 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
||||||
| Design Proposals for the Sites of Learning |  |
||||||
|
The Design Process At the beginning of the charrette about 70 students, faculty, and practitioners representing five planning and design disciplines were divided into four teams, each co-lead by two instructors and a student. Team members underwent an intensive orientation to the project, including a guided tour of Tukwila and a presentation of materials prepared by the programming class. Three teams were each assigned to one of the elementary schools and its environs, with the primary focus being on the school site. The fourth team looked at the city as a whole. Teams were asked to create overview proposals, while individuals or subgroups were to develop vignettes of specific concepts. There was no requirement for coordination within or across teams. Rather, participants were encouraged to offer the client a range of stimulating ideas, any one of which might be refined as an independent project in future years. Emphasis was also placed upon producing long-range visionary ideas, as well as modest interventions that children and their families might construct with minimal resources. Finally the teams were asked to communicate their ideas in an manner accessible to a lay audience and to be explicit in demonstrating their responsiveness to the client, especially the children. At the end of the first day, instructors and students alike set personal learning objectives--used by the university's Center for Instructional Development and Research, or CIDR, as the basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the charrette--and agreed upon a scope of work. The second day began with about 100 fourth and fifth graders presenting their ideas for the school sites. After the formal presentation, small groups of children were interviewed by the design teams. Later that day, CEEDS faculty affiliates provided desk crits, offering perspectives from education, forest resources, social work, industrial design, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. The day ended with input from school district staff, representatives of city agencies, and citizens. The third day of the charrette was devoted to concept generation, with the fourth and fifth days being for production and preparation for the presentation, which occurred on a Friday afternoon at Foster High School in Tukwila. The charrette ended with a debriefing of students (by CIDR) and instructors (by the CEEDS director). In all, over 200 children and adults participated.
The design teams' proposals have been reorganized according to concepts that are
found in the literature on school design, environmental psychology, and
environmental education Proposals that Enhance Children's Place Identity The spaces and places that children inhabit are an essential aspect of their physical, sociocultural, and historical identity. The cognitions that children accumulate relative to important settings in their lives help shape what has been referred to as their place identity. Place identity evolves, not merely in response to the physical properties of children's surroundings, but also as a product of the social roles--their own and others--that help them understand who they are and how they are to behave. This engagement with spaces, places, and people contributes to their competence in, and control over, their world. Neighborhoods are of special relevance to children and even adolescents' place identity because these groups spend most of their time near their homes. Low-income populations in areas like Tukwila that have limited public transportation tend to be even more dependent than others upon their immediate surroundings. When neighborhoods have distinctive settings that allow children to observe and practice a variety of social roles, place identity can be enhanced. In this respect, landmarks--churches, civic buildings, art installations, elements in the landscape--can help organize children's neighborhood experience. Because their visual quality, use, or age make them stand out from their surroundings, landmarks can help orient children to their physical, sociocultural, and historical world. Tukwila has a rich array of landmarks that this set of proposals draws upon. They offer ideas for using landmarks as focal points for active social engagement. They also suggest connective routes that can help increase children's understanding of themselves and their city. The proposals include concepts for using existing landmarks as neighborhood nodes, for developing the Duwamish and Green Rivers as landmarks, and for creating landmarks that are especially suited to children.
Proposals that Link School and Community |
|||||||
|
Historically many public schools have actively enriched the social and esthetic life of communities. Early twentieth century public school buildings were designed to provide access to communal spaces, and many of these buildings contained distinguished public art works, such as Tiffany stained glass, Pewabic tile, WPA murals, and decorative ironworks. The increased number of school facilities that will be built in the next decade opens up a unique opportunity to build upon and extend this approach to school buildings as sources of social and esthetic enrichment in communities. The opportunity is all the more challenging as communities nowadays are typically more culturally diverse than those of earlier times. |
 Schools as Focal Points in Residential Neighborhoods | ||||||
|
Recently, a group of educators, educational administrators, educational facilities planners, and architects established national design criteria for this period of intensive school construction. One of their criteria focuses upon strengthening a community's sense of identity. Envisioning a new version of the old town square, this group recommends that schools go beyond educating a specific age group to provide a forum for adults and children alike to exchange ideas and practice the arts of a multicultural democracy. In Tukwila, the schools already provide a focal point in their residential neighborhoods, being large and of high design quality. The proposals in this section offer suggestions for extending this presence by making Tukwila's schools into vibrant centers of the community, while also facilitating children's access to the city's resources. They include concepts for making both physical and psychological connections, and for enhancing the pedestrian environment.
Proposals that Use School Sites as Places of Discovery The outdoor environment traditionally provided a stage where children engaged in the serious task of play. It was the place where they explored, experienced geography, imagined adult roles, and made things of their own invention. It was where they overcame fear, measured their strength, and developed a sense of mastery over the environment. It was where they learned, in the broadest sense of the word, guided by the forces of nature rather than adult agendas. Not only is there less and less undeveloped land but many children are kept indoors nowadays out of fear for their safety--or simply because there is no place for them to be, or no way to get there. In addition, societal pressures for raising academic performance has contributed to the trivialization of the role of play in children's development. Many city planners have voiced concerned about the community development patterns of the last 50 years that concentrate shopping in distant malls, thus impeding socializing among neighbors and removing the "eyes on the street" that contribute to safety. In addition to decreases in a tactile involvement with nature, the lack of pedestrian-friendly, child-friendly neighborhoods, along with shorter (or no) recess periods during the school day have contributed to sharp increases in sedentary behavior and obesity among children over the past decade (22 percent of children in the United States are now considered obese). And Tukwila's children would seem to be part of this national trend toward staying inside--inactive and disengaged from the natural world. These proposals suggest how Tukwila's school sites can be developed as safe spaces for unstructured hands-on educational experiences in nature. They also suggest how these sites can be used for after-school and weekend activities by community members. They are based upon the children's ideas for ideal outdoor spaces at their schools and include overviews of each school site, as well as vignettes of a variety of outdoor classrooms.
Proposals that Foster Ecological Awareness and Restoration As more and more of the natural environment is developed, the ecological balances that sustain life at the local and global scale are being severely threatened. The water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breath, the buildings we inhabit--all are ever more toxic, diminished in part by the lifestyle choices of citizens who are unaware that their excessive consumption of resources is fundamentally altering the Earth's natural systems, as well as its social systems. Fundamental to a good education in this era of expanding stress on the Earth is a hands-on understanding of the relationship between human activity and natural systems. Children in the world's most affluent nation should understand where the things they consume come from, how those things are made, and where they go after they are finished using them. Further, they should be actively involved in reclaiming and maintaining the ecological balance of their immediate surroundings--in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Tukwila is a stark case study in the negative effect of development on natural and social systems. In just about forty years almost all of this agricultural community was paved over and in a way that created an unacceptably discontinuous topography for the life-sustaining activities of people and nature. Interestingly, a significant portion of the open land that remains is on school property. This presents the children of Tukwila with a unique opportunity to learn about, and take a leadership role in, the city's need for undertaking a serious environmental reclamation effort. The school sites (and other open spaces in the city) can be places where children not only observe the natural cycles of life and death but also contribute to restoring and safekeeping Tukwila's natural resources. But perhaps a fifth-grade girl at Tukwila Elementary School can explain the importance of protecting the environment in her own words. The following quote was in response to the question: "What did you learn by designing the outdoor space on your school site?"
Why This Project Is Important | A Case Study in Community Building | Programmatic Requirements | Design Proposals | Next Steps of Community Building | Site Map |
|||||||
Click here for: The Schedule