Tag: design

Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.

— Buckminster Fuller

Before these six acres were left to the trees, before the buildings were razed and the families displaced, before the $31 million promise or the thousands of visitors, and before there was ever a blueprint for a campus that might light a path towards the school of the future — there was the young woman on the bike with the 600-page plan under her arms, the one whose childhood teachers labeled her defiant, the one who set out alone to discover the world while still a teenager, who refused to take no for an answer, and who looked out at these abandoned lots and neglected tapestry and saw the culmination of everything those 600 pages had outlined.

For Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, it was an idea that had first taken hold of her as a child, and would not let go until she found a way to make it manifest in the world: Humans re-learning to live in harmony with nature — and schools as the vital containers in which that re-education could begin.

Before her twenty-fifth birthday, Ippel had already traveled to six continents to speak with educators, sit in classrooms, and look for patterns that might reveal the most irreducible elements of a transformative education — the design principles of a living, thriving school.

As a girl, she had always felt like she was hiding in plain sight. What she experienced as curiosity, her teachers saw as misbehavior. And what she felt as frustration, the adults in her life described as the price of the ticket.

You need to play the game, they instructed, to become a player in the game. Sit and get, so that one day you can stand and deliver.

But those rules never made sense to Ippel — or to the millions of others like her, whose natural iconoclasm, or wanderlust, or mischief, or undiagnosed trauma, or all of the above made it all but impossible to abide by The Game’s overarching rule: conformity.

In her travels, however, Ippel found a willing audience for her marked intensity and drive — and a more useful set of models for her musings about the best way to reimagine the timeworn thing we have always called “school.”

What she learned spilled across the pages of her ambitious proposal to the Chicago Board of Education. The Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC), she promised, would provide a new public educational model for the 21st century — one that prepared all students for an increasingly uncertain, interdependent, and ecologically fragile world. AGC’s curriculum would foster a schoolwide commitment to holistic wellness and sustainability that expanded from the inside out — developing healthier humans, communities, and ecosystems. And it would do all of this with the children whose well-being was usually the last to be addressed.

Twice, the city said no. The approach was “too sophisticated” for the community she wanted to serve. Topics like global citizenship and the environment would have to wait until basic literacy and numeracy improved. Recess was a luxury. Healthy food was a nice-to-have. Nature was a distraction.

Not true, Ippel insisted. Empowering students to make positive change would provide them with the motivation for academic growth. Before students could become stewards of the earth, they must first fall in love with nature.

In short, there were no shortcuts.

In 2008, on the third try, AGC’s application was finally approved, and Ippel and her colleagues got their chance. 

They spent their first year in the ground floor of a former dental tool factory that had been turned into a church. Founding teacher Meredith McNamara recalled needing to keep students quiet during funerals, and struggling to choreograph the daily, sometimes oppositional dance between theory and practice. “We discovered during that first year there are the ideas you have about how a learning experience should unfold,” she explained, “and then there are the realities and interests and needs of the kids in front of you, which, in the end, is all that matters. Whatever sparks their natural curiosity, that’s what you should do.”

In time, the school found its distinctive intellectual rhythm — six in-depth academic units a year, three curricular themes (responsibility for oneself, for one’s community and for the Earth) frequent field trips and speakers, and an integrated exploration of health and wellness. “As we evolved,” McNamara explained, “we realized we needed more structure for everything from community governance (i.e., becoming more democratic) to teacher collaboration (i.e., reserving two planning days at the start of each six-week cycle). We also realized just how confining the larger system of the city is, and how limiting it is to imagine our model, which depends on a certain type of physical space, in a place that’s not our own. It’s hard to teach kids to fall in love with nature if they’re never in it.”

Indeed, despite all its successes, AGC is still housed in two rented buildings, one of which is a former barrel factory, in the industrial landscape of the Garfield Ridge neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The campuses are separated by Cicero Avenue — a frequent thoroughfare for long-distance truckers — so the businesses that surround the schools are a mixture of automotive shops, fast-food restaurants, and motels. It’s a gray, flat section of the city, with scores of undeveloped lots alongside nearby residential streets and rows of well-manicured, single-story houses. 

More than 90 percent of AGC’s student body come from these nearby streets and houses. Two-thirds of them are low income. Three out of ten are learning English for the first time. And one out of four have special learning requirements.

To support the needs of these children, Ippel and her colleagues have done everything they can to create a greener landscape. An asphalt parking lot now features raised garden beds, a greenhouse, and some schoolyard chickens. The students grow their own vegetables, and eat what they grow thanks to an on-site chef working in a zero-waste organic cafeteria. Classrooms are lit by on-site solar panels; a wind turbine anchors the outdoor playground; rainwater gets collected from the greenhouse gutters. 

And yet.

“When we started AGC,” Ippel told me, “we always knew we needed a future home of our own design — an environment that fully reflected the vision of what we are trying to achieve here. To build a thriving world, we must design the template of a living school, and create a prototype so that others can do the same.”

And so, while her colleagues went on with the critical daily work of teaching and learning, Ippel went on the hunt for funding, and for a team of visionary designers from across the globe.

The team came first, and their work has engendered what critic Alexandra Lange describes as “the most architecturally ambitious design I’ve seen in the U.S.” In a section of the city in which healthy food options are scarce, more than half of the six-acre site will be reserved for neighborhood gardens, orchards, food forests, hoop houses, greenhouses, teaching kitchens and a community farm café and store. Instead of traditional classrooms, the school will be organized into Neighborhoods that get shared by grade-level bands. Each building will have a sloped roof, tilted toward the sun and covered with photovoltaic panels. On the shady sides, a clerestory window will let in cool northern light. Gutters running along the low points in the roof will collect stormwater for toilets and gardens. Students will move throughout the day along a series of meandering outdoor paths. And the campus will abide by the world’s most robust sustainability performance standards.

