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Basic Patterns for Reform
Revealed
Through a Review of Case Studies
The
case studies reviewed here share a common perspective in that they begin
with or within school systems and end with real benefits to the community
at large. This section will
shift attention to more directly address the operating thesis or value
statement of the Stein and Schools Lecture Series, of which this paper is
a part, “In order to
significantly affect community development in the 21st century,
communities must advance their ability to cooperatively join their
community development and educational planning, through new policy,
design, and planning initiatives.”
In
other words, how can schools and communities work together to develop the
best places for living and working?
In
addition to the optimism one should feel in reviewing the case studies,
citizens and researchers can also extract from the case studies certain
guideposts for taking action to design better schools.
Four observations gleaned from the case studies are presented here,
along with suggestions for ways communities can take action and possible
avenues for further research.
Observation
#1:
Communities
must design ways to identify and include all “clients” during the
programming and design process of centers for learning.
Success
in the case studies depended on broad-based community input, and a
programming attitude that proclaimed, what the client has to say matters.
Apathy is only one of the negative responses to exclusion.
Suggestions
for Community Action:
- Consult
the people who will be or are using the building.
Do this early on during the planning process.
Follow the School Zone model to get started.
-
Design civics curriculum that uses
field trips to community meetings, planining boards, architectural firms,
city planning offices, etc.
- Hold
community meetings at schools.
- Broaden
your client base by sharing and collecting data on changing
demographics (our
population is getting older, for example)
and combining parent/student requirements with after hours
programs that matter to different local groups.
Note: this does
not necessarily mean that school personnel will take on more community
responsibilities. We are
talking about optimizing the use of space and saving money for
taxpayers.
- The
Council of Educational Facility Planners International
(CEFPI) offers training and certification programs to encourage
better construction practices for schools through advocacy, training,
and research. The
organization offers a designation for “Recognized Educational
Facility Professional” for
the facility planning profession (CEFPI,
2000). These and other groups can help communities develop
standards and awareness.
Suggestions
for Research:
- Collect
data from multiple groups to evaluate school performance.
In New Mexico, the Coalition for Science and Math Education
(CESE), a private nonprofit organization, contributes a
different perspective on education by beginning with questions and
seeking data before drawing conclusions.
CESE observations are scientific conclusions drawn only from
the actual data, not opinions or recommendations. CESE’s initial
findings have indicated where schools need improvement and where
further study is warranted. Findings
are reported to the State Board of Education and State Board of
Education at no cost to the state (Brügge, Johnson, 2000).
- There
is still a need for more qualitative research which shows the effects
of more community and client involvement in the learning process as
well as in the design of the learning environments which house them.
Lorraine Maxwell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, recently
completed a study, “School
Building Renovation and Student Performance:
One District’s Experience.”
In the Syracuse city study, elementary school student test
scores were evaluated before, during, and after a district-wide
renovation effort. Results
revealed a statistically significant relationship between upgraded
facilities and higher math scores, among other findings
(Maxwell, with CEFPI, 1999).
CEFPI acts as a collection and dissemination point for
educational facilities research by partnering with planners,
architects, educators, construction professionals, government, and
higher education through its “Where Children Learn”
program (CEFPI,
2000). Similar follow-up
studies could be done on new schools designed as three-dimensional
textbooks or tools for learning, as recommended here.
Observation
#2:
Community
members must develop visual-spatial and design literacy in order to
participate intelligently while making contributions to any programming
and design process.
It
is essential that all parties communicate using a common language, and
that those who are unaware of, or intimidated by, design principles and
techniques will rarely give full support to initiatives to restructure
schools. Citizens must learn
through the design process to defer gratification, to persist by revising
work until functional solutions are achieved, to work in teams, and to
take their victories where they can find them.
If you lack the tools to think “out of the box,”
then all you will create is more boxes.
Suggestions
for Community Action:
- Admit
it: we live in a designed
environment and we are a visual society.
We need to be visually literate in order to sort through the
volumes of information thrown at us through packaging, products, the
media, and the Internet. Teach
design to everyone, hold workshops, display school design work in
public venues, emphasize a design component at science fairs, stage
exhibitions and inventor shows, dissect advertising, evaluate your
budget for public art, evaluate your community using design criteria.
- Involve
more design professionals or graduate students in the classroom.
They can teach visual-spatial concepts as part of teacher
professional development as well as to students.
- Clarify
the image of design as it is linked to art.
Imaginative design thinking is not limited to a few geniuses
who are lucky to be born talented.
Everyone is a designer. Add
this to a city motto. Send
this message home with the design work students do in school.
- Schools
and communities must communicate with well designed materials.
Buy, use, and share technology to produce professional looking
documents and displays. Advertise.
- Use
a design programming method to define what you want to accomplish as a
community. Designing
within limits promotes creativity and integrates thinking.
