Inside the classroom of a “school with no rucksack”

The classroom is the heart of school organisation. We need to understand what relationships are established between the subjects and objects at work in the classroom. A non-traditional classroom set-up, like that of the national project «At school with no rucksack», offers food for thought for changing learning environments too.

The atmosphere in the class, the relationships established there, ways of working alone, all together, in small groups and in pairs, the materials and tools that are used, the furniture and the way it is set out, all these can contribute to a learning environment which is inspired by the research community and by values of responsibility and hospitality.

The teacher’s role is to organise the «research» and facilitate everyone’s work. The classroom thus comes to represent a place of identity and reference, the «home base» in which individual pupils and the group of pupils find a constant point of reference, a base, a personalised environment which you can use as a starting point towards opening up to encounters and opportunities outside of the classroom and the school.

This diagram shows one (not the only) way of organising a classroom in the «At school with no rucksack» project, which allows a mix between polytopic space and polychronic time.

Area 1 is the area with tables for individual, pair and group work.
Area 2 is the forum zone for work with the entire group. Activities carried out here could be: decision-making, explanations, mini-conferences, story-telling and guided discussions. The forum is made up of 3 benches laid out in a horseshoe and of a hypoallergenic rug which can be used for reading and for other individual or group activities.
The areas marked 3 are mini-laboratories, which can be used, for example, for drawing and painting, scientific subjects, languages, etc.
Area 4, which we call the electronic brain, has two computers which are used with educational software and are connected to the internet and used for in-depth study of various subjects (Italian, history, maths, etc.).
And Area 5 is the teacher’s table (not a desk), where the teacher can work with a maximum of 2-3 pupils for more individualised tutoring.
The open cupboards (6) contain educational material, which should be as varied as it can be and in line with class activities. Material is put back into the cupboards so that it can be easily accessed.
Furthermore, the tables have drawers (7) so that each pupil has at least one drawer at their disposal.
The number 8 represents plants, which make the classroom environment particularly welcoming and hospitable.

Naturally, as in other organisations (and in the adult world), the majority of the material is shared and, (something that you rarely find in traditional schools) is not locked away in cupboards but available to all. The emphasis on the significance of classroom-space should not, however, detract from the importance of organising external spaces, – such as rooms for conferences and meetings, laboratories, rooms for specific purposes (music, foreign languages, scientific experiments) and a teachers’ room – which should be carefully designed.

At school with no rucksack

The global curriculum method for a school community

The «school without a rucksack», a project which is engaging 11 institutes in Tuscany, is about rediscovering the dimension of hospitality and aims to create a research community, encouraging pupil responsibility and the acquisition of competences. Every aspect is redesigned with the global curriculum method, for which worksheets and practical tools for class management and activity planning are provided. An innovation in this book is that it combines a pedagogical approach with an organisational one, thus the book targets both teachers and school heads.