A Study on the Classroom Design in Middle School for Preventing School Violence

학교폭력 예방을 위한 중학생 교실환경 계획에 관한 연구

Despite a lot of efforts, school violence is getting severe nowadays and especially it seems remarkably occurring among middle school students. Many studies show that most school violence occur in classrooms where the students spend most of their time in studying and socializing for their everyday life. The purpose of this study is to identify design elements of middle school classroom and to suggest some design plans for preventing school violence, in the point of view of CPTED. For this objective, six middle schools were selected from Gangseo-gu, Seoul, and the questionnaire and survey were conducted to identify the status of school violence and the physical classroom environment in each schools. An analysis was carried using SPSS to identify the correlation between the school violence and the physical environmental design elements. The results are as follows : although each selected school shows different status of school violence and the physical environment in classrooms, commonly the occurrence and the fear of violence are related to the classroom environment. Therefore, In order to plan classroom for preventing school violence, 'the proper size of classroom avoiding overcrowd', 'elevation design for the sense of belonging and territoriality', 'improvement of deteriorated environment' should be considered for reduce the causes of violence. And 'maximization of natural surveillance from hallway', 'accessibility of teacher' should be considered for rapid management of violence.