the objects they produce that occupy it;

• An intentional policy tool that is manipulated (being an intermediary - a means, a tool, an environment, a mediation);

• A product like other items or a sum of items, items or a set of items, a commodity or a set of items. In this approach, however, it cannot be perceived as an ordinary tool, because it is at the basis of the reproduction of social relations” ([9], p. 133).

Lefebvre was looking for a connection between the mental space, the space of philosophizing, and the real space, the physical and social spheres that we all experience every day [10]. In the course of his analyses, he moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to experiencing it in the everyday life of home and city. Therefore, it does not deal with education at all, much less the architectural space of education. If architecture is art, then millions of school buildings in the world have nothing to do with it, because they have lost the artistic dimension of the architect’s work with the body and its surroundings to give it an individual dimension and character. Here, the usefulness of kitsch prevailed under the guise of concern for the dissemination of education, because, after all, not education.

School architecture has lost the attribute of art, enclosing the space of human life and activity in a purely geometric form, which has now been taken over by the corporate ideology that pretends to be different from the old utility. Schools have not become real homes where people live, because they are supposed to be still necrophilic spaces, not biophilic ones. Hailed as a revolutionist in architecture, the Swiss pioneer of modernism, Le Corbusier, designed buildings without a cultural and psychosocial context, because the most important thing for him was the maximum efficiency and functionality of concrete buildings. These were supposed to be simple, devoid of their own style, as cheap as possible in the production of teaching machines, but not only for that. “It was he who created the concept of a “machine for living,” i.e., the most effective living space. By proposing to build with concrete and other inexpensive materials, he contributed to the emergence of mass housing” [11].

The behavior and actions of people depend on the space in which they live. It is not without significance whether it is a closed space, like a prison cell, open like a temple with several exits, or maybe half-open, like a classroom with barred windows due to the expected burglaries and thefts. The division of the school space into classes, and the classroom into two zones, i.e., the one at the disposal of the teacher only, which students are not allowed to enter, and the “foreign” area for teachers, which is cocreated by students outside the classroom, must affect the didactic paradigm adopted by the teacher. The first zone is the place of the teacher’s control over the students, while the second one is a reflection in the consciousness of young people, a “section” hidden for teachers, from the socially natural life, from what students really experience at school, what they experience outside pedagogical supervision [5]. School can therefore be something more than just a place of fulfillment of the school obligation or an environment of controlled proxemics in relations between teachers and students.

As long as the school architecture is not changed, it will not be possible to include children as learners for themselves, for their own development along with its socialization, and there will be no change in didactic thinking in teachers, which will lead to the necessary innovations in the education process to make it more effective and valuable for each child. Changing the paradigm of thinking and didactic activity is not only a matter of obtaining an adequate level, substantive, and methodological scope of education but above all taking into account the everyday environment of students at school.

Not only the multi-paradigmatic nature of didactics but also the multi-paradigmatic nature of school architecture generates diverse possibilities of teachers’ practical impact on students, which depending on preferences in both spheres and zones, will lead to the implementation of the assumed goals of education and upbringing. Thus, the factors modifying teaching practices, which Dorota Klus-Stańska writes about in her book, namely the following factors: socio-economic, general cultural, legal, scientific, and personal ([12], pp. 19-29) should be supplemented with significantly stronger personality-creating architectural and environmental factors. It is necessary to go beyond the binary division of education in the school building versus education outside the school, e.g., in the forest and in the city [13].

The architect Agnieszka Hempel-Kutek analyzed the relationship between the structure of the educational space and the possibility of using different approaches to the educational process: traditional, in line with the model of cultural transmission, and romantic-naturalistic, which is represented by the pedagogy of the new education trend, among others by Maria Montessori or Rudolf Steiner [14]. At that time, solutions for the educational space were not known, which together with the way of its architectural construction, would become the subject of research not only of these two opposing didactic orientations (traditional vs. alternative) but future-oriented, because constructivist.

The author drew attention to how teaching methods affect the higher level of education of students within the architectural design of the school in which they would be implemented. She pointed to the extent to which architecture, as the art of creating space, building a stage for educational life, can be conditioned by a methodical approach to the process of education and upbringing, and to what extent it may or may not be conducive to it. According to her, “good architecture” is created “(…) from understanding for what purpose and for whom it is created, and this knowledge always goes beyond the common understanding of what architecture is, becoming interdisciplinary knowledge” (ibid., p. 5).

