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Introduction
Waves
Timeline

Agricultural
First Wave
1650-1849

Industrial
2nd Wave
1850-1949

Information
3rd Wave
1940-1999

Knowledge
4th Wave
2000-2025

Author
Contact

Workshop
Seating
Matrix

Sketch above Bill Brubaker

Photo right: concept generated at Vancouver workshop

Third Wave Societal Trends
       Many names have been given to the Third Wave: post-industrial, information society, post-modern society, and knowledge society. What most authors agree is that the Third Wave represents an entirely new cultural paradigm that is still emerging and unfolding as we enter the next millennium. Our society is arguably in a period of great cultural transformation from the industrial factory model to a new dynamic socio-cultural form yet to be fully dominant. Change seems the only constant during this period and is once again experienced as a clashing of waves, this time between the Second and Third.
       The dominant icon or core pattern of the Third Wave is arguably the modern computer. However, Toffler suggests that the Third Wave can best be marked not by the development of the modern computer (Mark I, Howard Aiken, US, 1944) but rather by the decade that witnessed white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time (1955). Workers in Third Wave knowledge professions outnumbered workers in Second Wave industrial jobs.
       The information society requires a global economy with unpredictable, accelerated, differentiated, diverse and miniaturized markets. An economy based on new industries such as electronics, molecular biology, oceanography, ecology, space sciences, computer science and telecommunications. Corporations are more fluid, transnational, team-oriented, downsized and flatter, customer-, quality- and service-oriented, knowledge driven and entrepreneurial. The manufacturing process is based on customization, short batch production and quality principles. The industrial caste system is breaking down to include employees as part-time and flextime.
        The nation state, that political mechanism of the industrial society, is being challenged by independently acting transnational corporations and international organizations like OPEC and the Common Market on the one hand, and ethnic regionalism and secessionists and special interests groups of all kinds on the other.

        Community is getting smaller and larger at the same time. People want to spend more time in their home communities while at the same time be able to travel globally and virtually. Travel and telecommunications has created a desire on the part of many people to accommodate diverse cultures, locally as well as globally - accepting and celebrating diversity. The definition of the family is changing with only 7% of all families living in the nuclear family arrangements in the US today, and 20% living alone. Household types include as many as 86 different combinations of adults exist in the US today. Family life and work life are reintegrating as more people telecommute. The home centered society can be seen as having a positive impact on community life: a stable community, return of face-to-face communication in neighborhoods and reduced energy consumption. The information age allows individuals to emerge from the cogs of the machine to express themselves with mottoes like just do it and have it your way. The Third Wave is an age of individualism.
         Energy sources are beginning to move away from the Second Wave’s reliance on non-renewable resources to renewable resources, recycling and conservation, and the emphasis on long-term sustainability. Finally, the key pattern for communications during the Third Wave is virtuality. Demassification of media and the warehouse of images from the image factories of CBS and NBC have begun with competitive cable and telecommunication systems.

Educational Approaches
       Educational approaches to accommodate the Third Wave are still not evident. American education’s response to these societal changes can be characterized as a series of tweaks to the conventional system – the Second Wave.
       Key educational reform movements in the 1960s centered on curriculum and instruction and introduced open education, individualized instruction, the middle school model, and other initiatives that were quickly rejected in favor of the more traditional Second Wave model. Walls go up in the open space classroom; flexible modular schedules revert to 6 and 7 period days; educators continue to debate new and different approaches always in an "either/or" context. One columnist sums it all up in the following observation: "place a 19^th century teacher in a 20^th century classroom and she will feel right at home".
       The movement in the 1990s toward multi-age and various alternative learner groupings, cooperative learning strategies, integrated curriculum and interdisciplinary instruction, much of which theoretically fits a Third Wave paradigm has only started to take hold in educational communities throughout the Americas and internationally.
       In addition, partnerships between schools, their surrounding community organizations and other public agencies have become more prevalent, but still not wide spread. Schools are increasingly being seen as places in the community amenable to one-stop shopping for social services such as before and after school daycare, adult literacy, parenting academies and health and employment services.
       Education has become increasingly politicized. In the 1980s and early 1990s educational reforms begin to experiment with educational restructuring mirroring the corporate business world leading to such initiatives as school choice and vouchers, site-based management, increasing centralized standards, teacher accountability and reconstitution programs, and a retrenchment of teacher unions. Bottom-up reform initiatives by parent and community groups further politicize the educational setting. A global economy has made comparisons of test scores from students in different countries more important than comparisons between schools and districts in the U.S.

