Beyond Walls: Reconfiguring the Classroom for Active Learning

By Savannah Lira, Program Officer

In the fall of 2018, PVF funded the specialized meditation cushions and yoga mats needed for a meditation classroom. Pearl Bauer and Jennifer Murphy had co-designed and co-facilitated a student-driven freshman seminar on mindfulness and meditation, weaving together inquiry-based and experiential learning to promote self-discovery and social transformation within an intentional community.

They have now published a photo essay illustrating “how, with minimal resources and support, we dared to conceive a classroom that not only eschewed traditional rows, desks, and tables but also utilized communal spaces beyond the four walls of a traditional classroom. In this way we reimagined our notion of the experiential learning classroom to create a freshman seminar that supported active and engaged learning.”

“Reconfiguring the physical classroom invited students to reexamine their relationship to learning from being passive recipients of knowledge to be-coming active agents in their education.”