I was thinking on the way home about learning and the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance would say that one learns best when experiencing something novel, but not too novel. By extension, one stops being able to learn when something is too far outside of one's comfort zone.
So I wonder what role architecture and place can play in creating the right amount of dissonance to stimulate learning. Too comfortable, and our surroundings become mere wallpaper, not even worth considering. Too dissonant, and we retreat from the experience.
It strikes me that having a garage door literally open up the teachers' lounge into a performance stage finds the dissonace balance point. It's an architectural moment that leads us to reconsider what a teachers' lounge is for and invites us to use it in additional way.
(Well, this thought made sense to me on the way home; hopefully it didn't get too garbled here.)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Welcome!
Welcome to the University of Maryland Architecture Program graduate seminar "Learning Places" discussion space. This group blog is meant to provide a virtual space to continue our discussions started in class, and a forum for all to share parallel, and tangent thoughts to themes in the class. Feel free to post your reactions to the readings, material on the web that you feel has an interesting connection to issues discussed in class or articulated in the readings, or simply material related to architecture, media, and pedagogy that you think would be of interest to the class.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)