What if you’ve never experienced a learning space you belong in?
This week my language guest is someone who works in higher education.
She isn’t an artist and doesn’t work in art education, but yesterday we went to the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Masters Show in Dundee together.
The reasons for this are:
→ Degree shows are easy places to meet people and have conversations. (The artists are literally sitting in their spaces waiting for people to come in, look at their work and ask them about it).
→ Describing what’s similar and different to her own higher education set-up is great work-related language practice.
→ Language immersion works best in places we don’t naturally belong. We need to work out who we are in such spaces, and that deepens language connection.
→ Master’s shows are full of art and research on a wide range of subjects.
So for a language guest who works in education, a Master’s show is an extraordinary opportunity, beyond the immediate interest of seeing art.
As travellers, we tend to answer more questions than we are asked (eg: where are you from x 100). You can ask questions, listen to someone explain an idea, respond, follow your curiosity and move on to another room and another conversation.
This is great language practice. (Find more tips like this for anyone building their own language holiday).
Because my guest is an advanced-level speaker, we went off exploring independently, then met up at the end of every department to discuss what we saw and learned.
Of course, many of the differences between the educational environment she knows and this one were fairly obvious…
But many are subtle.
In the car on the way home, we got talking about what art schools are actually designed for.
What is an art school designed to do?
The building isn’t just a space optimally designed for making paintings or sculptures.
At their best, art schools are designed to develop confidence. To encourage ambition for change. To question what is normal. Sometimes to subvert it.
They give people permission to experiment with ideas, rules, roles and identity.
I know that feeling because DJCAD was my undergraduate art school.
It is 25 years since this place was my identity. I loved being an art student there.
Going back, I found it refreshing to be inside a building designed around creativity again.
If you’ve never experienced a space designed for people with priorities and instincts like your own, it’s hard to know how good that feels.
DJCAD was one of the first institutions where I felt I belonged. I wasn’t continually having to work out how to change myself to fit in. In many ways, I felt catered for.
As a student, though, I didn’t really understand how much of that experience had been designed.
We made artworks for corners. We occupied bits of the building. We tried things. I think we felt as though we were discovering what was possible there.
Going back 25 years later, I could see the other half of that relationship.
The space had been designed to let us.
→ Learn More About My Art & ESOL Training and Experience
Video: Artwork by Manuela Delosrios, DJCAD Masters Show 2026.
What Permission to Express Yourself Feels Like
We were part of a flow of students through an existing culture. Other students had occupied and changed those spaces before us, and students have continued to do so for the 25 years since I left.
The permission wasn’t accidental.
You can’t tell someone to experiment and then keep all the conditions that trained them into conforming.
What is an Optimal Language Learning Space?
You probably know what it feels like to enter an educational space and work out what is expected of you.
Where do I sit? What counts as progress? What are the invisible rules for succeeding here?
You probably also know spaces where you walk in and feel that there is already room for you. You relax. You feel comfortable. A friend’s house, your hairdresser, a favourite café.
Educational spaces often try to create a veneer of the second while remaining fundamentally the first.
They may add comfortable furniture, softer lighting, plants and communal areas to spaces still designed primarily around the delivery of education.
I’m interested in redesigning the starting point.
What if we start by designing a place where people can feel good, belong, participate and be themselves — and then build language education into that?
That produces a completely different kind of learning environment.
And this is where my art education continues to matter.
Over the years, I’ve worked with the design and redesign of artistic and educational situations and spaces.
I know that a space doesn’t simply contain what happens. Its design creates possibilities for what can happen.
The Blue Noun space
Blue Noun is a physical learning space in Crieff, and I am continually curating and redesigning it.
People walk through the door and ask, “What is this space?”
There are quiet places and sociable ones. There’s a kitchen and good food. There are books, original artworks and objects. There are posters all over the bathroom walls. There are three cats who sometimes wander about.
There are art materials we can pull out and start using.
The space is curated rather than cluttered. I’m always looking at the balance of quietness and interest, objects and empty space, privacy and sociability.
And it can respond to the people using it.
We can be talking and decide to make something. Move from a table to a sofa. Cook. Eat. Put music on. Get the paints out. Follow something interesting that has appeared in the conversation.
These are design decisions.
