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Place as Knowledge • Knowledge as Place
by Steven Bingler and Bobbie Hill
One of the most pressing issues concerning the programming and design of educational facilities has to do with the question of whether facilities play any significant role in the learning process. Most superintendents and school boards contend that educational facilities simply provide the containers in which learning occurs, and that the form of the containers, and even the process of making them has little to do with the core goals of educational delivery.
With the recent emphasis on approaches to learning that put the student at the center of the learning process, and on heuristic curricula involving many kinds of objects and projects that are integral to the discovery process, it may be time to look again at buildings as a component of a new three dimensional encyclopedia of learning tools.
One practical reason for considering this proposition is that over twenty-five billion dollars is being spent annually on the design and construction of educational facilities. Compared with similar expenditures for other educational manipulatives, it seems like a lot of money to waste on empty containers. The real challenge is one of design and creativity. In the best of all worlds, the facilities that we build to house new educational programs will also serve as a form of knowledge and as an instrument of curriculum and instruction in the learning process.
The ways that this could be accomplished are plentiful, as architecture embodies such a multitude of disciplines. During the Renaissance, architecture was referred to as "frozen music". It has often been called the "mother of the arts" since architecture is a manifestation and repository of mathematical equations, scientific principles, historical references, geographical design determinants, and literary content. The process of design and construction has often been used as a motivating force for individuals and even groups of individuals. Consider, for example, the process of "barn raising" which has served throughout history as a powerful social event for communal empowerment. All of these concepts and more are available to creative educators, and all of the facilities that we build can provide a broad spectrum of learning opportunities.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate this premise is through some working examples. The first project that we will look at is the Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, Michigan, a public charter school with a population of 400 students. Here, the learning environment integrates an innovative public educational curriculum with the extensive artifacts and resources of the existing Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. The success of this project is demonstrated by the fact that 98% of the students remain at the Academy throughout high school, and test scores are nearly four times higher than other Detroit public schools. The Academy also demonstrates how this kind of integration can produce economical environments, since the project was built for 20% of the cost for a comparable stand-alone high school in the state of Michigan.
Built by Henry Ford in honor of his mentor, Thomas Edison, the Henry Ford museum includes over one million museum artifacts located in one 12 acre building. The Greenfield village complex adds an additional 80 acre outdoor learning environment with more than 75 significant buildings, including the Wright brother's bicycle shop, Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory (birthplace of the original light bulb), the homes of Noah Webster and Steven Foster and a host of other facilities that represent some of the nation's most noted innovators and their creations. The design provides for the distribution of formal learning activities with access to the whole 80-acre campus. Organized classes as well as individual student initiatives make full use of the industrial and architectural artifacts that comprise this unique and compelling learning environment.
The academy was developed as a collaborative venture between the Henry Ford Museum, the Ford Motor Company and the Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA). Following the initial opening of the ninth grade in 1997, an additional one hundred students were added each year for the next three consecutive years. Facilities for each grade level were designed in collaboration with a school and museum community that included more than a hundred students, parents, educators, curators and museum and school administrators. The result is a facility that serves as both the physical and metaphorical "home base" from which a broad range of student excursions ensue, both within the museum grounds and externally through internships with participating adult mentors in the Detroit metropolitan area.
A different kind of integrated learning environment can be found at the Met Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Developed by the Big Picture Company, one of the country's leading innovators in best learning practices, the MET consists of a system of small 9-12 grade public high schools serving a wide variety of economic and socially diverse students in Rhode Island. In addition, through the Gates Foundation Small Schools Project, more Met Schools are being built throughout the country.
The Big Picture Company's philosophy is to educate one student at a time, with each student's curriculum reflecting his or her unique interests, background, and learning style. As a part of their learning plan, students at the Met spend three days each week at their small, self-contained "home base" learning center, where overall enrollment is limited to approximately 120 students. In addition to their work at the home base site, students participate in extended learning experiences for a minimum of two days each week at an outside community-based learning site, such as a hospital, professional office, governmental institution, restaurant, or other similar venue.
