ASE 2027 Annual Conference

You may know the idea of the Third Teacher: the Reggio Emilia principle that the physical environment is as formative as any instructor. What might this mean for your science classroom?

This interactive workshop explores how conscious spatial design — layout, naturalness, stimulation, and pupil-controlled affordances — can deepen engagement, support scientific thinking, and strengthen collaborative inquiry. The session itself is designed to demonstrate the very principles it explores.

You'll move through three activities — individual reflection, small-group application, and collective visioning — surfacing answers grounded in your own classroom experience and actionable research. You'll leave with concrete techniques to apply immediately, and the opportunity to help shape what comes next: a founding circle for a UK-wide action research network exploring classroom design in secondary science at scale. This is the future of science education — and we'll build it together.

Participants will be able to:
•Reflect critically on how their classroom's physical features currently support or constrain pupil engagement, cognition, and behaviour
•Apply evidence-based spatial design techniques to enhance science learning outcomes immediately
•Join a founding action research network with shared resources, peer collaboration, and opportunities to both contribute to and benefit from emerging findings

This session aims to:
• convene a founding circle for a UK-wide action research network exploring the transformative potential of classroom design in secondary science settings
• empower teachers and practitioners with evidence-based, immediately applicable answers, built directly from their own classroom experience

Background: Across years of action researching transformative learning experiences, a pattern emerged: expert facilitators consistently build a deliberate relationship with the physical space before their sessions begin. This observation sparked a master's thesis — An Architecture for Empowerment: Exploring How Physical Environments Co-Create Human Capacity — synthesising environmental psychology, 4E Cognition, neuroscience, and architectural theory. Its core finding: physical environments are not backdrops to learning but active co-creators of cognitive, emotional, and relational capacity. Science classrooms — with their fixed benches, equipment-laden surfaces, and competing sensory demands — represent a largely untapped frontier for this work.