**2. Theoretical foundations of the relationship between school architecture and the educational process**

Michel Foucault opens his thesis "The Birth of the Clinic" with a sentence that is central to my research on the crisis of school education, and it goes like this: "This book is about space, language and death. It's about the look" ([4], p. 5). For several decades, I have been calling for a change in the educational space, which along with the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the digital revolution, has been calling for a radical change so that the teaching-learning process maintained in the classroom and classroom system ceases to serve the authoritarian formatting of a young person by maintaining language and necrophilic educational policy [5]. Since the birth of the modernist school, successive generations of students are doomed to stay in closed rooms for many hours, which are in buildings with an architectural structure inadequate to the changing world and humanity.

#### *The Didactic Significance of the Postmodern Architecture of the First Inclusive Primary School… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114037*

The school, in its current architectural structure, excludes the possibility of using the latest knowledge in the field of psychology and pedagogy, because it maintains the myth of its alleged reform, which is based on the inviolability and immutability of spatial conditions, in addition to many other pathogenic factors in the organization of the education process, its financing and standardization pragmatics of the teaching profession. "The unveiling of the truth and its recognition have the same genesis. So there is no fundamental difference between the clinic as science and the clinic as pedagogy. In this way, the master and the apprentice form a group in which the act of re-knowledge and the effort to attain knowledge are accomplished in one and the same movement" ([4], p. 145). Both are prisoners of a space in which only the teacher can secure a minimum of freedom and independence, as long as his classes are not subject to school supervision at a given moment.

The illusion of freedom, creativity, and innovation is also great thanks to the closed school space, the changes of which are possible without the intervention of central educational authorities, but require a revolution of subjects, and thus mental, cultural, and volitional changes among adults responsible for the process of educating young generations. It seems necessary to open up to all shades of colors of human experience, which combine space, language, and potential destruction. This is how the polish school is dying and along with the toxic educational policy, the language of education science is being eliminated. The rulers of education have a problem because they are trying to oblige teachers to carry out the education process in the material and physical space that has been available for centuries.

The human body, mind, and psyche (soul) develop or experience barriers to maturation and growth depending also on what environment they live in every day, what laws apply in it, in what structures they are stimulated and enforced, and thus, what consequences they lead to in each student individually and in school social groups. M. Foucault was right that space is reflected in every person, conducive to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and experiences, but also various types of losses, diseases, and disorders. Its structure "(…) makes location in the organism a subordinate problem, but it defines a fundamental system of relations: embracing and subordinating, and introduces divisions and emphasizes similarities" ([4], p. 21). It is not without reason that the creators of alternative models of private schools already in the second decade of the twentieth century took into account the need to change the place and space of learning as a fundamental condition for the humanization of the educational process, not without reason referred to as the pedagogy of "new education" [6–8].

The postmodern era made more visible a cultural configuration that Margaret Mead referred to as prefigurative culture. "The child becomes the direct teacher of the adult to the extent that true education becomes identical with the source of what is true. In every child, things constantly renew their youth, the world regains its original form: it never matures in the eyes of someone who looks at it for the first time" ([4], p. 91-92).

Undoubtedly, an important category for analysis is space, which can be considered in various ways due to its different connotations. However, it is difficult to adopt the approach of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre to this category, who proposed "(…) four concepts of understanding space as:


work and in this sense be a place of people and the objects they produce that occupy it;


Lefebvre was looking for a connection between the mental space, the space of philosophizing, and the real space, the physical and social spheres that we all experience every day [10]. In the course of his analyses, he moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to experiencing it in the everyday life of home and city. Therefore, it does not deal with education at all, much less the architectural space of education. If architecture is art, then millions of school buildings in the world have nothing to do with it, because they have lost the artistic dimension of the architect's work with the body and its surroundings to give it an individual dimension and character. Here, the usefulness of kitsch prevailed under the guise of concern for the dissemination of education, because, after all, not education.

School architecture has lost the attribute of art, enclosing the space of human life and activity in a purely geometric form, which has now been taken over by the corporate ideology that pretends to be different from the old utility. Schools have not become real homes where people live, because they are supposed to be still necrophilic spaces, not biophilic ones. Hailed as a revolutionist in architecture, the Swiss pioneer of modernism, Le Corbusier, designed buildings without a cultural and psychosocial context, because the most important thing for him was the maximum efficiency and functionality of concrete buildings. These were supposed to be simple, devoid of their own style, as cheap as possible in the production of teaching machines, but not only for that. "It was he who created the concept of a "machine for living," i.e., the most effective living space. By proposing to build with concrete and other inexpensive materials, he contributed to the emergence of mass housing" [11].

