Learning Spaces

Carnegie Hall and Alumni Recitation Hall (ARH) are landmark buildings on campus whose time has come for major renovation. Students in the humanities and social studies — just as those in other fields — need spaces that fully support their learning and the faculty’s innovative teaching.

The Grinnell College Board of Trustees and the College administration are assessing long-term needs for facilities. The need for improved spaces at Carnegie and ARH is the subject of discussion now, as teaching moves beyond the lecture-and-listen model of old.

When Carnegie and ARH were built in the early 20th century, both were at the forefront of modern design for their purposes. Carnegie served as the College’s new library, and ARH was the prime new classroom building.

In 1905, when Carnegie was completed, the College’s library collection was still growing. Carnegie was designed to house 100,000 volumes and reached that capacity in 1935. By 1956, despite a lower rate of acquisition and significant culling of the collection, the number had risen to 120,000 volumes.

Clearly, a new library was needed, and in 1956 the College’s Board of Trustees approved the request to start planning a new library. Burling Library was completed in 1959.

Carnegie Library, renamed Carnegie Hall that same year, was renovated to accommodate faculty offices, seminar rooms, mail service, and the College Bookstore. Carnegie still fulfills these purposes — except mail service, which moved to the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center when it opened in 2006.

While Carnegie’s functions have changed over the years, ARH is still following its prime directive — hosting classes.

In a Jan. 12, 1916, issue of the Scarlet & Black, a student wrote with anticipation about ARH’s construction: “The building will be just exactly what it is termed; a recitation building. It will put Grinnell right on a par in this department with any college in the country. It will be modern, substantial, and built for the future. It will provide for the needs of Grinnell for years to come.”

From its opening in 1917, ARH has served students and faculty in the humanities and social studies. Back then, ARH housed English, foreign languages, classics, psychology, education, history, economics, political science, and applied Christianity.

During ARH’s long service, it’s had one renovation. In 1989–1990, the mechanical functions were improved, the interior was spruced up, and the sturdy oak student desks were replaced with cushioned seats.

The overall building design stayed much the same, however — a design that reflects early 20th-century pedagogy.

Why Change Is Needed Now

The 1990s heralded major changes — changes in technology, to be sure, but even more significantly, changes in pedagogy. Research in brain science and interdisciplinary research about the design of learning spaces have both provided a better understanding of how people learn and how architecture affects teaching and learning.

ARH and Carnegie no longer fully support the most important work on campus — teaching and learning.

“The rooms are too small for the basics,” says Erik Simpson, professor of English and co-chair of the Academic Space Planning Task Force. When a class session involves multiple configurations such as small groups for peer review, writing on whiteboards, and showing a video, he adds, “You can end up taking 20 percent of your class time just to move furniture around and to crawl over it.”

Engaging, student-centered pedagogy is one of Grinnell’s strengths, helping to attract students. Improvements have spanned the decades.

The early 20th-century classroom design imagined the professor at a podium — the sage on the stage. The focus was on what the professor was teaching rather than what and how students were learning.

“Back then, when you weren’t projecting images and the students weren’t interacting with one another as a primary instructional mode, ARH classrooms were really at the edge of having enough space,” says Jim Swartz, Dack Professor of Chemistry and co-chair of the Academic Space Planning Task Force. “As soon as you try to do anything other than packing them in the densest ways, facing forward, they absolutely don’t work.”

Such an old-fashioned classroom design with its single focal point doesn’t work for many 21st-century pedagogies. There often is no “front of the classroom” any longer, which is another reason flexible furniture and adequate space are so necessary. These days, students will shift their attention around the room — from an interactive Skype presentation projected on a large screen, to their own small-group activity at a right-sized table, to a student speaking in a whole-class discussion circle.

“To get to today’s pedagogy,” Simpson says, “you need multiple focal points. You need flexible implementations of technology — both bring-your-own devices and, to some degree, in-built technology. You need to be able to connect to people outside — say to an author of a short story or to a classroom in France. To do all of that, we need more space, flexible furniture, and robust, easy-to-use technological connections.

“Building in a capacity for long-term change is important for technology,” Simpson says. But it is changes in pedagogy, not technology, that are driving the planning efforts, he adds.

Drawing on Previous Success

“We’re capturing what [Robert N. Noyce ’49 Science Center] has done well in terms of effective pedagogy,” Simpson says. “But we also want to design ARH and Carnegie so they specifically reflect the work of the humanities and social studies.”

