‘There's Kind-of More Equality’: A Qualitative Exploration into How a New Active Learning Space Affected Instructors Feelings and Actions

Within Higher Education, the increasing interest in active and collaborative approaches to learning has driven an interest in the impact of space on teaching and learning.A result has been the creation of Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) which are spaces designed to enable active and collaborative learning.Existing ALCs research has focused on the student experience, impact on student learning and impact on instructor teaching methods.The impact on instructors themselves and how ALCs affect instructors remains under-researched.This exploratory study contributes to this discussion by exploring the perspectives of 11 instructors that used a newly designed ALC, in an Irish University.A qualitative approach was adopted wherein data was gathered via semi-structured interviews and data analysed via an inductive thematic analysis.Key findings are that participants perceived that the different nature of the ALC impacted how they felt while in the space which in turn impacted how they thought and acted in the ALC.Our findings also indicate that the physical spaces that we occupy can impact conceptions of teaching and learning, with these participants associating considerably more democratic and student-centred conceptions of teaching and learning with the ALC and more teacher-centred conceptions with traditional classrooms.Implications from this exploratory study is that those institutions that are keen to embed student-centred approaches may need further investment in ALCs.