A Musical Lens on Spatial Representations of Form to Support Designers and Teachers Using Hybrid Learning Spaces

Explorations of the potential of hybrid learning spaces have been accelerated by the rapid transition to online learning caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Educational spaces that accommodate hybrid learning may be seen as more complex spaces to navigate, particularly as the number of potential social and spatial arrangements available to the teacher tends to multiply. This creates a greater need to represent the overarching structure of a learning and teaching session, particularly as some students are co-located and others are remote in time and place. To explore ways of supporting educational practitioners and designers in managing the increasing number of permutations available to them in hybrid learning spaces, this paper turns to musical forms for inspiration. These forms, and the way they are represented diagrammatically, are examined to support thinking around how the sequence of, and interaction between, educational parameters across time may be represented. A discussion of the relationship between temporal and spatial representations of musical form is also used to support a broader notion of space in education, one that may be useful as physical and networked environments become less clear-cut. By exploring how the form of a learning session might be best represented to show the relationship of the parts to the whole in a single image, this paper contributes to the areas of hybridity and learning space design and use.