569378 research-article2015

SJP0010.1177/1403494815569378Planning Practice and ResearchIM Kirkeby et al.

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2015; 43: 260–268

Original Article

Designing for health in school buildings: Between research and practice

Inge Mette Kirkeby1, Bjarne Bruun Jensen2, Kristian Larsen3 & René Kural4 1Danish

Building Research Institute, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2Steno Diabetes Centre A/S, Gentofte, of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark, and 4The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Copenhagen, Denmark 3Department

Abstract Aim: To investigate the kinds of knowledge practitioners use when planning and designing for health in school buildings. Methods: Twelve semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with architects, teachers and officials to investigate use of knowledge in the making of school buildings. Results: Practitioners drew on many kinds and sources of knowledge, but in particular they made use of concepts, examples or pictures or thought-provoking knowledge. However, the interviews indicate a number of hurdles for efficient knowledge sharing between research and practice: (1) a considerable discrepancy between kinds of knowledge used by practice and knowledge traditionally produced by research; (2) research-knowledge and practice-knowledge form two circuits and the flow from one circuit to the other is weak; (3) practitioners’ knowledge was often based on experience and therefore person-dependent. It makes the knowledge vulnerable. Conclusions: Special attention has to be paid by research to concepts and principles to guide the decision-making in practice. Further is recommended to consider new kinds of collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Key Words: Knowledge management, research-based knowledge, school mental health, school buildings

Who wouldn’t want to build schools that promote children’s health? The Danish Pedagogical University, the Copenhagen School of Architecture and, later, the Danish Building Research Institute joined forces in 2005 to explore the relationship between architecture, pedagogy and health in school buildings. When the project started, only limited research was available on the interaction between building and pedagogy and how it affects health and health competencies among children and youngsters. The aim of the project was to provide new knowledge in order to understand the relationships between architecture, pedagogy, and health, and to promote health in school settings. The project ran for 5 years and included two PhD projects [1]. A sequence of workshops was organised within the framework of the research project in which researchers

and practitioners met to discuss the question of how school architecture might be improved to support the health of pupils. During the workshops, it became evident that, together, the participants possessed a considerable amount of knowledge relevant for the topic. However, this knowledge belonged to very different spheres, and different elements of this knowledge were sporadic, isolated and difficult to relate to each other and to operationalise. For researchers, this was a considerable challenge: How could we produce researchbased designs for health in school buildings? Underlying this question was the researchers’ interest in becoming better at shaping future research projects to meet actual needs among practitioners knowledge that fed into this rather scattered knowledge arena?

Correspondence: Inge Mette Kirkeby, Danish Building Research Institute, Aalborg University, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, DK-2450 København SV, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected] (Accepted 30 December 2014) © 2015 the Nordic Societies of Public Health DOI: 10.1177/1403494815569378

Planning Practice and Research   261 Historically, school buildings in Denmark were based on pattern drawings and normative standards that coordinated national knowledge with general standards and rules – covering, respectively, town schools and countryside schools [2,3]. Seen in this framework the current situation is a special case. Today planning and design of each individual school is carried out locally in a dynamic planning process involving local authorities, school teachers/leaders and architects. This procedure opens up unique possibilities for making schools to suit local wishes and needs. At the same time, this way of working requires that the different sectors hold the appropriate knowledge, and are able to combine the different arenas of knowledge. However, it does not seem common to explicate the knowledge in use, or where it comes from, and, as a consequence, opportunities for synergy may be missed. It may not even be noticed that important knowledge is missing. As a consequence, the authors – two researchers with a background in architecture and two with a background in education – decided to investigate what kinds of knowledge practitioners, especially architectural practitioners, make use of when designing school buildings, not least in order to design future research projects where the results may be supportive of practice. We wanted more ‘knowledge about knowledge’. Thus, the research question became ‘What kind of knowledge do practitioners really use when planning?’. The article addresses the relation between research and architectural practice. The results indicate a number of hurdles for efficient knowledge sharing between research and practice calling for the attention of the research world in particular. Understanding knowledge and practice Schools in Denmark are under municipal jurisdiction and planned in a multi-professional reality. In order to achieve an overall understanding of the knowledge that is used, the interviews were conducted with pedagogic advisers from local authorities as well as school leaders and architects. It is to be expected that mapping the knowledge used in this stage in each different discipline would result in a number of interesting studies. However, in the analysis, special attention is given to theories concerning the knowledge that architects employ. There are three reasons behind this choice. Firstly, during the planning and design process the architects are most directly engaged in translating the program into material form. Secondly, since architecture traditionally is not research based it seems a good place to start to investigate an eventual ‘gap’ or communi-

