ABSTRACT
Let’s face it, if at the beginning of the twenty-first century you were to design an environment for learning, you might not design something which looked and operated like the modal classroom. All across the world, in different cultures, a classroom and its dynamics are easily recognisable and markedly similar. The model which spread throughout the world during the twentieth century, and bears remarkable similarity with the earliest known classrooms of 5,000 years ago, is remarkably dominant and remarkably resilient. It has somehow become ‘locked in’ as a design, rather like the QWERTY keyboard,1 long after the reasons for it being that way have passed. If you examine images, prints, paintings and photographs of classrooms over the centuries, you will readily list observable similarities – classroom walls, rows of pupils, status gender and power – but differences are more difficult to identify – occasional changes in technology, and perhaps some reducing social distance between teachers and pupils.
