Flexible furniture to support inclusive education: developing learner agency and engagement in primary school

Abstract

To ensure quality and equitable education requires an understanding of how all learners function within a learning environment, and the ways in which teachers’ pedagogy can support inclusive practice. Drawing on research from a rural school in Western Australia, this paper identifies how furniture can be used as a tool to support student agency and opportunity to meet individual learning needs. Across two years, the study employed a single-subject research design to explore the impact of differing furniture arrangements on students’ agency and engagement, as well as teacher pedagogies. It used both quantitative and qualitative repeated measures with 9 teachers and their classes (over 500 stu..