cation between research and practice. The third reason is the limitation of time and resources. In architecture, the discussion of knowledge took a huge step forward with Donald Schön’s ‘The reflective practitioner’ in 1983 [4], where he introduced the concept ‘the reflective practitioner’ which has become part of researchers’ language. Schön stresses the importance of qualitative knowledge as opposed to what he calls ‘technical rationality’ – the practice epistemology of positivism. This concept is used frequently, not least in architecture. In fact, architects constitute only one of the professions Schön studied, and his theory addresses several professional practices. Other researchers followed suit, using terms like ‘designerly ways of knowing’ [5] and Bryan Lawson, who studied the design process, how architects think and what they know [6,7], argued for a definition of research as ‘original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding’ [8]. By adding the word ‘understanding’ to the word ‘knowledge’, an opening is created for other kinds of knowledge than the hard-core facts often required in traditional scientific research. In research prior to this project, interviews with practising architects supported the notion that understanding is a kind of knowledge that differs from mere descriptive knowledge [9,10]. Understanding distinguishes itself from facts and rules by being much more subject-dependent. Understanding was considered important by the architects. The production of architecture calls for an ability to imagine how others may use and experience a building as well as a need to imagine how it is to be in a certain space. Understanding is a process that involves interpretation, and where active participation is needed to make the understanding one’s own. Our analysis focuses on knowledge pointing forward, a kind of ‘action knowledge’, a practical knowledge that enables architects to make choices that are ‘good for man’ [11, p. 73]. Aristotle terms this kind of knowledge phronesis; his two other kinds of knowledge are episteme and techne. Flyvbjerg [11,12] relates phronesis to planning and relates it to the question of power, while others link phronesis with political judgement [13]. Flyvbjerg also introduces an important distinction between episteme and phronesis. He points out that while episteme is context-independent knowledge, phronesis is context-dependant – e.g. experience-based or ‘a good example’, closely related to a specific context. According to Kristian Kreiner, the knowledge that architects make use of should be seen in relation to some characteristics of architectural problems. In architecture, he states, you work with ‘loosely structured problems’ where frame and solution are

262    IM Kirkeby et al. developed simultaneously. Additionally, the extensive amount of knowledge which definitely exists among architects cannot be identified precisely at the beginning of a design task, but may be defined in retrospective. It is not known beforehand but it may be recognized. Therefore, he says, each design task presents the architect with the need to find a main approach – an Archimedean point, which, at the moment it is chosen, structures the task-solving. In this situation, thought-provoking knowledge will be more valuable than knowledge pointing to a specific solution [14]. The question of how new knowledge can feed into practice leads to theories on learning. In connection with this, the concept of situated learning by Lave and Wenger [15] is highly relevant. In fact, their theory is based on and counts for practice in general disciplines, but also covers the architectural discipline very well. Lave and Wenger’s social learning theory links learning closely with participation in, and learning in, communities of practice. The core of this social practice theory is that understanding and experience are in constant interaction, and Lave rejects the notion of the learning person as a passive recipient of information [15,16]. During the last decades, new ways of combining research and practice in architecture have been developed. The relationship between the architect’s ‘intuitive and experience based’ design work and research-based knowledge is addressed within the practice of hospital architecture – a field that has several similarities with school architecture. In addition, evidence-based design and action-research are wellestablished fields [17]. Or visit the Danish website http://www.godtsygehusbyggeri.dk/ [18]. Actionresearch provides us with another methodology which attempts to combine research – and practice based knowledge by directly involving the researcher in the project team. Research method Empirically the article is based on 12 semi-structured interviews – with four architects, four educational advisers from local authorities and four school principals. All three groups play an important role in the cross-disciplinary planning of school buildings. This is especially so in regard to setting up the building programme with its requirements and specifications of the kind of activities and the kind of health and interaction the school wants to support. The program develops and defines the guidelines for the rest of the project. In the following design process the program is translated into material physical structures where the architects play a leading role. All three groups

