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CREATING THE FUTURE
Perspectives on Educational Change
Compiled and Edited by Dee Dickinson
THE ECOLOGY OF THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Anne Taylor, Ph.D.
The Current State of Learning Environments
In 1980, 75% of the schools in New York had been built before 1900. In 1990, 61% of our nation's schools were constructed in the 1950's and 60's. The construction was rapid and cheap, built to last 30 years. Their time is up-- 20% are older than fifty years, and only 6% were built in the eighties. Of the total number of inadequate school buildings, 61% need major repairs, 43% are obsolete, 42% have environmental hazards, 25% are overcrowded, and 13% are structurally unsound.
With increasing enrollments, California will need 800 new schools by 1993, and Florida will need 816 new schools within ten years. New programs in schools will require additional space to house them. These include special education, science/math labs, technology/computer labs, and the performing arts. Yet the Education Writers Association "could not locate a comprehensive university program specifically for school facility planning" during their research done earlier this year.
In the past, educators and architects had a predetermined vision of what schools should be. Educational specifications were written for the architect as if there were a form for school design which included so many look-alike classrooms, hallways, gymnasiums, cafeterias for institutional food distribution, and administrative offices. The playground was a forgotten piece of property, even though it was often the most valuable piece of land in the neighborhood. Instead of being used as a landscape design for learning, it was a barren patch of ground encompassed by a chain link fence.
America, as well as the rest of the world, is on the brink of an educational facility facelift. There is a revolution in learning under way. It promises to move both the state of the art for redesigned schools and also children into the 21st century at a rapid rate. The new discoveries underlying the revolution document beyond question that human infants and children learn more rapidly in stimulating and varied physical environments which meet basic human needs. The results of this research are being applied to a very old challenge-the renovation, rethinking, and redesign of schools for children and their parents.
The historic design assumes that educational architecture is a series of empty boxes into which "school furniture" is placed. Even new schools place students in straight rows, facing front, learning mainly from textbooks which, because of state laws, still dominate the classroom. The computer is an adjunct to learning and often "down the hall" in a room where children go in groups of thirty to learn technical skills. The American school, an environment in which children spend a large share of their time for over eighteen years and beyond, leaves little room for self-expression and a sense of ownership or involvement. Yet actually there cannot be separation between the learning process and the physical environment-they are integral parts of each other.
Many architects who have been commissioned by school districts to design "a school of the future" are puzzled because of the old educational specifications with prescribed and predetermined square footage needs, which are now no longer viable. Architects want educators to envision with them what the school of the future will be. But the educators are having a difficult time articulating the educational program of the future, its curriculum and instructional methodology. Unfortunately, because no one can foresee the future, bond issues are being passed and construction is under way using outdated models and design formats which are over 200 years old.
Though these schools may have a slick postmodern entryway and a bit more landscaping, the innovation is not creative enough. One superintendent in Washington State fired three architects, saying that their solutions for future classroom and school design were not innovative or creative. That same district, however, replicated one school five times without performing a post-occupancy evaluation on the first prototype to see whether it needed work.
Learning Environments Can Teach
In our work, architect George Vlastos and I have spent over twenty years researching and designing indoor and outdoor learning environments as functional art forms, places of beauty, and motivational centers for learning. We have used the architecture of the school classroom, museum exhibits, and the landscape as a means of demonstrating how the built and natural environments demonstrate, in real live form, the ideas, laws and principles that we at present are trying to teach children from textbooks.
For instance, a solar greenhouse can help children nourish life outside themselves, understand botany, and begin to learn about alternative energy systems. Its systems can be studied and compared to body systems. Children can graph and understand plant growth, classify and compare it, and harvest food. A cooking environment can provide science and math learning, cultural uses of food, and the creativity of edible art.
The structure of the building itself can teach physics, concepts of tension, compression, force, load cantilevering, fenestration patterns, the awareness of solids/voids and massing as a basis for descriptive geometry. The electrical mechanical system, if left open for children to see, can be a lesson in the input and output systems that are similar to the arteries and veins in our bodies. The acreage surrounding a school, oftentimes a valuable but neglected piece of flat property, can be redesigned with the help of a landscape architect. It can become a "landscape for learning" and an open park for the community. Hills, valleys, deciduous trees, non-deciduous trees, gardens, and graphics, all become learning tools.
Creating Learning Environments
In designing buildings, it is essential to study the client, his special needs, spaces needed to support activities, and aesthetic preferences. In the case of a school, the clients are the children. Teachers are clients too, but the favored client is the child. Therefore, in writing a program for the architectural design, one needs to study the curriculum content and the developmental needs of the children as the design determinants. These developmental needs fall into a body, mind, spirit continuum. Information is extrapolated from these two sources, as well as information and ideas from children as to their preferences, likes, dislikes, and their innovative ideas for learning environments.
