MAGINE walking into a building where everything is above eye level. With your head tilted back to take in your surround- ings, you travel down what feels like a cavernous, never-ending tunnel. Every door you pass looks the same, the contents beyond each door blurring together in your mind with no individuality and no personal character. Now imagine someone said this was the place where you will be nourished, cultivated, and where you will find out who you really are. Every message the environ- ment gives is that personalisation, creativity, and excitement have no place inside this large and static building. This is the experi- ence of many elementary school children who attend schools designed with no regard for their development. The environment of a school plays an active role in children's development, including the way they learn. This position is held by many developmental psychologists. Piaget and Vygotsky both claimed that learning and development happen through the interaction of children with the environ- ment and people (Hunt, 1969). Psychologist and educator, Loris Malaguzzi (1998), the founder of the Reggio Emilia pre-school system, suggested that the environment is a ‘third teacher’, which has the power to speak to children and stimulate them. The influence of the environment is widely recognised by architects and land- scape architects, both in its physical compo- nents (space) and its relationship to socio-cultural meanings (place). In relation to schools, Nair and Fielding (2005) point out that the school building and grounds can be considered a three-dimensional text- book, offering curricular information, and helping children learn about social relations and norms (Sutton, 1996). However, most school systems do not see space and place as actors in the learning process. Many school buildings across the world still reflect the traditional pattern of shoe-box classrooms along corridors. Archi- tects can play a role and propose designs based on knowledge of child development, but the change must come from educators and communities (Hertzberger, 2008), the people who give meaning to schools. A deeper understanding and collaboration among school practitioners and designers is the key to going beyond traditional educa- tional facilities. This paper helps bridge the gap between educational psychology and architecture by 64 Educational & Child Psychology Vol. 28 No. 1 © The British Psychological Society, 2011 Children and their development as the starting point: A new way to think about the design of elementary schools Alessandro Rigolon & Maxine Alloway Although the active role of the environment in education has been widely accepted, only few schools render this consideration into built spaces. This is mostly due to a lack of communication between educators and designers. This paper aims to begin to bridge the gap between pedagogy and architecture by exploring aspects of child development and implications for designing developmentally appropriate environments. Five aspects of child development are considered: physical; ego; cognitive; social; and ethical. What is known about child development in each of these areas has significant implications for designing schools in new and innovative ways to better foster student learning. This analysis of child development highlights common themes of how schools should be designed including a variety of scale, exposure to nature, and interactivity of spaces. This interdisciplinary approach to design has significant implications for the development of school buildings. I