have been interviewed, but the analysis and discussion is focused on the architects and their use of knowledge. The architects play a central role in all phases and are very directly engaged in translating knowledge into the actual material structures. All respondents had considerable practical experience with developing school buildings and can be considered ‘professional practitioners’. Each interview lasted approximately 1 hour and was recorded and transcribed for analysis, which could later be shared. The quotations presented below were translated and slightly shortened by the authors. The respondents were asked to give their view of the role of the physical environment for health and pedagogy, to explain their concept of health when building schools, and to put into words their use of knowledge and their sources of knowledge. The method is explorative and attempts to map the knowledge in the field without any preview of what the ‘right’ kind of knowledge should be. It is also intended as a basis for further discussion of possible ways of bringing research based and practice based knowledge closer to each other. From the beginning of the interview, it was made clear that the meaning of ‘knowledge’ was to be understood in its broadest sense – covering hard-fact knowledge, understanding and inspiration, and the questions were formulated so that the respondents took part in defining the concept of knowledge. The interview method was chosen in order to derive first-hand answers to the question about the practitioners’ use of knowledge in general. Valuable knowledge might also have been obtained by using observation as a method [4,19], and it can certainly be argued that people do not necessarily do what they think they do. However, it seemed relevant at this stage of the research process to seek insight into their conscious reflections about their own planning and design process. Also, it might be argued that interviews, per definition, can only cover knowledge that the informants are able to verbalise, thus omitting an important part of knowledge, namely implicit knowledge. Seen in a researcher’s perspective it may worthwhile to understand how this is integrated in professional practice, and research may be able to create knowledge about implicit knowledge, but not to produce and communicate implicit knowledge to others. When knowledge and different kinds of knowledge are topics for discussion in the field of architecture, it is common to point out the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge is built up through experience, built-in in practice and exchanged ‘without words’ in collaborative work

Planning Practice and Research   263 and in a master–apprenticeship relation. But from the researcher’s point of view, the study of tacit knowledge is somewhat of a dead end. For researchbased knowledge is by definition explicit – verbalised, frequently supported by other explicit means. Implicit knowledge can only to some extent be externalised – and, above all, it is questionable whether it would benefit anybody – implicit or tacit knowledge is rather to be accepted as a characteristic part of professional practice. Finally it has to be emphasised that the interest in research, knowledge and design processes in no way means that researchers think it is either possible or desirable to make the planning and design process more rational or ‘scientific’ as such. On the contrary, the article is written from a research interest in the knowledge that practitioners make use of and how research may produce results to support and enrich practice. We endeavoured to derive this knowledge by asking the practitioners directly, and the findings from the interviews are presented in the following. Knowledge use in planning and designing school buildings - results The empirical results are divided into three sections. The first section addresses the finding that the respondents act from an overall concept of ‘the good life in school’, the second deals with their understanding of the concept of ‘health’, and the last and longest part with the different kinds of knowledge and sources from which they gain it. The respondents understanding of good school life The respondents were asked: What kind of knowledge do you use when designing a school building? However, the question was easier to ask than to answer, and at first glance it looked as if the answers avoided the question. But when looked at more closely, they focused on the core of the matter, on what really mattered to them when they planned a new school building. The answers would typically reveal high ideals for the school – what it was that they wanted to obtain with the school, how to make a good school, i.e. visions for children’s good life in school, with no sharp boundaries between physical and mental aspects. Health was considered to have physical and mental components, and to contain hard-core qualities linked to good indoor climate, light, acoustics as well as to harder to define qualities such as the atmosphere of the school building. A school building has to be ‘for all’ taking individual differences like age, sex, and abilities and interests