In a small rural school in Trout Lake, Washington, the total faculty and 150 children were trained to use architecture and design as a way to teach basic skills. The community had defeated a bond issue for a new school building over a period of six years. The teachers and children spent the year collecting data, writing about and drawing architectural concepts in plan view and elevation. Using this they built models to depict their ideas for a new school. A community meeting was held to involve the citizens of that area in a discussion of their preferences as well. An art and architectural exhibition of the children's work, including computer graphics executed by high school students, was displayed.
One month later the bond issue was passed and all parties look forward, not to a traditional school, but to an intergenerational community center. High school students are working with the Forest Service to do an environmental impact study on the chosen site. The architect is planning to come to the school and show students how to use computer-assisted design as he does the working drawings.
Some direct spin-offs from Trout Lake include these steps: Architecture and Design will be incorporated into the fifth and sixth grade curriculum; IBM discs from the architect with project information will enable everyone to keep pace with developments using the computer programs; students will be engaged in landscaping and construction of play areas, observatories, and nature walks at the new school site; mechanical drawing class will switch to CAD drafting during the 2nd semester; students will be using a computer program called "SIMCITY" as part of their civics class to design a model city responding to its dilemmas.
Classrooms for the Future
The twenty-first century stands right before us. The decisions we make today and the actions we take tomorrow will set the tone for the direction of our schools in the coming decades.
Primary needs include the remodeling of current classrooms, the designing and building of new schools, and a rethinking of what "school" means in light of the changes we foresee in the near future. Perhaps schools won't look like schools. Perhaps we will be using the total community as a learning environment-not a new idea.
Although we would like to see schools not stereotyped by lockstep classroom configuration, we know that classrooms are probably here to stay. It is possible, however, to rethink their design and the components which make up the classroom of the future.
Borrowing from many areas of study, one envisions classrooms and playground as living museums, studios, and laboratories for hands-on learning with a computer for every student, telecommunications studios for worldwide communication, and interactive video for encyclopedia verbal-visual information retrieval. Learning materials include computer discs, video cassettes, good children's literature, music, photographs, paintings, found objects, toys, games, creative materials, and natural materials systematically and hierarchically assembled, based on themes or concepts of known interest to children, perhaps retrievable by computer.
Should it not be possible for present and future learning environments to include communication centers with the use of printing presses, computers, televisions, and radio; art, music, and dance studios open and available at all times; creative dramatics as an everyday pursuit; and cooking-science areas? Portable mini-environments that are thematically designed and fully equipped could travel from school to school, expanding our children's experience of being involved and capable in many different types of environments. They might even be responsible for designing and maintaining the architectural setting.
In our workshops and seminars where teachers and children were asked to redesign their classrooms for the future, many unique design ideas have emerged beyond the given developmental and curricular determinants.
Some of the following represent those ideas:
The rationale for this programming process is based on research from the field of Design and Behavior, which shows that if a learning environment is designed based on what is taught and learned, and if the facilities or adjacent spaces reflect concepts and principles to be learned, then both behavior and learning are affected by the design of the environment. This is a "whole system" view of learning that can make a critical difference in creating schools to meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's students.
About: Anne Taylor"Before Western civilization divided the Universe into discrete subject matter areas, the order in the Universe was (and still is) both interdisciplinary and holistic. The branching of trees, spiraling of shells, meandering of streams, and the radial designs of flowers, for example, represent an a synthesis of mathematics, biology and art. The current artificial separation of subject matter is in contrast to the way the world is constructed and the way children perceive it. Architecture and the built environment synthesize the world of ideas and the world of material things. They help us to realize that we are a part of, not apart from, the environment." So speaks Anne Taylor.
She is a professor in the School of Architecture and Planning and co-director of the Institute for Environmental Education at the University of New Mexico. She is also visiting professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington. For twenty years she and architect George Vlastos have worked to research and design learning environments and their effects. They are co-authors of School Zone: Learning Environments for Children, and are also co-authors of a curriculum series to teach architecture and design to teachers and children. They have designed a Head Start Classroom for the Future, and created a special modular system of early childhood portable furniture.
Dr. Taylor is founder and program director of the Architecture and Children Institute based both in New Mexico and in the state of Washington. In both states she trains teachers in the Architecture for Children curriculum, which is an interdisciplinary curriculum model used as a basis for design so that math, science, social studies, and art are taught through architecture.
After graduating from the Eastman School of Music and Wells College, she received her master's and doctorate in Art Education /Architecture from Arizona State University.
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