The behavior and actions of people depend on the space in which they live. It is not without significance whether it is a closed space, like a prison cell, open like a temple with several exits, or maybe half-open, like a classroom with barred windows due to the expected burglaries and thefts. The division of the school space into classes, and the classroom into two zones, i.e., the one at the disposal of the teacher only, which students are not allowed to enter, and the "foreign" area for teachers, which is cocreated by students outside the classroom, must affect the didactic paradigm adopted by the teacher. The first zone is the place of the teacher's control over the students, while the second one is a reflection in the consciousness of young people, a "section" hidden for teachers, from the socially natural life, from what students really experience at school, what they experience outside pedagogical supervision [5]. School can therefore be something more than just a place of fulfillment of the school obligation or an environment of controlled proxemics in relations between teachers and students.

As long as the school architecture is not changed, it will not be possible to include children as learners for themselves, for their own development along with its socialization, and there will be no change in didactic thinking in teachers, which will lead to the necessary innovations in the education process to make it more effective and valuable for each child. Changing the paradigm of thinking and didactic activity is not *The Didactic Significance of the Postmodern Architecture of the First Inclusive Primary School… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114037*

only a matter of obtaining an adequate level, substantive, and methodological scope of education but above all taking into account the everyday environment of students at school.

Not only the multi-paradigmatic nature of didactics but also the multi-paradigmatic nature of school architecture generates diverse possibilities of teachers' practical impact on students, which depending on preferences in both spheres and zones, will lead to the implementation of the assumed goals of education and upbringing. Thus, the factors modifying teaching practices, which Dorota Klus-Stańska writes about in her book, namely the following factors: socio-economic, general cultural, legal, scientific, and personal ([12], pp. 19-29) should be supplemented with significantly stronger personality-creating architectural and environmental factors. It is necessary to go beyond the binary division of education in the school building versus education outside the school, e.g., in the forest and in the city [13].

The architect Agnieszka Hempel-Kutek analyzed the relationship between the structure of the educational space and the possibility of using different approaches to the educational process: traditional, in line with the model of cultural transmission, and romantic-naturalistic, which is represented by the pedagogy of the new education trend, among others by Maria Montessori or Rudolf Steiner [14]. At that time, solutions for the educational space were not known, which together with the way of its architectural construction, would become the subject of research not only of these two opposing didactic orientations (traditional vs. alternative) but future-oriented, because constructivist.

The author drew attention to how teaching methods affect the higher level of education of students within the architectural design of the school in which they would be implemented. She pointed to the extent to which architecture, as the art of creating space, building a stage for educational life, can be conditioned by a methodical approach to the process of education and upbringing, and to what extent it may or may not be conducive to it. According to her, "good architecture" is created "(…) from understanding for what purpose and for whom it is created, and this knowledge always goes beyond the common understanding of what architecture is, becoming interdisciplinary knowledge" (ibid., p. 5).

### **3. The first inclusive school in Tel Aviv, Bikurim**

During my scientific internship in the capital of Israel—Tel Aviv, I had the opportunity to see a school whose architectural solutions are an intermediate solution between modernist and postmodern institutions, the latter of which is characterized by opening the internal territory to direct contacts, creating places and spaces for children to hide in self-isolation so that they can take care of their affiliation, social, distance, or meditation needs. Thanks to the architecturally created opportunities to decentralize places for learning, the individual does not have to be "visible" to everyone at school anymore, because he has the opportunity to take responsibility for the time, pace, place, and manner of educational tasks. In such an architecturally reconstructed educational institution, the area of individual freedom becomes the sphere of privacy, the right to isolate oneself, hide from the "eye of power," learn in a climate and places that are safe for oneself (**Figures 1**–**3**).

The inclusive Bikurim Primary School in Tel Aviv was established in 2019 as one of 10 inclusive schools in the country. In the capital of Israel, it is the only public institution of this type, fully financed from the state budget, attended by 350 students. They

#### *Intellectual and Learning Disabilities – Inclusiveness and Contemporary Teaching Environments*

#### **Figure 1.**

*Plan of the first inclusive school in Tel Aviv; Bikurim (źródło: https://bigsee.eu/the-first-inclusive-school-in-telaviv-bikurim/).*

**Figure 2.** *Classroom.*

implement a general education program at the level of a six-year primary school. The external appearance of the school building and its architecture are not of secondary importance, as in the case of public schools in Poland described by A. Nalaskowski [15]. The construction of the five-story building is located in a tight urban area, so

*The Didactic Significance of the Postmodern Architecture of the First Inclusive Primary School… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114037*

**Figure 3.** *Theater class.*

students have vertically located zones for their own and team activity as far as the interior of the building allows them. The school grounds are fenced and guarded by an armed security guard.