into consideration, and in order to meet this need the actual design had to reflect diversity. Different places should be created at school; “light, warm, cold, hard and soft” were the words one respondent used. The following quotation illustrates an inclusive view of the ideal of a school covering many aspects: … to make a school where children experience that what they do at school is important for the school and for life in general. It is part of socialising to be yourself, but part of a relationship as well. Not only to be a number who passes a corridor and enters a room, but to be part of a bigger organism. Where there are many possibilities – at our school we try to set the stage for diversity. (adviser local authority 1)

In short, the interviews revealed an ideal of the good school as a place where the individual subject is socialised to take part in society and at the same time be respected as an individual. The respondents understanding of health in school buildings The project addresses designing for health in school buildings and the respondents were asked to elaborate on their understanding of health in school buildings. The school building was expected to support health by creating places that matched the pedagogical activities which were part of the educational programme, while at the same time supporting a broader well-being. Further the respondents emphasised the importance of physical activity and food. In practice this meant that they envisioned that the importance of healthy food was reflected by the central placement of a canteen in the school with other activity places around it. In this way the importance of the function also constituted the architectural expression. This well-being was seen as crucial for the users’ health without a sharp border line between the different parts. As one of the architects put it: ‘but if we talk about pedagogy, we also talk about well-being – and then we are talking health’ (architect 4). Three different headmasters gave their view of architecture and health: Health is physical as well as mental health. In architecture, you can make school buildings so that people have to walk 600 meters from classroom to music room. This gives them exercise. If it rains – well, it may be annoying, but then you realize how weather in Denmark is changeable. When designing furniture, it is important that chairs and tables are flexible and different, to enable different ways of sitting and different ways of working. It is important that the environment is hospitable to diversity and flexibility and that the pupils can develop. (headmaster 1)

264    IM Kirkeby et al. … we modernised the school building and suddenly the children engaged themselves more in daily activities. They became more independent in their learning. When we get pupils from other schools, we have noticed that they often expect the teacher to instruct them more. Whereas our children expect that they must start on their own and at the same time be guided in their learning process – what they can do to solve problems, where they can find relevant material etc.Taking health into consideration, our pupils have become mentally more whole human beings), more active in their learning processes, and as a consequence they enjoy more going to school. It is a matter of understanding, when you are in harmony with the things you do within the physical setting. (headmaster 2) … to be physiologically well balanced has to do with being able to work without disturbance. That is an aspect of health. Another aspect is the question of having a possibility of doing exercise. School work is often done sitting on a chair. Here it is very important to have outdoor areas where the children can move freely around during breaks. (headmaster 3)

In short, the interviews contained a broad concept of health containing a wide number of aspects including physical as well as mental health. This understanding of health has a close similarity to WHOs definition of health: ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ [20, p.100]. Historically this is an interesting move from health considered closely linked with hygiene and fresh air around 1900, to the 1930’s celebration of daylight and, again, fresh air and current understanding [3,21]. Different kinds of knowledge and sources To interpret and operationalize this broad idealistic vision of ‘the good school’, the practitioners searched for knowledge and inspiration to guide the design process. The knowledge that the respondents considered important was, on the one hand, knowledge which could increase and deepen their insight and understanding of daily life in school, and on the other hand knowledge needed to translate the building programme into an architectural frame for the good school life. It became evident during the interviews that many kinds of knowledge were considered relevant – especially experience from one’s own life and from previous work on school projects. In particular, knowledge gleaned from other sources was important, ranging widely from knowledge about how the amount of