The buildings need to support:

• Connecting globally through print, audio, video.
• Manipulating and creating scholarly artifacts.
• Working with multidisciplinary teams.

“A lot of the most exciting work happening in those fields today involves multidisciplinary teams of faculty working very closely with staff,” Simpson says. “So you might have an English professor, a political scientist, an instructional technologist, and a librarian working on a project with students. We want to build in that kind of project-based, multidisciplinary work team.

“Faculty [members] are trying to do things that are central to the pedagogical mission of the College that we can’t do right now because of space,” Simpson says. “That’s the key to this whole project.”

Swartz agrees. “We need different kinds of space, but more. And the more isn’t bigger class size or more classrooms; it’s the space per student in the rooms we have,” he says.

Experts in the field have come to the same conclusion.

“The classrooms you have are too small for the number of students, and many of the rooms are half the size they should be,” says Arthur Lidsky, president of Dober Lidsky Mathey, the campus-planning firm hired to assist with the review of Carnegie and ARH.

In its planning, the task force is assuming no substantial increase in students or instructors.

Imaginative Pedagogy

The understanding of the relationship between learning spaces and pedagogy has evolved across campuses.

“About 1990 was when there was this huge change in science buildings,” Swartz says. “Before that, we didn’t recognize the influence of space on the learning environment.”

“Spaces should allow ideas to flourish, but they won’t do that on their own,” Simpson says. “As we build new spaces for new ways of teaching, part of the way we cultivate our imaginations of how to use those spaces is to have a center for teaching, learning, and assessment, where we’re sharing best practices, thinking about models that are developing here and elsewhere, and challenging ourselves to use these new spaces in new ways.”

Swartz says, “That happened very much with Noyce in the sciences. When we started thinking about the building, it was just in terms of needing additional space and that the roof leaked and the ventilation didn’t work. But as we got going, it became clear that there were big pedagogical changes that we needed to be thinking about and embracing as well.

“In the sciences,” Swartz continues, “the curricula tend to be more prescribed, so a chemistry major has to do math and physics and probably biology, too. So when the physics department started teaching their intro course in a somewhat different way, our students came to us and said, ‘Why aren’t you doing that?’ That was a powerful incentive to say, ‘Boy, we need to start thinking about this.’”

Improving the learning spaces allows faculty to be even more creative with their teaching, which guarantees better learning opportunities for students.

An Experiment in ARH 227

Even before the current discussion of remodeling and expanding ARH, there has been work to experiment with new classroom alignments.

ARH 227, a long rectangular room in the middle of the second floor overlooking Park Street, was renovated in 2010. It is now configured with multiple projectors and screens and flexible furniture — tables and chairs in the middle of the room plus clusters of computer workstations around the perimeter.

Faculty members reported that the room challenged them to take full advantage of the technology, information sources, and methodologies it makes available. “It’s so successful that we have way more demand for it,” Swartz says.

Carmen Valentín, associate professor of Spanish, was an early proponent of the experimental room and uses it frequently. “It’s great to have the computers and headphones for students to do activities and research during class,” she says.

In spring 2014, Valentín taught Spanish Dialectology in ARH 227 using multiple audiovisual materials including songs, PowerPoint presentations, short films, documentaries, and interviews. The room’s configuration allows students to see the screens from any position. Valentín also can use both the board and the screen at the same time to compare and contrast information — something she can’t do in many other rooms because the screen covers the board.

Valentín says the computers are important for students to do in-class research activities. For example, students find samples of dialect from Latin American countries and use the headphones at the computer stations to listen to and analyze the dialect’s specific linguistic features.

This kind of activity is much easier to do with technology that lives in the room versus using a laptop cart, which doesn’t include headphones, or requiring students to bring their own laptops and headphones.

Leif Brottem, assistant professor of political science, taught Geographical Analysis and Cartography in ARH 227 for the first time in spring 2014, which was also his first semester at Grinnell. The course involves learning how to use geographic information systems (GIS ) software, which requires robust computers.

“Teaching GIS has not traditionally been part of a liberal arts education,” Brottem says, “but there’s a strong demand for it here. Faculty want their students to have this skill, and students want to learn it. In academia in general, GIS is being used more and more outside of the discipline of geography and its traditional uses — for example, in the digital humanities.”