Time and time again, educators as well as architects and city
planners witness the power of the clearly defined problem to inspire
good thinking practices. In
each of the case studies, planners and initiators faced the usual
challenges: budget
restraints, defining needs, lack of time, and upholding aesthetic
standards. There is no way to meet all of these real challenges
without demonstrating flexibility and imagination.
Suggestions
for Research:
- Use
standardized test scores to compare schools with and without design
education curriculum over several years.
- Design
a design rubric and test it in the classroom.
Architecture and Children evaluates student performance across
five levels of achievement and five areas of expertise:
Fluency and Clarity of Communication; Technical Competence;
Understanding Process; Imagination,
Innovation and Creativity; Detail and Overall Aesthetics (Sanger Unified School District & Anne Taylor
Associates, 2000b).
Observation
#3:
Communities
must cultivate the image of young people as strong and capable learners
who want to learn.
All
of the architects and educators working on these projects believed in
their students and trusted them to contribute effectively to the planning
and design process. Educators
relinquished some traditional controls and became facilitators in order to
bring out individual and collective student strengths.
Students responded beyond expectations to this challenge.
Suggestions
for Community Action:
- Challenge
students to fix a community problem or to maintain and enhance school
property. Put young
people in charge of a community initiative.
- Make
it a policy that students be represented in city government.
- Use
high school students who are technically literate to train teachers to
get up to speed, to install technology, etc.
Use students to teach seniors computer skills.
- Set
up or take advantage of programs that invite students into the private
sector as visitors, performers, and/or interns.
- Students
set up a web site for collecting design determinant data about youth
and schools. Architects
and others use this data to inform themselves about the needs of young
people in terms of school design and community design.
Suggestions
for Research:
- Use
technology and scientific methods to gather information about students
and what they want and need from school.
- Explore
project-based learning and student-designed curriculum in terms of
test scores. Do students
at schools that employ these methods do better or worse than
traditional schools? Do
test scores measure design capability?
- Do
research on alternative and technological processes and products that
can be utilized in learning environments (e.g., laptops, new office
systems, data collection devices for science).
Observation
#4:
Planning
and design techniques used by architects and educators can offer a model
for communities to use in developing and evaluating initiatives.
The
“how” of most of the success stories is linked to the synthesis of
existing procedures and concepts. Participants
in the case studies built on what they knew in order to create something
new--new planning processes.
Suggestions
for Community Action:
- Schools
as well as communities benefit from sharing spaces and developing
locations to suit multiple needs.
Determine habitability concerns for the groups that will use
the space. Where do needs overlap and where are they distinct?
Synthesize these needs to invent spaces that serve more than
one purpose and save money. This process can also be used in a more abstract way to
design communication processes and procedures for avoiding duplication
of effort or information. For
example, schools already offer minimal nursing and counseling
services. If more
extensive community services move into school locations, how might we
ensure that (a)
community resources save schools time and money and vice versa,
(b) we develop
communication procedures that we can use to gain a more complete
picture of the whole child in the context of community, and
(c) scheduling and
functional “territory” are well defined?
- Adapt
architectural evaluation procedures as methods for assessing community
centers. Modify
Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE)
criteria that architects use to evaluate buildings to fit your
specific desired outcomes, such as streamlined management of shared
spaces. POEs offer a
systematic “before and
after” methodology for
analyzing spaces. Did the
design do what the program said it would do?
Is the space being used as it was intended to be used?
For a start on learning more about POEs contact your local AIA
organization, architectural programs at your local university, the
Educational Design Institute, or use the Internet to connect with
Design Share (2000) and its “School Construction News” feature on
line. Once you develop
your own version of habitability and its assessment, share it with
architects.
- Familiarize
yourself with architectural design standards.
A listing of awards criteria for schools as centers of
community has been developed through collaborative efforts of
architects, consultants, educators, and CEFPI, through a United States
Department of Education (1998)
Symposium on School Design .
To summarize, schools should:
- Enhance
teaching and learning and accommodate the needs of all learners
- Serve
as centers of community
- Result
from a planning/design process involving all stakeholders
- Provide
for health, safety and security
- Make
effective use of all available resources
- Allow
for flexibility and adaptability of changing needs
(Design Share, 2000; United
States Department of Education, 1998).
Suggestions
for Research:
As
related to the above design awards criteria, this year Design Share and
other jury members exchanged ideas about the process of soliciting and
evaluating school designs from the design community.
During this e-mail discussion it was suggested by Jeffery Lackney,
Director of the Educational Design Institute, that jurors consider a way
to require joint submissions from both the educator and the architect,
similar to some published qualitative research that contains multiple
perspectives (J. Lackney,
personal correspondence, 8/1/2000). Further
research along these lines might include analysis of school sites using
multiple voices as compared to research findings of a quantitative nature.
