Student-Centred Learning as an Approach to Design Primary Schools' Outdoors

Student-centered philosophies of education emerged as a response to the limitations of traditional, authoritarian models of education, where learners construct knowledge for themselves and learn from their experiences. Recent researches look at ways of involving students more successfully in schools, as learners and participants. In this respect, it is crucial to recall the significance of learning taxonomies, which are utilized as a way of describing different kinds of learning behaviors and as a practical approach for deeper learning - active learning - which emphasizes the learning outcomes. Student-centered learning (SCL) model shows that the learning environment is one of the crucial aspects of the quality education process. Previous studies revealed that schools' outdoors are potential educational spaces where concepts taught within the school building can come alive. Students' everyday places and activities affect developing self: mind, body, and spirit. Therefore, this research aims at adopting SCL as an approach to design primary schools' outdoors. The study methodology depended on pursuing an analysis of the deep meaning of SCL and its relation to schools' outdoors. Then, a content analysis of primary schools curricula that was terminated by classifying them according to the learning domains - learning taxonomies - was carried out. After that, a content analysis of designing schools' outdoors and their functions, based on the targeted learning outcomes of the SCL model, was accomplished. Finally, the research resulted in a preliminary design schema that listed specific functions of schools' outdoors and their needed spaces and features in relation to the learning domain-based curricula.