• Programming. Students in an undergraduate seminar developed performance requirements and conceptual ideas for fourteen open spaces in the city of Tukwila, including four school sites. They surveyed children, city officials, and citizens in Tukwila about the city's history and current status. They also physically surveyed the city to identify open spaces for possible design intervention, photographically documenting those sites and consulting with the Parks Department on the viability of their selections.

• Design. In a week-long workshop--referred to as a "charrette"-- about 80 students, faculty, and practitioners representing five planning and design disciplines consulted with well over one hundred children, school district staff, CEEDS faculty, city representatives, and citizens. The charrette resulted in proposals that were organized according to concepts found in the literature. They include ideas for enhancing children's place identity, linking school and community, using school sites as places of discovery, and fostering ecological awareness and restoration.

However, this partnership hopes to go beyond the proposal stage to implementation, which will require building support among the network of people who are needed to realize a built project: school staff, university faculty and students, city officials, local artists and designers, and funders.

To help build support, CEEDS has been disseminating the work in a number of venues. At the end of the charrette, the design proposals were presented at a three-hour town meeting at Foster High School in Tukwila. Students provided a formal slide show of all the work, which was followed by interactive break-out sessions with each of the design teams. Since then, dissemination of the proposals has taken place at all three elementary schools, a joint meeting of the City Council and School Board, an exhibition at the Children's International Festival in Seattle Center, an op-ed piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a seminar for architecture faculty at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, and a meeting of funders interested in K-12 design education at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design in New York City. This digital record and a video tape are other forms of dissemination.

Potential Next Steps

Considering each of the constituencies that would be needed the realize a project, here are possible next steps:

• School Staff. Classroom teachers might be supported in using the Sites of Learning design concepts as the basis for curriculum development. Activities might include art and design (elaborating on a specific proposal), public relations (marketing a project), and construction (implementing a project). Such activities can integrate across the curriculum with math (costing and specifying materials), language arts (visual thinking, writing, and public speaking), and science (researching plants and construction materials).

• University Faculty. Studio instructors in art, architecture, industrial design, and landscape architecture, might offer design/build courses in which university students would develop a design concept and construct it. Ideally school staff, children, and their families would be part of the design/construction team.

• University Students. Undergraduate and graduate students in the planning and design disciplines, as well as in education, social work, and forest resources might undertake independent studies, internships, or theses projects. Such projects might range from helping children identify resources in their community to working with principals to engage parental involvement or working with the Parks Department to get the necessary approvals for a project.

• City Officials. Actions might range from creating a budget line for youth-designed school/community projects to making it a policy to include children in the design of all the new pedestrian amenities that are envisioned in the city.

• Artists and Designers. Many civic projects call for community involvement, but young peoples' voices are rarely included. In the spirit of making the city more supportive of children's development, artists and designers might work with classroom teachers to get children's input into their projects.

• Funders. Funding is needed for teachers' professional development time, graduate teaching assistantships, students' out-of-pocket expenses, and project materials and expenses. Projects at the lower end of the scale might range from $20,000 to millions at the upper end of the scale. Because of the broad-based collaborative effort that any project would involve, experience suggests that the pay-off would be great, no matter what the investment.

Thoughts on University/School Partnerships

Judith A. Ramaley(1998), president of the University of Vermont, has been studying the nature of successful university/community partnerships (Click here for: The Bibliography). The partnership between CEEDS and the Tukwila School District is a demonstration of the characteristics she identifies. Among others, "the relationship is based on mutual self-interest, common goals, and a willingness to remain committed for a long period of time" (p. 90). As students in the programming seminar quickly discovered, the respective goals of CEEDS and the Tukwila School District not only overlapped but the project was developed to encompass goals set forth by various city agencies and contained in its comprehensive plan.

Partnerships require facilitators who understand, and are willing to work with, one another's culture. The Tukwila School District has a long track record of successful partnering with the university and also has a commitment to art and design. In addition, the district is already actively engaging local partners from the business, social service, governmental, and academic communities to get their participation in creating a supportive learning environment for children. This context provides a rich venue for CEEDS faculty, who within their various departments have experience in working collaboratively with multicultural communities, learning from those communities while facilitating the development of local assets.

Partnerships require adequate financial support, and it should come from both sides of the table. In this project, generous funding was provided by the University of Washington as a demonstration project that was focused on the transformation of courses within the university. A major component of that funding was for the charrette and its documentation. The school district paid for all in-school activities, with the primary focus being on introducing children and staff to the design/construction process. With this demonstration in hand, future undertakings by this and other partnerships would require larger contributions from outside the university.