Something new. I've been thinking about school design. :)

What if we could design school buildings that help kids learn?

We know that environments affect how we feel, how focused we are, and how comfortable we are to do certain things – like meeting new people, or expressing ourselves. If we know it as adults, what about kids?  How is the environment affecting how they feel and behave? If they spend most of their time in school, how is that environment designed to bring out the best in them? So many factors contribute to a child’s success in learning. The teacher, the family life, other kids a kid’s personality, but yet, have we considered the role that buildings and environments might play?

I like to think of the design of spaces in two ways. Firstly there is the functional approach. In this way you think about all the activities you would like to do in a space and make sure that you can do these things there. You might think – “OK, we want to play basketball at our school – so we need a gym, a hoop and a court”. This will be a space that provides for the needs of kinesthetic children. As a designer you would go to all the teachers and ask what activities they do, and what space they need to do these and then design to make sure you have all of these things available.

The second approach is phenomenological. That is a big word to talk about how a space makes you feel, in a more profound sort of way. It’s like when you walk into a room and you just feel sort of cold, and isolated, or you walk into another and it feels calm. The things that architects and designers manipulate to induce these types of experiences for people include the size of spaces, the shape of rooms, the materials of the space, openings, windows, doors, lighting, acoustics, even the smell. All of these things together create an environment that can have an effect on a person. Especially on a child.

With this in mind, the schools we currently use have been designed from a functional perspective. There are rooms that are a certain size to house a certain number of kids. They are built as a shell to protect kids from the environment and to provide space for desks and chalk board and all that stuff. They usually have a gym and a few extra rooms, and all of these are connected with hallways designed to be a certain width to allow exit in case of a fire.

All this is good.  All this is great.

But then, have we stopped to think about what all of this feels like for a child? And even more specifically - how does it affect their learning?

Current thinking in education supports all sorts of learning styles. Some innovative classroom techniques include movement therapy, brain gym, kinesthetic learning, outdoor learning, learning through play, and art centered learning. We build new schools all the time, and buildings last usually 25-50 years. Shouldn’t we want to adjust the architectural model we are using to represent the latest in what we know about learning? New pedagogical methods are adapting and evolving rapidly. Are new schools being designed to adapt to these changes? And if we are going to design schools with these things is mind – what would we do?

So, actually, I think this is a lot to chew on, but I like to think about ways that we can start to really understand children, and how they are affected by their environments. Are there ways that a school design can help their learning in a holistic way? Not just adding more facilities, but looking at the experience of space in a school. How can we find this out? What methods can we use to study children’s behaviors and how they are affected by their environments? And then, how can we translate this into better school designs to bring out the best in our kids?