Redefining School: Educational Spaces for Adolescents’ Engagement in Learning

Abstract

Members of school systems around the globe recognize the challenge of educating adolescents to enable them to thrive in a rapidly changing world. They are faced with the complex task of designing educational spaces that combine more traditional instructional school settings with the “real world,” that is, the tangible world surrounding the school as well as the digital world connecting schools to the wider world. This contribution shows how adolescent students’ engagement in learning can be supported by redefining schools’ settings for learning and by designing hybrid spaces that provide complex, authentic, and demanding tasks in real-life settings to enable deeper learning.