The influence of child self-directed learning on the built environment: towards a primary school in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Date
2020
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Abstract
The contemporary architecture of learning environments in the city of Lubumbashi still
supports a system of education that has been proven to limit passion and creativity in
children. This system emerged during the first industrial revolution as Europe was adopting
the process of mass production in manufacturing. The revolution came with a great demand
for factory labour that contributed to transforming education into an act of predominantly
transferring knowledge, hence creating a parallelism between teaching and factory
production. Coupled with regional factors, the association of school with factories in
Lubumbashi resulted in a type of places of learning with spatial qualities that do not account
for the individual and the collective aspect of learning in children. Subsequently, formal, and
restrictive spaces became the norm in primary schools such that children are not motivated
about conventional schools.
Therefore, this work looks at alternative ways of designing primary schools by exploring the
relationship between the pedagogy of child self-directed learning (CSDL) and the built
environment, within the context of Lubumbashi. To achieve this aim, the research starts with
the question of How child self-directed can influence the Built Environment
To understand the ontological relationship between education and built form, the research is
primarily situated in an interpretive (constructivist) paradigm. Therefore, primary, and
secondary data has been processed from an integral theory that includes the different aspect
of human experience of the built environment. While experiential learning theory was applied
to provide depth to the human experience, critical regionalism theory was employed to
underline the contextual aspect school.
Hence, two case studies were analysed. The first school, which is in Lubumbashi, has been
studied for the purpose of understanding contextual factors that influence the architecture of
the learning environment. The second school, which is in Durban, helped empirically explore
the relationship between child self-directed learning and the built environment.
Finally, this work demonstrates that the relationship between Child self-directed learning and
the built environment reveals new spatial conditions that integrate the individual, the
collective and the contextual aspect of leaning.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.