Exploring Students' Thoughts: An Interview with Shannon Dowling

As people who work in educational spaces, at one time or another we have probably asked ourselves, "What do students want these days?" This target may appear to be ever shifting, and quite frankly, it is. But for those looking to reach the current generation of learners in higher education, Shannon Dowling is here to shed some light on our questions [yes, my architect readers- pun intended]. Shannon is an Architect in Virginia, USA and works with educators, students and administrators to optimize academic settings and create inspirational and functional spaces for everyone. Shannon was the recipient of the Society of College and University Planning (SCUP) fellowship grant in 2020-2021 and she used this funding to conduct a large research project across the Mid-Atlantic United States and interacted with more than two dozen institutions and over 200 students. Shannon set out to discover what campuses currently have and offer in their ‘student’ spaces and what students think about those spaces.

Hopefully you read the previous article in this series, and you’re here for more! I know I was excited to speak with Shannon about her work, and I hope you will enjoy some of our conversation below.

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Interviewer: Based on your article from your SCUP research, could you please briefly describe the research that you did, where you did the research as well as how you conducted your study.

Shannon: To give a very brief background, I have been teaching, I have a child myself who is a neurodivergent learner, and I work in and design higher ed. spaces. While working in these spaces, I kept seeing the words diversity, equity and inclusion on all strategic plans, but I didn’t see any link between physical space and how institutions were going to foster belonging.

So, I put in the proposal to do this with SCUP and it got approved. That is the why. How I did it was, well, it was during COVID, I started in the summer of 2020. I had originally proposed to work with three institutions that are all within 2 miles of my house, but because there were going to be no students on campus anyway, I had to pivot but virtual connections gave me an opportunity to have more conversations with a lot more universities. So, I ended up talking to over two dozen universities and I also noticed that none of the previous research really centered on students or talked about students’ points of view, but yet students were very well versed in what they wanted, and they were able to describe it to me more easily than any of the other administrators could, so I just turned straight to the students. I involved probably close to 300 students in the research. I put out a survey that had a little over 150 responses. I then followed up with a bunch of listening sessions. Some of them were at the University of Richmond, but I also did some one-on-ones and other students at Marshall U and Wyner U. Then what I really wanted to do was get students involved in designing these spaces themselves, so I mostly worked with students at VCU [Virginia Commonwealth University] but I also put out an all-call for the competition. It was right at the very end of the year, so I had to depend on my friends that were professors to push it out before students stopped paying attention. It got a lot of really good responses and there were a lot of commonalities between the things the students really cared about. And I used that to develop the Playbook.

Interviewer: Thank you! And we’ll come back to the Playbook a little later. Now after collecting all of this data, what was the most surprising or informative finding to come out of your research project??

Interviewer: That’s really encouraging for higher education institutions, especially after COVID. There’s still this stigma that students don’t want to come back to campus and instead have mostly online classes and maybe not be as physically present or involved as they were beforehand, so I’m glad that your research found that’s not the case.

Shannon: No, and I say this all the time, but I always differentiate that students want to come back to campus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to go back to classrooms. Students have found other, better ways to do their instruction.

Interviewer: That’s true because you can take an online course and still be involved with something on campus. That’s an important differentiation.

Shannon: Just because people want to be on campus doesn’t mean they want to be in the classroom.

Interviewer: In your research, you talked about how you discovered students like to study and socialize in open spaces. You mentioned a mixture of types of furniture as well as a place where they can see the outdoors, and food. Did you find, now I know you weren’t there physically, but did you find that most campuses already had spaces like this that existed where students could go?

Shannon: It depends. Most campuses have spaces like this in new buildings, but, at least in the US, since the majority of our academic buildings were built in the post-war boom and the 60’s and 70’s, and those buildings are setup very siloed where there are just corridors and rooms. And those buildings don’t have spaces for students and now people are coming back and asking architects, ‘How do we infuse informal spaces into what we already have?’ A rule of thumb that I usually tell people is that I use the learning space rating system. It’s this idea that for every instructional seat inside a classroom or lab or any kind of scheduled space within a building where you need 3-5 sq. ft. outside, so that basically means that for every 5-8 seats in a classroom, you need to make sure there is 8ft outside of that classroom for the informal before and after class interactions.

Interviewer: Wow. And so probably most of the previously built buildings, from the 50’s and 60’s, those buildings probably do not allow for those types of spaces in the hallway.

Shannon: No, but one thing about it is that these buildings, they actually have these big classrooms, like 600-800 sq. ft. And what we’re finding is that we don’t actually need that many of those types of classrooms so we are converting and reinventing spaces. We have the space we just don’t have the right match of open space or furniture there.

