The Classroom Environment
December 9, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
One of my students is writing her senior thesis on environmental psychology and classrooms for special needs students. This is the fourth year I’ve known her; she’s an education major and has a special needs sibling, and I’ve long shared stories with her about Charlie and found her a sympathetic and supportive presence. Early yesterday afternoon, she stopped by my office and she asked me a series of questions, as research for her thesis, and I’ve been reflecting on her questions and my answers to them.
What do you worry most about for Charlie?
I’m afraid this one was too easy to answer: A job and a place to live, I said. And paused. I said: What happens to Charlie when we’re gone…….
The other questions evoked less overtly existential sorts of answers from me. We talked about what Charlie’s current classroom looks like; whether I thought that his physical environment had affected him (yes, for sure, I noted); if his teacher and therapists were aware of environmental psychology (of the concepts, yes, but not explicitly, I said); whether I thought that teaching methods or the physical classroom space were more important.
To the last question, I answered emphatically in favor of good teaching methods and good teaching, and good teachers, as being the most important. A classroom can have all the accoutrements, smart boards and computers and the like, but that doesn’t mean the students, all the students, any students will learn. Whether learning at a little blue plastic Little Tykes table in his bedroom in our rented St. Paul duplex or in a public school classroom in New Jersey, it’s the people who’ve made the difference in Charlie’s learning.
And so the interview turned into more of a conversation, with my student and I sharing stories about teaching 7th graders (some of my first, and most formative, teaching experiences were when I was a middle- and high-school Latin teacher in St. Louis). She noted that her students, the boys especially, needed to get up and be in motion, and that sitting at a desk with bells ringing and announcements blaring periodically did not create happy memories in any student. I talked about the effects of no playground and no more recess. Charlie does have gym, and his APE teacher is great at adapting all kinds of sports (basketball now) for his class, but it’s not the same. We talked about proprioceptive input and I mentioned how ever-growing Charlie often doesn’t seem quite sure how to arrange his suddenly longer legs under desks and atop chairs that seem abruptly smaller.
We could have talked for another hour but, as ever, I had to run out the door to meet Charlie’s schoolbus. As I was packing up my bag, I found myself saying that the topic of adapting and changing the physical environment raised a fundamental question for me: How much to seek to change the environment, the world around Charlie, and how much to seek to teach him to adapt, to change himself?
And, as I opened the door to my car, I noted that I’ve yet no answer.
That’s got to be one of the most difficult questions that we have to face- if you figure out the answer, please let me know
Ditto what Jen said.
nice to see environmental psychology coming into the autism issue. there’s a lot that it can help us with, i think.
I think environmental psychology can help *all* learners. And, you are right, the teaching has to be the most important element. But if the teachers are aware of —no, sensitive to —the ways in which the environment can affect learning and really use it as another tool in their arsenal… that could change the way our children learn in so many ways.
@Niksmom…
precisely! not just ‘aware of’, but ’sensitive to’! this goes also for culture, it seems (doing what you’d probably call a Ed. S. in educational ethno-psychology).
>> Whether learning at a little blue plastic Little Tykes table in his bedroom in our rented St. Paul duplex or in a public school classroom in New Jersey, it’s the people who’ve made the difference in Charlie’s learning.
Here’s the tough part though. It isn’t just those thing but huge sensory/perception differences. A “busy” classroom with interesting decorations, lots of charts on the wall, stuff hither and there. Great for engaging for many young minds.
But to us ADHD folk? Educational deathtrap that the best of teachers will end up fighting against every day to get a slice of our attention. By far the very best counselor I’ve ever had, who specialized in attention people of all ages, had an office that was stunningly stark. Two chairs and a desk. Nothing on the desk save for one paper pad for me to use and one for her, only bare bare minimum in the drawers (2 pens and a pencil, a receipt book). Purposely so. Not only for herself (ADHD to the core) but because she understood how destructively distracting most office trappings are to her clients.
As to the question of how much onus should be upon the individual to adapt to the surrounding society and environment, and how much vice versa: I think we have to equip ourselves to work both sides of that street.
Phil, good question you raise.
I feel that a Vygotskian approach is called for: scaffolding (as the neo-Vygotskians like Bruner call it). Initially, society adapts to where the person is, and supports development and – as the person develops – society withdraws but maintains support to such a level that the person is not expected to work outwith his/her Zone of Proximal Development; by keeping the person working inside that ZPD, development is effectively guaranteed (according to what Vygotsky wrote, and it seems according to what the research has been finding out). If the person is expected to work outwith that ZPD, then whatever is happening is not support.
I am curious to know how much of learning theory, behavior analysis, behaviorism, there is in this environmental psychology…the first sentence of the attachment could have been for behavioral psychology. But my comment was on your questions about how much to change the environment to seek the world to adapt to the learner or how much to teach him to adapt to the world. From a psychological perspective, that of a behavioral psychologist, you are on the right track to get everybody to competently adapt the environment in such a way that he can learn to live in less adapted or adaptable environments. Behavioral psychology has excellent technology for such a task.
With respect and admiration.
Environmental psychology is less to do with behaviourism than Daniela would seem to wish. For example, in behaviourist thinking, the target person’s behaviour is the basic unit of analysis (at least seemingly without reference to the person him/herself), whereas environmental psychology sees – at least nowadays – the person-in-environment system itself as the basic unit of analysis. It tends to use a ‘holistic, developmental, systems-oriented approach’ (according to Bechtel & Churchman (Eds), (2002) The Handbook Of Environmental Psychology; Wiley, NY)… and this involves analysis at a number of levels just for understanding the person (and the same number of levels of analysis are used for the environment; and here’s the key: there is a socio-cultural level of analysis that just isn’t there in behavioural psychology, along with the notion that the person is an active organism seeking to construe his/her environment (which will involve the construction of an interpretation, rather than a copy of the so-called external world). More attention is paid to the affective contributors to behaviour than in a behavioural paradigm, and this particular aspect of EnvPsych is used in contributing to the design of buildings and interiors (such as schools and work-places). Behaviourist psychology would seek to modify the environment in terms of events-as-reinforcers (as a sort of Skinnerian Teaching Machine that the person operates within, rather than just operates), whereas EnvPsych seeks to understand what aspects of the environment might enterfere with effective learning (as in the example given above, on classroom walls being adorned with posters… good for one kind of learner but not good for another). Such things are often omitted from behavioural analysis, as are affective and cognitive issues.
This is not to say that behavioural psychology is entirely wrong: it isn’t. But it is incomplete.