Section 5
CASE STUDIES
The conference provided several case studies of innovative alternatives in learning environments. I have gone into more depth in the case studies that were most pertinent to the foci of this study. The titles of the case studies were those given by the presenters.

Case Study 1—Open and Flexible Learning Spaces [Heinavaara Elementary School]. Reino Tapaninen as Chief Architect of the National Board of Education in Helsinki, Finland, opened his remarks for the case study with a presentation slide showing a line of “identical blockheads” emerging in a straight line from a “block” school building. Recognizing that learning needs to be taking place differently for societal and economical reasons, Finland had changed its educational system to be learner centered, cooperative, and project-based.

The Heinavaara Elementary School was designed two years ago through a cooperative agreement between Finnish architects and Cuningham Group, led by Bruce Jilk. The school is located north of Helsinki and is designed for 190 learners. According to Tapaninen, learners are involved with projects all day long. The learners learn, study, and assess together and proceed at their own levels. They work in small and large groups, use technology to access information, have panel discussions and assemblies, create displays, and give presentations.

Recognizing that schools also provide a place for social growth, Heinavaara Elementary was designed to be a place that learners: (a) bonded with, (b) belonged to, (c) met with peers, and (d) took part in the learning process and life together. The spaces allow for different sized groups, have laboratories for experimentation, and have individual workspaces. Teachers learn and experiment with the learners and are located in the middle of the learning spaces. In keeping with the nature of projects, dining was available in small “cafes” that are open all day with no prescribed times to eat.

Design Features of the Physical Environment
According to Tapaninen, flexibility, openness, and visibility of learning at Heinavaara result from designing the facility around a central resource area. There are student sharing spaces, like gazebos, only for the learners. Production of information and projects occur in large open spaces rather than in rooms separated by corridors. Comfortable and versatile furniture, and soft and inviting lighting are important features that support learner centered, collaborative, project-based learning.

An urban environment was created in the design of the school. The outside entrance was designed like a city square to provide a gathering space. From this square, each workshop area had its own outside entrance or the learners could enter through the main door and pass by a large hearth at the center of the plaza. The hearth provided a “warm start” to the day. From the plaza, there were streets with cafes, net surfing and media bars; and a large information resource area. The streets lead to the workshop spaces. The building is also used a learning tool in that the night sky is painted on the ceiling and signage in the building is written using other languages.

Case Study 2—Designing a Place for Problem Solving: The Center for Applied Technology and Career Exploration. Daniel Duke, professor of educational leadership and the director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Educational Design at the University of Virginia, began his presentation with a story about one of the site tours from the previous evening. After visiting a K-8 Montessori School in Amsterdam, the tour bus was unable to maneuver a street corner due to a parked car. There were no alternate routes. To solve the problem, the bus driver asked for six volunteers to get out of the bus, lift the car, and place it on the sidewalk, thus, giving the bus enough room to get around the corner. Duke asked the conference participants, “Can we do this for education reform?”

Four years ago, the community of Rocky Mount, Virginia, needed to address a high dropout rate and at the same time needed a new middle school. The new middle school was designed as a Center for Applied Technology and Career Exploration. The per capita income for the region was less than $16,000; forty percent of the adults had less than a high school diploma, and 32 percent of the students were eligible for free lunches. The preference would have been to build a traditional middle school for 1000 learners. The cost would have been $14 million dollars, but the community had passed a $7 million dollar bond.

Duke explained that the educators and community recognized the 8th grade is a crucial year and often is the time of “losing them [the students]” from the school system. Through a community-based design process, the community created a school focused on career clusters and project-based learning. The aspiration was to keep the learners in school and to begin to prepare them for careers.

Because of the funding limitation, it was decided to build a school for 500 learners. Half of the middle school students would attend the school for half of the year. The other 500 learners would remain at the existing school. The groups switch locations mid-year. During the 18-week semester at the Center for Applied Technology and Career Exploration, each learner selects three, six-week career modules. The learner spends each day of the six-week period in that module.

The learning is based on real community issues that need to be solved. The learner presents her/his findings to community agencies, local governments, and to boards. The modules provide team learning, problem solving, improved oral and written communication skills, clarification of career paths, and the opportunity to develop a work ethic comprised of responsibility, initiative, and dependability.

Design Features of the Physical Environment
Duke explained the school is designed as a center with no traditional classrooms, laboratories, cafeteria, or gym. There is an electronic library, one computer per two learners, individual workstations rather than desks, a commons that provides food service for a three-hour time block to better accommodate the problem-based learning process, storage in each workstation, and access to the local YMCA for physical fitness activities.