3. The first inclusive school in Tel Aviv, Bikurim

During my scientific internship in the capital of Israel—Tel Aviv, I had the opportunity to see a school whose architectural solutions are an intermediate solution between modernist and postmodern institutions, the latter of which is characterized by opening the internal territory to direct contacts, creating places and spaces for children to hide in self-isolation so that they can take care of their affiliation, social, distance, or meditation needs. Thanks to the architecturally created opportunities to decentralize places for learning, the individual does not have to be “visible” to everyone at school anymore, because he has the opportunity to take responsibility for the time, pace, place, and manner of educational tasks. In such an architecturally reconstructed educational institution, the area of individual freedom becomes the sphere of privacy, the right to isolate oneself, hide from the “eye of power,” learn in a climate and places that are safe for oneself (Figures 1–3).

Figure 1.

Plan of the first inclusive school in Tel Aviv; Bikurim (źródło: https://bigsee.eu/the-first-inclusive-school-in-tel-aviv-bikurim/).

Figure 2.

Classroom.

Figure 3.

Theater class.

The inclusive Bikurim Primary School in Tel Aviv was established in 2019 as one of 10 inclusive schools in the country. In the capital of Israel, it is the only public institution of this type, fully financed from the state budget, attended by 350 students. They implement a general education program at the level of a six-year primary school. The external appearance of the school building and its architecture are not of secondary importance, as in the case of public schools in Poland described by A. Nalaskowski [15]. The construction of the five-story building is located in a tight urban area, so students have vertically located zones for their own and team activity as far as the interior of the building allows them. The school grounds are fenced and guarded by an armed security guard.

Therefore, they do not have a garden or a school playground located on the ground floor, so they can spend their breaks from classes in asphalted and partly secured with tartan places on the school patio and in the open attic of the building. The height of the building and the width of internal, free spaces mean that there are no homogeneous corridors typical of modernist schools, with classrooms on both sides. There are no such rooms. There are glazed rooms, open, with equipment for specialized activities or forms of activity corresponding to the talents or interests of children. So, there are theater rooms, but also corridors equipped with appropriate furniture, so that children can spontaneously and independently play theater, play roles, or practice self-presentation. In the building, you can learn almost anywhere and carry out educational tasks in very different places.

The structure of the school space gives teachers the possibility of a flexible organization of children’s work in groups of heterogeneous age and similar in level of competence. Due to the fact that three teachers are assigned to each class (including one educated in the field of special educational needs), one of them can work individually with a child who needs appropriate consultations and support, while the others can divide small teams of students into small groups that will carry out didactic tasks in or outside the classroom. There is no division into lesson units, and therefore there are no bells in this school that would regulate the same learning time for everyone. It is the students who decide how much time they need to complete specific tasks, and they can also decide where it will take place and in what form—individual or group (Figures 4–7).

Figure 4.

Sports hall on the roof of the school.

Figure 5.

School corridor.

Figure 6.

School entrance.

Figure 7.

School corridor.

Each teacher prepares an original educational program based on the didactics of differences for his team of students. Children are constantly observed and diagnosed so that it is possible to work with them using different methods, depending on their needs, developmental potential, and their skills. As the school principal explained, each child has special needs, so this syndrome does not only apply to students with some kind of disability or dysfunction. The inclusion applies to all students, including those with a high IQ , gifted, with already developed cognitive, esthetic, or technical interests. In each class, there are three to six children with physical disabilities, dysfunction in the sphere of social behavior, emotional disorders, etc.

Each child has some problems, so an individual approach to them is needed, but not disregarding the processes of socialization, life skills, and working in a group. Students do not know which teacher is the one with special educational needs for a particular child, lest their attention be directed to someone else’s differences. If a hearing-impaired or even blind child comes to school, appropriate spatial and technical conditions are created for him to gain knowledge and develop his skills on an equal footing with other children. Teachers act as tutors, preparing curricula. If necessary, they reach for various methods of movement therapy, sensory therapy, music, art, theater, etc. The teacher must be flexible, ready to suddenly change the curriculum, so not everyone can cope with it. Sometimes, separated from their own group of students, they have to take care of another one, because one of the teachers fell ill. The school is well-equipped. There is no need to buy textbooks, notebooks, stationery, or workshop materials. In the passage to the corridor kitchenettes, where children can heat up a meal, boil water for tea, etc., there are open cupboards with charged laptops. If any of the students would like to use this medium, they can unplug it from the charger and start working with it.