Conclusion
Moving
into the future means entering uncharted territory or, perhaps, territory
that has been mapped out from high above by some sort of intellectual
satellite, but has never been traversed by people on the ground. Out on the front lines, schools and communities are
struggling to synthesize space needs, design, and usage on the most basic
levels, relying primarily on building codes, predetermined square footage
needs, and regulations, with little other input of an academic or
aesthetic nature. Most often
no one has considered asking for direct meaningful student input when
planning new or renovated school buildings. This would not happen in the
business world, where the customer must be considered, at least, before
being manipulated by marketing techniques.
Valuable school space often rests unused during evenings and in
summer months, and playground design rarely addresses academic curriculum
(Sanger Unified School District & Anne Taylor Associates,
2000a). Designers of schools need to look deeper for inspiration.
The instructional delivery system of schools is changing, and past
models do not reflect the impact of technology and the information highway
on the use of space in schools by both teachers and students, let alone
community. In fact,
classrooms as we know them today may be eliminated entirely in the future.
At the very least they must be configured differently now that
roles are changing. No longer
should we see isolated classrooms located along double-loaded corridors,
or individual desks arranged in rows, with classroom dynamics focused on
the teacher as the center of knowledge--and yet this type of outmoded
design is what we encounter in reality every day even as new, “cutting
edge” schools are being
built.
Artificial
divisions between schools and the real world must be dissolved and
replaced with holistic systems thinking, rather than territorial and
hierarchical approaches to policy-making.
In the case studies, teamwork during the design process arose from
an awareness of the Principles of Ecology as guidelines for understanding
our place in the universe. Communities
of the future, if they are to survive as the building blocks of society,
must define themselves as desirable places to inhabit.
They must follow the laws of nature, which are not linear or
fragmented, but cyclical and dynamically balanced.
Schools
must find ways to communicate not only their needs but their successes and
their research to the community at large.
Community planners and architects, in turn, must try to familiarize
themselves with research in the field of education. Current brain research shows us that humans learn by
constructing knowledge, and that education focusing on rote memorization
neglects the potential of far more powerful natural or “locale” memory systems which allow us to remember complex detail
embedded in context (Caine
and Caine, 1991). Humans most
naturally think by making connections to what they already know and by
interacting with the spaces they inhabit.
If more people were aware of this research, perhaps these same
citizens would realize that standardized testing can only offer a partial
measurement of what has been learned.
In addition to brain research, nearly one hundred years ago John
Dewey (1916)
cited the importance of hands-on, minds-on
learning, a constructivist theme now taken up by cutting edge magazines
from Educational Leadership (November, 1999) to Fast Company
(June, 2000). Furthermore, books abound about the current revolution in
technology and how aware young people are of this revolution.
As Tapscott points out in his books and articles about the rise of
the net generation, our children often know more about technology than we
adults do, leading to a “generation lap”
in which students surpass teachers or authority figures in
knowledge (Tapscott, 1998).
Research,
the case studies in this article, and common sense are telling communities
the same thing: that students
construct meaning and learn within the context of the environment--the
built, natural and cultural environment--and not in isolation.
Schools cannot be viewed as separate from community.
The education system is complex and cannot be fixed in piecemeal
fashion.
Communities
and leaders must ask themselves, why aren’t we using what we know to
create better schools and better facilities?
Why don’t we teach teachers and other citizens about the context
of the environment and spatial understanding?
Why aren’t we using design--hands-on, problem-solving design
workshops--to teach both adults and children how the world works?
If young people know more than we do about technology, why don’t
we consult them and ask them to lead us into the 21st century?
If we are preparing young people to become valuable contributors to
society, why are we shutting them into stripped landscapes behind chain
link fences, cut off from interaction with community?
All
stakeholders in the schools should be a part of the programming process of
schools and curriculum. This is, at heart, what democracy is about:
participation of an educated public in the process of governance.
If, as the premise of this lecture series states, “...communities
must advance their ability to cooperatively join their community
development and educational planning,”
then that public at the grass roots level must gain some ability to
think as designers and planners, to develop problem-solving strategies and
a “knowing eye.” Communities must develop an appreciation for the complexity
of design work. Schools,
first of all, must teach design, not only to K - 12 students, but to
teachers and to others in the community as well.
Before more schools are built, communities must initiate a
programming and planning process that operates within the context of local
concerns, that synthesizes thinking from multiple sources, that demands
excellence, and that results in well designed spaces serving as visible
expressions of community sensibility and culture.
Anne Taylor, Ph.D., Hon. AIA
Professor and Director
The Institute for Environmental Education
School of Architecture & Planning
University of New Mexico
2414 Central SE, Albuquerque, NM 87131-1226
(505) 277-5058 Fax: (505) 898-4689
aetaylor@unm.edu
See
the next section for references, a selected bibliography and an appendix
that includes suggestions for additional research.
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Programming
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