Brookside Centre

Narratives

Architect Narrative

This project involves much more than a conventional school. It’s aim is to create a community learning centre - a focal point for a “village” of some 3000 people within a new town which will eventually have a population of 30,000.

There are at least four important ideas expressed in the design, the planning process and the operation of the facilities:
- everyone in the new village - especially (but not only) the children - will need to be a learner all their life. Lifelong education will be an integral part of everyday living
- collaboration and working together in partnerships is a key characteristic of living successfully in the 21st Century
- learning is a social process in which close interpersonal relations are central to the quality of learning especially for children
- the new information technologies and the library will be the tools with which people access many of their learning opportunities

COMMUNITY LEARNING CENTRE
The idea of a conventional primary school transformed into a community learning centre and established as a focal point for village life is well illustrated by the site. The central “Piazza” is a celebration space for the village. It links directly with the school, the neighbourhood store, child care facilities, gymnasium, library, IT centre, gallery, art room, performance space and staffroom/meeting room all of which are available to the whole community. The result is a learning place for the whole village - especially the children. It is a central and integral part of the village life - just as shopping, recreation, worship, and celebration are integral parts of everyday life.

This is in deliberate contrast to the tradition of withdrawing the school from its community and the community from its school. The idea is to reconnect learning with the everyday life of the village. So instead of keeping people out, the facilities draw people in for purposes which are never far removed from the idea of learning - not only for the children but also for people of all ages.

That some of the learners need safe places and closely supervised places for learning is evident in the design. But the sense of security which comes from the everyday presence of familiar and friendly people is valued here as much as the more physically defensive forms of security provision.

PARTNERSHIPS
Collaboration and creating new opportunities for enhancing the scope and quality of learning through productive partnerships are ideas which are of high priority in this project.

In most urban communities in Australia children have a choice between free state schooling and fee paying private (usually religious based) schooling. This choice is valued by parents and in this community three schools - one State, one Catholic and one non-denominational Christian - have agreed to collaborate to form the village learning centre. The result is a very significant enhancement of the range of learning opportunities. Resources are pooled and shared without loss of ownership or identity. Every day the collaborating schools work through the learning process of living harmoniously together despite their differences and their need to compete with each other for students.

Facilities such as a library, the art room, and a fully equipped IT centre would simply not be feasible unless sharing occurred. The gymnasium - a joint venture between local government, a sports group and the schools - and the playing fields - a partnership between the community, the schools and a local football club - are two other opportunities which would otherwise not be available at all unless collaboration occurred.

A commitment to collaboration required innovative aspects of the planning process for the learning centre. The first step involved the development of the vision with a wide range of stakeholders from the community, local and State government authorities, the developer, education service providers, business, local sporting groups and industry. A small steering committee led by the State education authority and serviced by the developer guided the successful delivery of the vision.

A SENSE OF BELONGING
“Small is preferable” is another idea which has influenced the design and operation of this community learning centre. In the past there have been tensions between the apparent advantages of large school size (more specialised facilities, economies of scale, increased prestige, larger staff numbers and bigger budgets) and the advantages of smaller schools (more domestic scale, less alienation and closer interpersonal relationships between students, teachers and parents). A new balance has been struck in this project. Here is a relatively large facility which operates as several relatively small units. Each unit has its own spaces (along with a number of shared facilities), its own identity (plus occasions when the individual units come together), its own home base rooms with home base teachers and all the benefits of being small balanced by the opportunities which only come from being large. From a design point of view the commitment to giving every child a “home” place has meant that buildings are dispersed rather than stacked into a large multistoried building.

The emphasis on the idea of “home” has led to an unusual outcome. In order to accommodate a short term peak in enrolments a group of houses on the periphery of the school site has been specially designed and constructed by a private investor and lease to one of the schools for “home” based accommodation. They will revert to residential uses when the need has passed. This is a further expression of the idea of reconnecting school and community. There is general agreement on campus that this example of flexibility in planning is a better solution than the conventional response of costly and often unsightly “temporary” transportable buildings.

LIBRARY
Special mention of the Library and IT centre is warranted in this overview of the ideas which have influenced this project. Two main considerations have guided the design, location and functions of these elements of the learning centre.

- The Library is the point of access to learning for the community from early in the morning to late at night. It operates on weekends and through the normal vacation periods of the schools. Here learners of all ages retrieve information, process it to create data and publish their new knowledge via multi media technologies.

- While every home and workplace in this community is expected to be a relatively high user of the new information and communication technologies, there will always be a new, faster, more powerful and relatively expensive machine that is beyond the reach of many users. Given that the new technologies are expected to be central to the successful operation of a learning community in which learning can occur any place, any time and at any pace, the IT centre, where learners will have access to the latest technologies, will be a vital element. It has been located next to the Library and right on the edge of the public “piazza”. Here children and adults will work side by side with the aid of the new learning technologies - no doubt with some interesting adjustments to the usual roles of teacher and student.