Three times a year they organize meetings for parents and the local community to talk to them about the development of their children and to respond to their problems. There is no formal assessment at this school as learning progress and problems are discussed with each child and their parents, which teachers try to solve, involving the students’ parents as well. Various rooms are available for conversations with parents, with the possibility of conducting both individual consultations and meetings of a task nature. Parents are involved in the work using the project method.

Teachers have a heavy mental burden in this work; hence they receive psycho-emotional support so that they can cope with stress or methodological problems they encounter during classes with children. In this school, they are also supported in the organization and conduct of classes by students of the teachers’ College in Holon (Talpiot College Holon), which is located near Tel Aviv. It is extremely important to acquire skills in diagnosing children, planning activities for them, individualizing them, and working in teams. Students here do not have homework, nor are they assessed by means of didactic tests of a selective nature. Each student receives a descriptive assessment at the end of the year, which is prepared together with him and his parents in order to further support his development, aspirations, and interests. It is important for them to be aware of what they still need to work on, or what support they will need. At the end of the year, children complete a self-evaluation sheet together with their teacher, as each of them must learn to evaluate their own abilities.

4. Conclusion

The article focuses on place and space as a factor determining the constructivist approach to the process of education and upbringing of children in the example of the first inclusive school in Israel. In such a space, normative didactics can be combined, because children have religion lessons during which they learn about the “Holy Bible” (Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, or the Koran), but above all, classes in the constructivist didactics paradigm. Therefore, special emphasis is placed on students’ activation, independence, creativity, cognitive, social, and interactive competences. In preparing children to live in a global, virtual society, in conditions of risk, uncertainty and threats.

“Space is, on the one hand, an all-encompassing phenomenon related to the existence of the universe, on the other hand, it is elusive and invisible. So it is both fundamental and irrelevant at the same time. We can only see space through the objects in it, so it is both material and imaginary at the same time.” ([16], p. 7). According to the American geographer Edward Soja, there is no single space in the world, but it is not only dichotomous either. A synthesis of two spaces emerges—thirdspace, which is built on the firstspace experienced by man, i.e., the material, physical environment, which is an empirically knowable, measurable basis for social relations, and secondspace, which is imagining it on the basis of subjective knowledge about space. and the relations taking place in it (ibid., p. 26). Space creates us, but we can also be its constructors, so it is worth considering to what extent the change of space and the participation of all educational entities in it can be conducive to learning. The exploration of the knowledge space has taken on a whole new dimension thanks to virtual databases, computing clouds, but also artificial intelligence and system technological solutions, e.g., 3D printing. School architecture should free itself from the totalitarian ideology that is inscribed in the walls of school buildings unless it has not become outdated yet and its form must be conducive to the reproduction of ideas contrary to education in a democratic society.

A new culture of flexible learning is necessary, in groups of students diversified by age and gender, and at the same time providing them with opportunities to master independent learning skills. You can replace classrooms with three different learning spaces, namely:

1. Input room: Grouping students around a “marketplace,” which may be an oval table, where the class receives a condensed introduction to the topic,

2. Learning studio: Here, each student has their own workspace, containing analog aids and an iPad, with which they can improve their competencies,

3. Market: A large room that is divided into small study islands, separated by partitions, with appropriate furniture to provide learning partners with the opportunity to work together and use computer software ([17], p. 30).

Education in the twenty-first century requires not so much a new grammar of school, but a new space in which the educational process will be dynamic, open, and not static and closed. Not only in times of economic and pandemic crisis, but due to the development of technology in the world of communication, economy, management, also in education, schools need more self-organization, self-determination, supporting the internal motivation of students and teachers, strengthening self-discipline and personal creativity and commitment, participation. The school (for) the future requires a radical revolution here and now to create a new organizational and teaching culture, and this will be possible thanks to the new school architecture.