CO2 in classrooms influences pupils’ performance to a lecture by a theatre instructor comparing the making of good theatre with the making of good school buildings. Another interesting point was that they referred to other schools as an inspiration, such as Herman Hertzberger’s Montessori schools. At this stage, some readers – not least readers who are researchers themselves – might well imagine that the respondents had mentioned research results from reports, books or articles as a source of knowledge. However, it soon became evident that a considerable part of the knowledge brought into play was exchanged in direct communication with others – at conferences, by participating in project teams, developing a new school building together with other professions which possessed another expertise than one’s own. Experience differing from one’s own experience was stressed again and again as important, often combined with other kinds of knowledge. I use my own experience of life and put it into words – sometimes we are much too much afraid of opening up for things which we all have as experience. (adviser local authority 1) … among other things we draw on experience. That is our experience as professional architects. When we design schools, then it is our experience from own schooling and as parents. Because as architects, we are educated within a tradition where it has been allowed to trust intuitive cognition. (architect 1)

The architects made use of knowledge gained on previous projects, but added that it would be hard to pinpoint exactly when and what they reused. They realised that they would often need external assistance for complex projects like schools and called in experts from other fields – in technical matters as well as pedagogical or theoretical ones. One architect said: ‘The more we open up – the more we get back.’ (architect 1). Another expressed himself like this: ‘we try to build up our own knowledge, but each time we have participated in competitions, we have been assisted by pedagogical specialists’ (architect 3). The architects’ expectation from research and research-based knowledge was that it should guide them towards ‘good solutions’. It might take the form of a compilation of examples, but might also be analyses and design tools. Valuable research, to them, would mean a short cut to good solutions. Otherwise the practitioners did not show enthusiasm concerning research, since they experienced a gap between what they experienced as research based knowledge and their actual practice.

Planning Practice and Research   265 I’m not able to point to a specific research-based result which has had any importance for us. It may be because of the kind of projects that the office does – they often have a very specific point of departure that is very practical. (architect 2) … the interface between the projects that we do and the work you researchers do, is not very extensive, and that is a pity (architect 3)

Not only architects brought personal experience into play when planning a new school. Here is a quotation from an educational adviser: I get inspiration from the projects we have taken part in, from my own experience. I get inspiration from reading, articles, novels, and investigations of how others look on things. I also get inspiration from meeting other people, researchers who write something wise. I get inspiration from using my eyes, ears and senses, when I visit schools. But hopefully it does also come from other sides – where you are not aware that it will end as an inspiration in this particular field. Going to the theatre, seeing pictures, may also generate reflections. (adviser local authority 2)

This often intuitive knowledge seems, to a wide extent, to fulfil the architects’ needs, and so far one could argue that this is ‘good enough’. But at the same time it has the inherent vulnerability that it may close itself in a way, that it does not realize when more relevant knowledge might be available. Interestingly, this risk was also acknowledged by some respondents. One architect actually pointed to the risk that outdated ideas would be used and realised that there was a need for obtaining new knowledge. But this new knowledge was not always easily accessible for the practitioner and he mentioned that he often found useful information in his morning paper! … there are some very good articles in the better newspapers, also on schools – then I suddenly realise some things we have overlooked in our profession – it may be my fault, but it also could be a hint to the researchers to come closer to my breakfast table (architect 3)

The empirical answer to the research question ‘What kind of knowledge do practitioners really use when planning and designing for health in school buildings?’ was that the practitioners took their point of departure in an overall understanding of the task – first of all to create a physical frame to support good school life for the children including health in a broad sense. Further the interviews revealed that in the planning and design process, the interviewees made extensive use of their own experience including