Case Study 3—Designing for the Unknown. [Alpha High School]. Norm Dull, architect with Dull Olson Weeks, described the dilemma of designing learning facilities for a future that is unknown. Educators request facilities that are flexible and adaptable in hopes of gaining a facility that will be as usable in thirty years as it is today. One high school his firm designed is Alpha High School (AHS) in Gresham, Oregon, in the Portland Metropolitan area. Alpha High School is an alternative high school designed around the needs of the learners. Two goals for the learners are: (a) to develop a positive self-image, and (b) to gain skills necessary to be employed upon graduation.

For half of the day the learners are at Alpha High School taking academic courses to graduate, and the other half of the day the learners are at a work site. As much as possible, the curricula for the academic courses is designed using projects or service learning. The projects range from growing plants for a stream restoration in a National Forest to learning about running a small business such as video production or bicycle repair. Over 200 business partners come into the school to provide guidance and school-
to-work experiences. The school also has space for small business incubators in which the learners are given the opportunity to observe and participate in the business.

Design Features of the Physical Environment
Dull pointed out the most impressive design feature of AHS is the ability to move all the walls and cabinetry in the learning portions of both floors. Learning spaces can be created for groups as small as 10 and the total area can be opened up to house over 200 people. The administrative area of the school can be secured so that the facility can be used by others in the evenings and weekends.

Two other noticeable design features about the AHS that differs from the traditional comprehensive high school are: (a) the lack of a large parking lot and (b) its small size. Not much parking area is needed because the learners and community users have easy access to public transportation with AHS being located next to light-rail and bus lines. Again, the size of the AHS remains small with having just half of the learner population at the facility at one time, while the other half are at work sites.

The design does not include a traditional library, cafeteria, or a gymnasium. Alpha High School partners with the public library, which is located a few blocks away and because the learners are at the facility only half of the day, they do not need full meal service provided on-site or an onsite gymnasium. There is a snack center with vending machines and a microwave to heat food. Alpha High School is the cornerstone of an urban redevelopment project in Gresham, Oregon, and is used as a community center in the evenings and weekends by local Senior Centers and Mt. Hood Community College.

The Space Workshop
Six design theme workshops held at the conference were: (a) Location, (b) Space, (c) Time, (d) Scale, (e) Cost, and (f) Context. I participated in the Space Workshop and explain the process of the workshop in the study because it served to guide the design of Phase III of this study. I also describe the features of the physical learning environment that were identified during the workshop that were pertinent to this study.

The description of the Space Workshop read, “…the basic building block of a school design has been the classroom, a setting supportive of lecture-style instruction.” The question given to the workshop participants was, “How should the spaces for learning be designed to accommodate new learning approaches, specifically for the Study House concept?” The Study House concept (Meijer, 1996), was developed in the early 1990’s by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science in response to education reform and implemented in 1997.

The Study House prepares learners at the secondary level to enter a bachelor’s degree level university in The Netherlands and accommodates both academic and vocational opportunities. The concept develops critical thinking, relevancy to the learning, and responsibility for planning one’s own learning by: (a) working on projects more independently and in small groups and (b) teachers being more of a coach than an instructor. The physical learning environment to support a Study House includes spaces of varying sizes to support teacher/faculty-led instruction, individual work, small and large group work, project work, and access to technology and other resources. Elly Reinders, Jan Wagemaker, and Jeff Lackney were the workshop facilitators.

Design Process
The process began with a question to the workshop participants to think back to a successful learning experience and to make note of the following things: (a) what was the learning experience, (b) what activity was occurring, (c) where were they, and (d) who were they with. The workshop participants discussed their experiences with the others at the table, wrote the information from the above questions on large sheets of paper, posted the sheets of paper on the wall, and the workshop group discussed the experiences looking for common patterns or themes. The facilitators of the workshop analyzed the information and determined that 77 percent of the listed learning experiences took place outside of school-based learning activities and settings.

To further stimulate the workshop participants’ thinking about educational experiences, video clips from The Dead Poet’s Society movie were shown. The movie was about a residential college preparatory school for young men. The clips included scenes depicting the structure of the school’s physical setting, social structures, learning practices, and a parent’s influence on a young person’s educational and life choices.

The workshop participants self-formed into three groups and were asked to design a space for a “Study House.” As each group began the process, the facilitators became aware that the groups were each and collectively resisting the assignment. The groups wanted to focus on the philosophical concept of whole communities becoming learning communities, taking the learning out into the community, and bringing the community into the learning process rather than focus on designing a particular type of facility or a singular concept. The facilitators allowed the groups to proceed in the new direction and also noted that each group had developed its own process to complete the assignment. The facilitators named the three groups: (a) the “verbal group” [that wanted to talk and talk], (b) the “kinesthetic group” [who wanted to begin to design immediately], and (c) the “future group” [who began with an initial discussion of what learning may be like in the future and then moved into the design phase].