Therefore, they do not have a garden or a school playground located on the ground floor, so they can spend their breaks from classes in asphalted and partly secured with tartan places on the school patio and in the open attic of the building. The height of the building and the width of internal, free spaces mean that there are no homogeneous corridors typical of modernist schools, with classrooms on both sides. There are no such rooms. There are glazed rooms, open, with equipment for specialized activities or forms of activity corresponding to the talents or interests of children. So, there are theater rooms, but also corridors equipped with appropriate furniture, so that children can spontaneously and independently play theater, play roles, or practice self-presentation. In the building, you can learn almost anywhere and carry out educational tasks in very different places.

The structure of the school space gives teachers the possibility of a flexible organization of children's work in groups of heterogeneous age and similar in level of competence. Due to the fact that three teachers are assigned to each class (including one educated in the field of special educational needs), one of them can work individually with a child who needs appropriate consultations and support, while the others can divide small teams of students into small groups that will carry out didactic tasks in or outside the classroom. There is no division into lesson units, and therefore there are no bells in this school that would regulate the same learning time for everyone. It is the students who decide how much time they need to complete specific tasks, and they can also decide where it will take place and in what form individual or group (**Figures 4**–**7**).

Each teacher prepares an original educational program based on the didactics of differences for his team of students. Children are constantly observed and diagnosed so that it is possible to work with them using different methods, depending on their needs, developmental potential, and their skills. As the school principal explained, each child has special needs, so this syndrome does not only apply to students with some kind of disability or dysfunction. The inclusion applies to all students, including those with a high IQ, gifted, with already developed cognitive, esthetic, or technical

**Figure 4.** *Sports hall on the roof of the school.*

**Figure 5.** *School corridor.*

*The Didactic Significance of the Postmodern Architecture of the First Inclusive Primary School… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114037*

**Figure 6.** *School entrance.*

**Figure 7.** *School corridor.*

interests. In each class, there are three to six children with physical disabilities, dysfunction in the sphere of social behavior, emotional disorders, etc.

Each child has some problems, so an individual approach to them is needed, but not disregarding the processes of socialization, life skills, and working in a group. Students do not know which teacher is the one with special educational needs for a particular child, lest their attention be directed to someone else's differences. If a hearing-impaired or even blind child comes to school, appropriate spatial and technical conditions are created for him to gain knowledge and develop his skills on an equal footing with other children. Teachers act as tutors, preparing curricula. If necessary, they reach for various methods of movement therapy, sensory therapy, music, art, theater, etc. The teacher must be flexible, ready to suddenly change the curriculum, so not everyone can cope with it. Sometimes, separated from their own group of students, they have to take care of another one, because one of the teachers fell ill. The school is well-equipped. There is no need to buy textbooks, notebooks, stationery, or workshop materials. In the passage to the corridor kitchenettes, where children can heat up a meal, boil water for tea, etc., there are open cupboards with charged laptops. If any of the students would like to use this medium, they can unplug it from the charger and start working with it.

Three times a year they organize meetings for parents and the local community to talk to them about the development of their children and to respond to their problems. There is no formal assessment at this school as learning progress and problems are discussed with each child and their parents, which teachers try to solve, involving the students' parents as well. Various rooms are available for conversations with parents, with the possibility of conducting both individual consultations and meetings of a task nature. Parents are involved in the work using the project method.

Teachers have a heavy mental burden in this work; hence they receive psychoemotional support so that they can cope with stress or methodological problems they encounter during classes with children. In this school, they are also supported in the organization and conduct of classes by students of the teachers' College in Holon (Talpiot College Holon), which is located near Tel Aviv. It is extremely important to acquire skills in diagnosing children, planning activities for them, individualizing them, and working in teams. Students here do not have homework, nor are they assessed by means of didactic tests of a selective nature. Each student receives a descriptive assessment at the end of the year, which is prepared together with him and his parents in order to further support his development, aspirations, and interests. It is important for them to be aware of what they still need to work on, or what support they will need. At the end of the year, children complete a self-evaluation sheet together with their teacher, as each of them must learn to evaluate their own abilities.
