Teachers Participation in School Design: An Approach to a Better School Organization Type in IRAN

Schools in Iran have experienced many changes until now but we can’t see much improvement in the quality of educational building designs in recent years. Although, participatory design has been a controversial issue nowadays, there is no considerable user participation in designing process of schools in our country. Participatory action research ( PAR) is the framework of this study which involves practitioners in the research process from the initial design phase of the project .we chose the group of teachers as the most crucial group for educational decision making for the participatory design. Different types of organizations was nominated and introduced to teachers. By analyzing the results of participation workshops enclosed yard was the most favorable organization, extracted from the questionnaires. This type of organization which was elected with a considerable difference from the four other types was standard Iranian traditional schools model and is no longer in use. The extracted result shows that teachers are also interested in gathering semi-spaces which were important elements in traditional Iranian schools

Keywords:

Participatory design , School design , School organization types , Teachers participation ,