actively taking part in projects and project teams. Further, they mentioned the importance of studying other schools – throughout history, architects have been known to study progressive schools before making their own design [21, pp. 19–54]. Nevertheless, it became obvious that, to a wide extent, they made use of person- and contextdependant knowledge. An obvious disadvantage of this procedure is that the practitioners may use the knowledge they are used to implementing without exploring whether there might be other knowledge available that is more relevant to fulfil the actual requirements. Additionally, when they do find something new, it risks being fairly random. Although the respondents did express interest in new research-based knowledge, they demonstrated only little interest in mere facts and ‘scientific’ knowledge. Further, they expressed their preference for obtaining knowledge flow ‘face to face’ with the researchers. In other words, they preferred personally delivered expertise to reading an article or scientific report. These findings are supported by previous research and analysis [9,14,21]. However, in addition to this, the present project revealed some obstacles for supporting the design of health in school buildings by means of research-based knowledge. The project is explorative and not evaluative, and our point of departure is that the architects’ knowledge certainly is ‘good enough’. On the other hand the project investigates the knowledge arena with an interest in how to optimize the use of knowledge. If the aim is to create new knowledge which feeds into the actual planning and design process, it is important to realize flaws and biases in merely re using own experiences – an architect actually points to this possible limitation in his working method. Knowledge flow – an analysis In the following, knowledge flow will be analysed based on the findings of the interviews. Within the framework of this research project with limited resources, the analysis can in no way be comprehensive, but has to be seen as a step towards a deeper understanding and a point of departure for further investigation. The path from knowledge to a real school building ready to receive a diverse group of children necessarily goes via planning and designing of the school. All the interviewees acknowledged that knowledge was important in order to build good schools. They also stated that research-based knowledge might be important for obtaining new knowledge in the field. However, when the interviews were read in succession, a number of hurdles appeared in the

266    IM Kirkeby et al. knowledge flow from the researcher’s desk to places where decisions were made in regard to the actual design of a new school building. The architectural profession is to some extent based on experience and has its own established working method, and in this article it is considered important to accept and respect this professionalism. At the same time, architects must be able to incorporate new knowledge of the interaction between pedagogy and health on one hand and school buildings on the other, because the world that the school is part of, continuously changes with new standards for pedagogy and new understanding of the concept of health. To build up-to-date schools, new knowledge is therefore crucial – and one of the places where new knowledge comes into being is the research world. •• First, there seemed to be considerable discrepancy between the kinds of knowledge that were used in practice and the knowledge that research traditionally produces. The first hurdle for optimising research-based knowledge was that the knowledge that the practitioners praised as valuable in the design process, was to a wide extent derived from their own experiences and cultivated in the context of solving a specific design problem. Architects did not start the process of making a school building by collecting factual knowledge or consulting research reports. Instead they took their point of departure in a concept of an ideal school and used this as an Archimedean point from which they were able to structure the design process. An ideal of school as a good place for children and their development could also guide the choices to be made during the design process. We could say ‘choices which are good for children’ paraphrasing Aristotle’s’ ‘choices which are good for man’. The architects gave examples of using experience from their own childhood and from former school projects, or good examples they had seen on excursions. These context-dependent kinds of knowledge were characteristic of phronesis, and the interviews suggested that more qualitative and ‘soft’ kinds of knowledge seemed to fit the working process of the reflective practitioner. Whereas knowledge produced ‘by others’ was consulted to a lesser degree – leaving a gap between knowledge used in practice and knowledge produced by research. •• Secondly, knowledge in research and knowledge in practice formed two different circuits and the flow from one circuit to the other was rather weak.

It might be considered that resources spent on research on health in school buildings would be justified by results that not only communicate to other researchers but also feed into practice. However, as mentioned above, it was striking that the interviewed practitioners paid little attention to activities and results in the research world. They might attend a conference or ‘happen’ to see an article in a newspaper presenting new research. However, while they valued this new knowledge, it was nevertheless an indirect and arbitrary line of communication compared with a targeted search in, for example, research databases. One problem was that if a systematic way of looking up knowledge did not fit into practice-related ways of working, then research-based knowledge would run the risk of getting lost, or stay hidden in a database, from time to time looked up by other researchers. It was most encouraging to hear that the practitioners invited researchers as experts to come to the office and discuss problems related to a specific design task. Thus we found a kind of knowledge transfer that was not the one-way distribution found in a scholastic understanding of learning, but an interactive knowledge sharing where the ‘learner’ took an active part in constructing the knowledge. However, this procedure was extremely time-consuming. It could not replace more traditional forms of knowledge transfer, which had the advantage of being self-sufficient and were transferable over distance and time. •• Thirdly, knowledge possessed by the practitioners was often based on their own experience and therefore also person-dependent. It was often developed in collaboration and could to some extent be maintained within a given firm over time. That made the knowledge vulnerable in so far that it might disappear from the firm together with staff members. The practitioners built up new knowledge and understanding by active participation in the making of school buildings, often in multidisciplinary groups, where new knowledge was integrated in existing experience. Thus revealing a constructivist knowledge production and transfer – which, in fact, was rather thought-provoking since the schools of today promote a constructivist perspective of learning which the new school buildings were aimed at supporting! In Lave and Wenger’s social learning theory, understanding and experience are in constant interaction. Their theory is based on examples from

