How to Design 'Cultivated Spaces' in Active Learning Classrooms: Analysis of Faculty Reflections on Learning Space

A growing diversity of classroom designs, broadly labeled as active learning classrooms, is a rising development across higher education institutions. Along with the construction of these new spaces, stakeholders have developed new vocabularies and concepts for articulating and identifying the impact of new classroom designs for teaching and learning. As new language evolves and ways of thinking about classroom space evolve along with new designs, there has yet to emerge an explicit conceptual framework of the nature of the learning spaces that holistically addresses the cultural, contextual, communicative, and interactional experiences of the faculty. The aim of the present study was to investigate spatial understandings of faculty members in the context of a professional development program in an attempt to identify the social construction of space in active learning classrooms. We conducted a content analysis of 25 reflective portfolios written between 2018 and 2020. Grounding on the Henri Lefebvre's Spatial Triad (1991), we found that faculty members used three types of space as describing their spatial experiences in classrooms: (1) perceived space, (2) conceived space, and (3) experienced space. The results were discussed in terms of a cultivated space approach to support faculty in developing pedagogical agility across various learning environments.