The aim is bigger than making a language school look comfortable.
I am interested in what happens when we redesign language education around conditions in which people already feel able to participate, experiment and belong.
Language guests tell me that the hub feels relaxing and comfortable.
During longer stays, some start telling me that Crieff feels like home.
That matters.
It’s more than a good sofa.
A space communicates what is permitted there.
Blue Noun visibly demonstrates that somebody is shaping this place. I have preferences. I change things. I put posters all over the bathroom. I let cats wander through. I keep adding, removing and adjusting.
The place itself demonstrates some of the freedom I’m asking a language guest to find in English.
There is room to have preferences. To contribute. To try something. To change your mind. To be yourself.
Even our guest English teachers find the presence of cats relaxing. (Fiona sharing a quiet moment with Rocky at the Blue Noun Hub).
Redesigning language learning
Many language-learning environments are very good language-delivery systems. They give people teachers, materials, explanations and practice.
I’m interested in what else an educational environment can be designed for.
→ What kind of spaces help you connect with a language?
→ What helps you develop the confidence to use it?
→ What would encourage you to experiment rather than conform?
→ What elements help you discover who you can be in a language?
Blue Noun is working answer to those questions.
It’s a real place in Crieff, but the ideas being pioneered here are bigger than one physical space.
- Learning environments can be redesigned.
- Educational situations can be redesigned.
- The roles we give learners can be redesigned.
And these principles can travel.
→ Small Cat, Big Picture: Your Right to Comfort in Language Learning
Language Learning – Differently
This is an idea that can happen anywhere.
I have built my language holidays in Perthshire, Scotland for a number of reasons. But they could happen in lots of other places.
The language industry needs to spend less time asking how to make people fit our existing models of language education, and more time asking:
What could we redesign around them?
This is one of the questions I explore through my English Holiday for ESOL Educators, which uses English while exploring different educational ideas, environments and practices. (The results are not just better English, but better English teachers).
Learning environments can be redesigned. Educational situations can be redesigned.
The roles we give learners can be redesigned.
And the principles can travel.
The Arc of an English Language Holiday
This Masters Show visit itself an example as an ingredient in a wider plan
My guest and I used an art school as a language-learning environment for an afternoon.
The artists didn’t need to become language teachers.
It was already a place rich with people, ideas, questions and reasons to communicate.
I added language exercises to that.
This combination can happen in many different settings; part of the expertise is curating the parts into a story – an experience – that will help someone’s language through the completeness of all the parts.
How this Dundee Visit Fits into the Bigger Structure of a Blue Noun English Language Holiday
For a fuller look at how excursions, conversations, workshops, hosts and teaching support work together, explore:
September is Art Month
September always has an art theme at Blue Noun, with invitations for both professional makers to train in English and for amateurs and art lovers to have an art immersion holiday.
This was the final weekend of August, so our visit to the Masters Show felt like a warm-up for the workshops, studio visits, conversations with artists and art-making we’ll be doing next month.
Art gives us excellent reasons to communicate. It gives us things to notice, questions to ask, opinions to form, disagreements to enjoy and ideas to try out. It’s embedded in all our holidays, but September dials up the art to the max.
→ 3 Small, Beautiful Objects That Help People Remember
Art gives us spaces where experimentation is already expected.
Blue Noun has absorbed these lessons to the advantage of your English.
Field Notes | How the Language Work Happens
A Blue Noun Field Note
My Blue Noun Field Notes make visible some of the thinking and decision-making that happens during a Blue Noun language holiday.
This one comes from an earlier visit to an art school. Within minutes of arriving, we found a classical sculpture with a collection of colourful poles stashed behind it — a small clue that we’d entered a space with different rules.
For me, immersion happens anywhere we don’t automatically belong. We have to pay closer attention, work out what’s happening and respond. Art spaces heighten that awareness of our environment: they ask us to notice, interpret, question and adapt. Our language has to react too.
That slight uncertainty opens up permission — we don’t already know what is going to happen or what we’re supposed to say. And that makes art environments particularly rich places for practising the responsive, adaptable English that real fluency requires.
Further Information
Related Posts
→ Language Holidays for Women: Why Design Matters
→ Beyond Visitor Attractions: A Visit to Stirling University