Brottem continues, “To teach GIS well in a liberal arts context like Grinnell, it requires teaching about the science and the conceptual models that go into GIS. That requires the flexibility that ARH 227 provides.”

With more flexible spaces and technologies, professors can more easily provide their students with authentic learning tasks. Such tasks allow students to put theory into practice right in the classroom, which in turn helps them understand the potential relevance of what they’re learning to their post-graduate lives and careers.

Learning Outside the Classroom

Informal areas around classrooms and offices are also important teaching and learning spaces. “We’re increasingly using peer mentoring as a pedagogical approach, so spaces that support those types of interactions are important,” Swartz says.

The wide hallways in ARH effectively shuttle people from one place to another, but they’re not comfortable for continuing a conversation at the end of class. There are few places to sit and no places to write.

“One thing I’ve noticed about newer spaces,” Simpson says, “is how much you have the capability to begin a conversation outside the classroom, take it inside, and then continue it again outside. In ARH, if three students come up to me to continue a conversation after class, there’s nowhere to go. My office can be a seven-minute walk away.”

The hallways in Noyce are a great example of fostering informal learning. They have workspaces that encourage collaboration, interesting displays, and plentiful seating outside faculty offices. Students use these spaces not only to work individually but also to create community with one another.

Ongoing Adaptability

Providing students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences with excellent learning spaces is now the highest priority in campus planning. It’s the next phase in the 2000 campus plan, which looked at all academic spaces, including Burling Library and the Forum.

On May 2, the Board of Trustees voted to move forward with planning for work on ARH and Carnegie. Neither building will be demolished.

Once a design firm is selected for the ARH/Carnegie project, the firm will help meet the challenges that the Academic Space Planning Task Force has identified. After the architects develop solutions, the task force will provide critical feedback, in consultation with the wider campus community.

The new vision for ARH includes a possible expansion. Interestingly, the building originally was designed with multiple sections, including three wings. A subsequent plan included two wings. However, funding limitations prompted the College board in 1916 to instruct that just one wing be built for approximately $150,000 — with alumni pledges totaling $50,000.

“We want to build in the capacity for long-term change,” Simpson says. “We want buildings that are as adaptable as they can be.”’

“I certainly went into this process thinking ARH would be a tough building to do very much with,” Swartz says. “But both it and Carnegie are more adaptable than most of us thought.”

Learning from Others

In January 2014, several Grinnell trustees and a handful of faculty and staff members headed to California and Minnesota to learn about the academic space planning choices made by other private, liberal arts colleges.

In California, participants visited Pomona, Claremont McKenna, and Harvey Mudd colleges. These colleges offered separate architectural styles and planning approaches within walking distance of each other.

Harvey Mudd’s Shanahan Center, for example, is a new building whose construction echoes but fundamentally departs from the architectural style of the rest of the campus. It houses most of the campus classrooms.

“The staff at Harvey Mudd described this new building as the buzzing crossroads of the campus,” says Simpson.

In Minnesota, the tour visited Macalester, Carleton, and St. Olaf colleges. St. Olaf’s Tomson Hall is an example of a science building that’s been renovated and is now a multipurpose academic facility. An atrium was created from a previously dark, enclosed space and suggests an interesting option for renovating and building onto ARH.

Team Guiding the Planning

The planning process has been multidisciplinary. Students, faculty, and staff members from across campus are on the Academic Space Planning Task Force:

• Jim Swartz (co-chair), Dack Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Science in the Liberal Arts
• Erik Simpson (co-chair, 2013–14), professor of English
• Keith Brouhle ’96 (co-chair, 2012–13), associate professor of economics
• Todd Armstrong, professor of Russian
• Karla Erickson (spring 2013), associate professor of sociology
• Remy Ferber ’14 (2013–14), Student Government Association vice-president
• Richard Fyffe, Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Librarian of the College
• John Kalkbrenner, vice-president for College services
• Kathryn Kamp, professor of anthropology, Earl D. Strong Professor in Social Studies
• Claire Moisan, senior lecturer in French, director of the Alternative Language Study Option program
• Kelsey Scott ’13 (2012–13), Student Government Association vice-president
• Maria Tapias, associate professor of anthropology, associate dean of the College
• Barbara Trish (2013–14), professor of political science