Facility Responses:
        School building planning and design responded in a variety of ways to the conflicts evident between the Second and Third Wave educational paradigms during the second half of the 20^th century. School building designs have for the most part replicated variations on the factory model school. School buildings have gotten bigger in size and population and added numerous specialized and auxiliary spaces such as media centers, resource spaces, teacher offices, and small seminar rooms.
       Some facility responses have begun to form that suggest a completely new way of thinking about how learning can best be supported and nurtured in the Third Wave society. The first experiment in Third Wave design is illustrated by the development of the open plan school building during the 1960s and 1970s. In response to the open education movement that relied on a number of curriculum and instruction innovations such as individualized instruction, educational facility planners and designers created open-plan schools to accommodate these innovations. Open-plan schools featured flexible folding and movable walls, systems components and the potential for large open spaces. As larger numbers of open-plan schools were built and occupied problems became apparent immediately. Providing highly flexible and open learning settings for Second Wave teachers, accustomed to self-contained learning environments, proved to be a disaster. Many of the innovations in curriculum and instruction represented by the open education movement failed to take hold in practice resulting in facilities that did not fit the programs naturally occurring in them.
        During this same period the conceptualization of the community school encouraged innovative facility responses as well. Schools were increasingly being seen as centers of their communities. Sharing school facilities with a variety of community and government organizations have been attempted, from daycare, health and social service agencies to community education programs, sports and recreation and other life-long learning activities. The degree to which schools have opened up and shared their facilities with the community has had mixed results. However, in the middle to late 1990s, with federal support the growth of what is now known as community learning centers has accelerated.
       A new trend in educational facility planning has been to view whole communities as a learning laboratory for students. Learning takes place everywhere. Schools and school district administrators across the country are beginning to realize that working to improve schools includes the larger collaborative effort of working to improve their community’s overall learning ecology. Second, in order to provide students with project-based, authentic, real world learning experiences, educators are increasingly pursuing opportunities for learning outside the structured classroom that would otherwise not be possible in the classroom. Learning happens in many settings and each setting needs to be strengthened. Schools are decentralized into a network of partnerships and smaller structures.
       Concerns over the developmental appropriateness of junior high school environments for pre-adolescent learners led to the development of the middle school philosophy in the 1960s. The facility response to the middle school did not take off until the mid-eighties and is now commonly referred to as the "house plan" corresponding to the middle school "family" organization. A family can consist of as few as 100 students and 4 teachers and as many as 200 students and eight teachers. The house can include anywhere from four to eight self-contained classrooms oriented toward a centralized resource center and supported with a specialized classroom, teacher offices, small seminar rooms and other support spaces.
       The house plan concept is currently being applied in high school environments as an appropriate response to advances in self-directed learning and interdisciplinary instruction. The goal of keeping groupings of learners small enough to support individualized attention and cooperative learning is now seen as having developmental value throughout the K-12 learning experience.
      The rapid growth in instructional and digital technologies began to create the need to rethink what we mean by school. The first crack of this Third Wave technology into Second Wave thinking began with the re-conceptualization of the library into what is commonly referred to as the instructional media center. As computer technologies rapidly miniaturize the impact they will have on facilities is unknown. Planning for self-contained classrooms has included additional space to house technological equipment, yet the advent of laptops, voice networks, video, distance learning, palm pilots, internet and wireless technologies might reverse the trend. Resource centers have increasingly been located near classrooms rather than be housed in a main computer room. Some planners debate the necessity of a computer room to begin with if technology can be just as easily dispersed throughout a facility. In addition, the ability to log on to the Internet has created a push toward virtual schools and educational programs. What impact these technological trends may have on physical learning settings is an open question.
        With all the innovative facility responses that exist the reality for the majority of schools in North America, urban, suburban and rural is that of the Second Wave facility and Second Wave educational approaches.

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