After the majority of the time being spent in discussion, the verbal group in which I participated, produced three learning diagrams in the last ninety minutes before the report-out session to the whole conference. The first diagram illustrated the development of the learning process along the age spectrum from birth to high school. The group member who drew the diagram explained that in his view, learning initially started in a contained, fairly safe, box-like, environment and through elementary education a few holes and tears began to appear in the box as the learner discovered more knowledge. By middle school one or two sides of the box had been kicked out and by graduation from high school, it was his hope that all four sides would have been flattened.

The second diagram showed the dynamic links between learning sites all over the
city or geographic area. The connections varied with some being one-way, others were two-way, some were formal and others were informal links.

Wanting to develop a more in-depth learning community, the third diagram (Figure 2.) had four “streets” or “pathways.” The intersection of the four streets was a basic core learning area with resources, media, computers, and staff. In each of the four directions from the central learning core was one of the following learning spaces: (a) personal spaces for students and the community; (b) project-group spaces; (c) exploratory spaces for science, equipment, and technologies; and (d) social experience and activities spaces. The diagram showed direct flow in and out of all of the spaces, using wireless and Internet technologies, community providers as teachers, and learning staff going out into the community. The social experience and activities area also provided community support services and a basic commons area for the community, learners, and staff.

The kinesthetic group built a three-dimensional model using construction paper and added accessories to simulate the built environment. The learning community was built around and into a lake, using the lake as one pod for learning. The learning was interdisciplinary with a multicultural, multidirectional, and whole community focus.

The future group looked to the year 2025 and created a learning village within one structure. The structure housed cinemas, markets, cafes, offices, and meeting spaces all providing a sense of “voyeurism” into the learning spaces and processes taking place in the village.

Figure 2. Learning Community Diagram
The process used in the Space Workshop illustrated that in a relatively short time frame, it was possible to have a small group of people, who basically did not know one another, but all of whom had knowledge and experience in education and/or architecture, to do the following three things: (a) produce insightful designs, (b) identify the features of the design, and (c) provide insight into the thinking behind the selection of the features into the design process itself. Another learning experience from the Space Workshop that I applied to Phase III of the study was the participant group might want to change the assignment to what is most pertinent for them at the time. The importance of the lesson was as a facilitator of a learning project, it is crucial to recognize when to deviate from the planned process and agenda and let the group’s work flow.

Findings of Phase II
Five new features emerged in Phase II that were not identified in Phase I: (a) access to food and beverage; (b) lighting such as task lighting and light tables; (c) high-bay, shop space (d) technology laboratories; and (e) slump spaces or places to generate synergy, create new ideas, think, and relax. Features recommended in Phase I that were not mentioned in Phase II were: (a) public display space, (b) lockable personal storage, (c) personal display space, and (d) durability.

The analysis of Phase I included clustering the design features into four preliminary categories of group size, learning activities, adjacencies, and furnishings. The five new features from Phase II fit into the categories as next described. Features building as a learning tool, high-bay, shop space, and technology laboratories were added to the learning activities category. An additional feature identified was the infrastructure of the building being used as a learning tool to teach concepts such as sociology, psychology, mathematics, scientific and environmental principles. Specialized infrastructure and equipment needed to support specific learning activities were identified. Lighting (e.g., general purpose and task based) was added to the furnishings category as an element to support learning processes. Further analysis of Phase II identified a new category of design features, which I labeled as psychological and physiological support referring to the human functions that need to be taken care of during the learning process.

Psychological and Physiological Support
The design features put into that category were access to food and beverages and “slump” spaces. One could argue that all learners need access to food and beverage; however, the participants stated that with collaborative, project-based learning, the activity takes place in longer blocks of time and it could be disruptive to break from the learning at appointed times rather than at natural breaking points. The participant who described “slump spaces” gave them a dual purpose. One was to offer a space similar to a “think tank”—that is, an energizing space to create ideas.

The second purpose was a place for a small group of individuals to get away from formal activities to relax and reflect. In the analysis of Phase I, the feature, sense of pride and ownership, did not fit into any of the categories that emerged in Phase I; however, from further descriptions and purposes being described in Phase II, I placed it into the psychological and physiological support category. This decision was based on the psychological aspects of belonging and not feeling anonymous, and needing a space to “own,” by personalizing and caring for the area.

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