Section One: Conceptual understandings of school spaces, learning and wellbeing -- Towards a spatiality of wellbeing -- Sociomaterial dimensions of early literacy learning spaces: Moving through classrooms with teacher and children -- Promoting children's wellbeing and values learning in risky learning spaces -- School design and wellbeing: Spatial and literary meeting points -- Section Two: Student experience of school psaces for wellbeing and learning -- Imaginings and representations of high school learning spaces: Year 6 student experiences -- High school spaces and student transitioning: Designing for student wellbeing -- Students reimagining school libraries as spaces of learning and wellbeing -- Creating learning spaces that promote wellbeing, participation and engagement: Implications for students on the autism spectrum -- Enhancing wellbeing through broadening the primary curriculum in the UK with Open Futures -- Section Three: Participatory designing of school spaces for wellbeing and learning -- Fostering educator participation in learning space designing: Insights from a Master of Education unit of study -- Participatory principles in practice: Designing learning spaces that promote wellbeing for young adolescents during the transition to secondary school -- Creating a sensory garden for early years leaners: Participatory designing for student wellbeing -- 13 Creating the third teacher through participatory learning environment design: Reggio Emilia principles support student wellbeing -- Section Four: Designing 'space' for student wellbeing as flourishing -- Designing 'space' for student wellbeing as flourishing.

This book introduces a new wellbeing dimension to the theory and practice of learning space design for early childhood and school contexts. It highlights vital, yet generally overlooked relationships between the learning environment and student learning and wellbeing, and reveals the potential of participatory, values-based design approaches to create learning spaces that respond to contemporary learners’ needs. Focusing on three main themes it explores conceptual understandings of learning spaces and wellbeing; students’ lived experience and needs of learning spaces; and the development of a new theory and its practical application to the design of learning spaces that enhance student wellbeing. It examines these complex and interwoven topics through various theoretical lenses and provides an extensive, current literature review that connects learning environment design and learner wellbeing in a wide range of educational settings from early years to secondary school. Offering transferable approaches and a new theoretical model of wellbeing as flourishing to support the design of innovative learning environments, this book is of interest to researchers, tertiary educators and students in the education and design fields, as well as school administrators and facility managers, teachers, architects and designers. “This timely book fills a significant gap in the school design literature by exploring human affect and experience and coalescing design and teaching professions. It exhibits robust research methodologies blending literature reviews and evidence-based field explorations to represent school student and staff perceptions. The collection provides – in effect – a ‘Handbook for the Evidence-Based Design for Primary and Middle Schools’. The first chapter sets a high benchmark for authentic scholarship that shapes the rest of the book in establishing a fluid written structure throughout this seminal work.” —Dr. Kenn Fisher, Associate Professor in Learning Environments, University of Melbourne, Australia.