Transforming Educational Spaces Through Architectural Literacy

This chapter presents architectural literacy as a core competence for redesigning educational spaces, positioning the spatial dimension as an active agent in pedagogy, social life, environmental stewardship, and territorial engagement. Architectural literacy enables educators, students, architects, and communities to interpret, evaluate, and co-create learning environments, transforming school spaces into participatory platforms that foster inclusion, well-being, and democratic engagement. Central to this approach is Participatory Post-Occupancy Evaluation (PPOE), a methodology that turns assessment into co-learning, allowing school communities to translate lived experiences into actionable design knowledge. Drawing on the Redesign Of Learning Environments. What is changing? (ROLE) research project (CITUA, University of Lisbon), the chapter also demonstrates how actions on PPOE and regenerative design practices, from sustainable schoolyard redesigns to adaptive reuse of buildings, cultivate spatial awareness, empathy, and civic responsibility. These initiatives illustrate the potential of co-design to integrate pedagogical, social, environmental, and territorial considerations, transforming schools into dynamic laboratories of democracy and ecological practice. By framing architecture as both a pedagogical and cultural practice, it bridges the disciplinary divide between education and spatial design, highlighting the interplay between spatial arrangements, social dynamics, and learning outcomes. It concludes with recommendations for policy, professional development, and research: recognising school buildings as pedagogical infrastructures, embedding spatial thinking and participatory methodologies in teacher and architect training, and fostering transdisciplinary research that connects architecture, psychology, and environmental studies. Finally, architectural literacy shifts technical competence towards civic awareness, empowering all students to understand and shape the spaces that structure their collective futures.