Interviewer: What can campuses do to create spaces which are social or made available for students to choose different types of furniture or manipulate the room?

Shannon: I think we often need to consider smaller spaces where students could duck in and take a Zoom call in between classes so that they don’t have to go all the way back to their residences. Usually in the assignable square footage on campus, which is anything other than the residence halls, 30-35% of that is dedicated to staff and faculty offices, and we’re realizing that we don’t need that much space dedicated to offices, but that area is 120-140 square feet and that’s the perfect space for a Zoom spot. I really feel like we don’t need more new space but we need to take the space we have and reallocate it and prioritize in-person interactions and give people space to have private conversations and space to focus on just building relationships and well-being.

Interviewer: Now, speaking about well-being and fostering relationships, I think one of the most interesting things I learned while reading your paper was that students feel the most uncomfortable in their dorms and those spaces which are actually, technically, meant to be ‘their space’ as it’s one space they can control on a campus. Why do you think, or what did students say about why they feel so uncomfortable in their dorm rooms??

Interviewer: One of the other things you mentioned in your article was the design competitions that you ran as part of your study. Could you explain the parameters around that, how did that work and what did you find, what did students suggest to you for spaces?

Shannon: If you look at the Playbook, which is at the very end of the report, it had two or three drawings on every page in there and those were from students.

I kept everything very loose. I created a website and said, I want to understand how underrepresented students feel and how you can design a space for underrepresented students to feel like they belong, and describe to me the qualities of the space. I gave the same options like the questionnaires, an outdoor space, a formal learning space, a study space, a residence hall or faculty office. They submitted floor plans, renderings and they submitted drawings to me, and through those, I was able to gather a lot of information because there were so many similarities from one to the next. All of them had furniture that you could move around. All of them had a variety of types of furniture. All of them had windows. A lot of them had something in the space that you could manipulate other than the furniture, which I thought was fascinating.

Interviewer: That’s really interesting, can you give an example of that? What was something they could manipulate, other than the furniture?

Shannon: One student had a giant light peg-board where you could customize the artwork. Another student had a graphic wall where you could use your phone to project onto the wall, so whatever you were in the mood to see, it was up there. It really was just this idea that students these days, we’re used to customizing everything from a burrito at Chipotle to your shoes, so students wanted to have spaces that they could have some kind of control over. And I wonder if that’s a reaction to going to campus and sitting in spaces with wood-panel walls and pictures of past presidents on the wall.

Interviewer: Near the end of your article, you listed five strategic themes that institutions could use to explore their current spaces or use to help guide them with improvements. Is there anything you would say about designing spaces now that you’ve done this research or anything you would like to add about your findings?

Shannon: Yes, a couple of things. On the very last page of the Playbook, it lists a couple of theories for suggested metrics. And the reason I did those was because it was really important for me for institutions not to measure against each other but to really measure their own growth and progress. For instance, you can look at how many seats are outside a classroom, you can measure that and do a project about it and measure again and you’ll know if you’re making progress. Plus, you can survey your students as well. Usually, I tell people that there are some things we could do really quickly that could help. The first thing I would do is tackle faculty offices and make sure there isn’t a desk indicating that this space is mine and that space is for the guest. Turn that desk, take the monitor and put it so that it doesn’t block your view. The other thing that I think is pretty easy is to use different chairs. Make sure not all of the chairs have arms on them, have a variety. If you’re thinking about painting a space, whiteboard paint really isn’t anymore expensive than regular paint and it gives students a way to express themselves. Chalkboard paint too. Just giving students ways to express themselves. There are also things like turning over some of the landscape to more Native and natural landscapes. Manicured lawns make people feel like they have to behave a certain way…I feel like there are just a lot of things that we can slowly do that don’t actually cost a lot of money, but would make a big difference.

?Thank you so much Shannon for sharing your work with us and your professional perspective! If you want to take a peek, you can find Shannon’s report and the Playbook available here: https://www.scup.org/bio/shannon-dowling/

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Leo Quote: “Voice and choice can allow students to explore their passions and feel honored for their ideas and opinions.” -Andrew Miller

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References

Dowling, S. (2022). The planning and design of diverse, equitable & inclusive campus environments. Society for College and University Planning. https://www.scup.org/resource/fellows-report-the-planning-and-design-of-diverse-equitable-and-inclusive-campus-environments/

Miller, A. (2016, January 25). Voice and choice: It’s more than just “what.” Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/voice-and-choice-more-than-what-andrew-miller?