At these extended-learning sites, they follow an innovative and highly personalized "learning-through-internship" model, where the student, advisor, parent, and intern collaborate to support the student's learning through an integrated curriculum based on real-world experiences that are played out in a real-world environment. In the MET "teachers" are replaced with "advisors" whose responsibility is to facilitate and assess each student's learning plan in his or her "advisory." Each advisory contains a maximum of 14 students who start together in the ninth grade and remain together as a group, and with their initial advisor until graduation. The deep trust that is developed during this period between advisor and student optimizes the students' investment and motivation for their own learning.
The Big Picture Company believes that the physical design of a learning environment shapes reform efforts and learning. Each stand-alone school is designed for no more then 120 students. The Met Center's first community-based learning environment began operations at two inner city "home base" campuses in Providence, Rhode Island, one in an existing downtown office building and the other in a stand-alone facility.
A third new campus, located in a challenging inner-city neighborhood in South Providence incorporates an additional four independent and stand-alone small schools, along with shared community facilities that include a fitness center, performing arts center, health center, media center, and outdoor recreational spaces. In addition to accommodating the school's fitness needs, the outdoor spaces double as a "town square" for the community in the evenings and on weekends. With "parking streets" that transverse the site and a notable lack of fences, the school is clearly open to and supportive of the community that it serves.
The continued evolution of an ethic that embodies inclusive and integrative principles in the redesigning of educational systems opens up significant opportunities for the community as a whole. Learning environments that best serve the needs of all learners will someday include models that are integrated with all of the resources available in the larger Learning Community. It takes a lot of information to make a community. The more information that the community can identify and use, the greater is the potential for deriving understanding, knowledge, and wealth from those informational resources.
A maximum amount of learning wealth can be produced in a community where all of its learning assets are integrated and accessible to every citizen in the way that he or she wants or needs to receive them. But in order to be effective, the development, celebration and integration of these diverse community assets must be in tune with the heartbeat of the total community organism. When the system is functioning to its maximum advantage, the parts support the collective whole and the whole nourishes all of its parts. It is for this reason that integrative learning environments are best developed with the creative input of a wide range of community stakeholders. John Dewey said that we need not only education in democracy, but also democracy in education.
The planning and design of more integrated and systemic learning communities provides an opportunity to engage students, parents, educators and a wide variety of community stakeholders in decisions that benefit all aspects of the community's health and well being. At the same time, opportunities to design learning environments that can facilitate the best practices outlined in current educational research are limited only by our collective imaginations. Based on what we know about the benefits of parent and community engagement and the value of more integrated, project based and real world learning experiences, there is a compelling need to move forward with greater intent in developing more inclusive, extended and integrated environments for living and learning.
About the authors:
Steven Bingler, AIA is the founder of Concordia LLC. Under his leadership, Concordia's projects span a wide range of building types including the Jackson Brewery Festival Marketplace, the New Orleans Aquarium of the Americas and the Henry Ford Academy.
In recent years, Mr. Bingler has undertaken projects focused on the community-based planning and design of environments for living and learning. He has cultivated collaborative alliances that have included Harvard University's Project Zero, the MIT Media Lab, the University of New Mexico, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Thornburg Institute, the Appalachian Education Lab and the West Ed Lab. Mr. Bingler has also served as a special consultant to the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education for policy related to the design of schools as centers of the community. His educational papers have been published in a wide range of books and journals. Additionally, Mr. Bingler frequently speaks at national symposia and conferences related to innovations in community based planning and design. Email: SBingler@Concordia.com
Barbara "Bobbie" Provosty Hill is the Director of Planning for Concordia. Using the Concordia Planning Model, Ms. Hill works with communities to help them realize their potential through consensus building and exploring learning opportunities through collaboration. She is committed to public scholarship by helping communities become healthy civil societies that are interconnected—not homogeneous—but integrated. She is currently directing projects from the rural North Country of New Hampshire to inner-city Cincinnati, Ohio, urban Los Angeles, California and Plainfield, New Jersey.
She has organized many local and state-wide networks and associations which are concerned with issues related to education, the arts and community advocacy. Ms. Hill has served on regional and State task forces such as the Governor's Education First Committee, which developed policy and consensus-building for education reform in West Virginia. Her work on this committee and other organizations has brought about significant change. For example, Ms. Hill worked with government leadership to create legislation that supports community based planning as a prerequisite for requesting State support for school construction. Email: BHill@Concordia.com
© December 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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