Planning Practice and Research   267 traditional craftsmanship, e.g. tailor workshops, where master apprenticeship is asymmetrical and where novices are introduced to and enabled to continue a professional tradition. But a broader interpretation is possible, allowing a symmetrical relation between participants in which they not only ‘take over’ a tradition, but also create new ideas, solutions and knowledge. It should not be surprising that practitioners make use of knowledge built up through experience and discussions within working collaborations. However, knowledge based on experience, and developed within a group is person bound. The knowledge and expertise disappear with the person who possesses it, unless it is continually kept alive within the community of practice, where new employees receive the opportunity to take over and maybe develop them further. Traditionally, research often operates from a scholastic view point, expecting one part to transmit knowledge to another part as a finished product. But the interviews revealed that the practitioners take ownership of knowledge that they have taken part in constructing. A challenge for researchers is to develop methods for working together with practitioners in a way that allows active participation by practitioners and at the same time documents the knowledge in a way that can be transferred to broader circles. The analysis pinpointed three challenges in regard to the production of research-based knowledge that feeds into the practice of designing for health in school buildings. Considerable knowledge was built up by the practitioners themselves, but the flow of relevant knowledge from research to practice seems uncertain. This suggests some considerations, the first being the consideration of what kind of research projects and results that are relevant in the planning and design situation; second, how to communicate new knowledge such that it actually reaches the practitioners, and finally how can research-based knowledge be made suitable in order to support a constructivist learning process. Conclusions To build schools supporting the health of pupils requires an extensive body of knowledge. Practitioners’ interest in new knowledge was clearly demonstrated throughout the interview; they draw on many sources of knowledge in planning and designing schools, and they take an active part in acquiring new knowledge. It is taken for granted that researchers have a basic interest in developing and cultivating new relevant knowledge which also may

support practice. However, practitioners in general seemed to pay little attention to established research that in principle could be of relevance for improvement of their practice. Even parts of basic research might inspire processes of thinking about school buildings. The results point to a considerable distance between the research office and the places in practice, where planning and design is conducted. Additionally, the results also suggest three obstacles in the knowledge flow between research and practice, as pointed out above. It therefore seems relevant to consider two things. Firstly, how might research be designed such that it, to a higher degree, meets the request for guiding principles that are decisive for the setup of a design and thereby make an Aristotelian point for the decisions to be made in the following process? According to the practitioners, they made use of concepts, examples or pictures to feed into discussions or thought-provoking knowledge. Secondly, the results give rise to considerations as to whether it might be possible to develop new kinds of research and research collaboration where researchers and practitioners work together to develop new knowledge. The interviews did not give an answer to the question of which new possibilities there might be. Neither did they give an indication of which direction the collaboration might take since the problem had not been acknowledged before the interviews were conducted. These discrepancies were revealed during the analysis and therefore it was not possible to ask the practitioners to give their view of the matter. To enhance the knowledge flow when building schools, new research ought to be undertaken to map the field between research and practice. A suggestion - inspired by findings from the present project – might be that the collaboration could be strengthened through evidence based design. Action research or investigation could be conducted as a collaborative research project in workshop-like forms, close to the situated learning in communities of practice where new knowledge is developed by researchers and practitioners together. Acknowledgements The article is based on research kindly supported by Realdania and Aase and Ejnar Danielsens Fond. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.

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