“It’s a flipped relationship with circulation space,” Ippel says. “Rather than breaking learning spaces up with hallways and walls and asking each educator to stay in one space with one group of students, teachers will circulate around the entire shared learning space throughout the day. The campus itself will be a living system — with geothermal wells, animals, a learning barn, and ample green space. We’re adding trees to improve outdoor air and remove air pollutants. We’re giving preference to building products and materials that are recycled, salvaged, rapidly renewable, or sustainably harvested. And we’re doing all of this using the same cost per square foot as the district, so that the ideas and design principles are accessible to anyone who hopes to replicate this approach in their own communities.

“Why would we all not do this? Why would we not make this the new standard?”

Good question. And in 2019, Ippel finally got some answers when, after seeing the school’s sustainable design and its possibilities for replication, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker authorized $31 million of state funds to support the school’s construction. 

Making the decision easier for the Governor, Ippel had already found the land on which AGC’s vision could eventually become a reality — a site that runs alongside the Stevenson Expressway, a few blocks from AGC’s current campuses, and about a mile from Midway Airport. It’s a patchwork of large tracts of overgrown grass, comprising more than forty acres in total, broken up by a cross of empty roadways, and currently housing little more than a well-spaced community of sturdy Oak trees. 

Its barrenness, in the shadow of the Chicago skyline, makes one wonder why it is barren, and what or who was here before. And, as you might suspect, the story of this land is a reminder of just how many other forces are always at play in our cities and communities, and just how far we still have to travel as a people.

That’s because AGC’s future home was also once the home of LeClaire Courts, a public housing complex of 600 two-story row houses that stretched along Cicero Avenue. Built in 1950, Leclaire Courts was an early attempt at integrated, low-rise public housing. And over the years, it became the home of thousands of African-American children and families. 

That all changed in 1999, when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced what he called “The Plan for Transformation.” It was a plan to demolish every remaining public housing complex in the city — more than 18,000 units. It would take ten years, the Mayor said, at a cost of $1.6 billion. It would ostensibly result in a slew of transformational public-private developments, and a bevy of new and improved public housing options. And it would guarantee most of the families that were going to be displaced a “right of return” once the old buildings were demolished and the new units were built.

In 2011, the Courts were torn down, and its families were displaced. The site has been barren ever since. And now, nearly ten years later, according to the Chicago Reader’s Lucia Anaya, “the list of LeClaire residents with a right to return has dwindled from 400 families to fewer than 40. Some no longer qualify for return or have died. Others have simply lost hope of ever returning and have made their temporary homes permanent.”

As a result, Garfield Ridge’s Black families, once the majority in the neighborhood, are now being joined in increasing numbers by Latino children and families. “Daley didn’t believe public housing developments could ever be assets to the neighborhoods around them,” writes Chicago native Ben Austen. His belief was that “the very landscape would be remade, the skyline altered, the street grid restored.” Anything less, the Mayor proclaimed, and “you wouldn’t have a city of the future. You’d have a city of the past.” 

But timing is everything, and the Plan was devised amid the real estate bubble of 2008. As money dried up overnight, Austen explained, “the poured foundation set exposed like a Roman ruin, harking back to an age that had yet to be.”

For residents like Tara Stamps, a CPS teacher who had grown up in one of the houses the city had destroyed, the feeling of displacement left a permanent scar. “Those were not just buildings,” she said. “Those were families. Those were communities.” The people who lived there “are rooted to the land. They have a blood memory there. Their grandparents and their aunts and their cousins and their favorite memories were there.”

So the story of this place does not begin with the young woman on the bike after all, just as our own stories do not begin with us. Instead, like all stories, they are a kaleidoscope of things and memories and people, equal parts beauty and tragedy, injustice and fairness — the dialectical legacy of homo sapiens, sunk into the soil of our shared landscapes.

Wherever we are, in other words, old bones are buried, stubborn legacies persist, and new life is bound to emerge. 

How willing are we to find the roots of the stories that shape us?

By her own admission, Berenice Salas wasn’t willing at all. She grew up in this neighborhood — the daughter of educators — and the only things she was certain of as a young woman were that she wanted to leave, and she didn’t want to teach.

Once she moved away, however, she felt the land of her family pulling her back. And when she heard what they were doing in a former barrel factory near her childhood home, she allowed herself to be pulled all the way in.

Now, as AGC’s elementary school principal, Salas sees her work as a part of something larger than herself. “This is the school I would have dreamt of growing up,” she told me. “We are creating our own little ecosystem — right next to the highway. The Southwest side has always been unfairly under-resourced. But we can be the anchor of something that is both very new and very old. My dad was a farmer in Mexico. This work makes me feel like I’m going back to my roots, and reestablishing what was lost. I’m continuing the work of my ancestors, but in a different way.”

For too long, this is the work that too many of us have tried to forget. 

For generations, we have practiced the logic of delusion, and the slow dance of collective suicide. 

And now we must remember — before it’s too late. 

“Our school lies at the crossroads of a great city,” Ippel says, “bounded by racial divisions and economic challenges. But our citizens are the seeds that will give birth to new gardens here, and new chapters of hope across the globe. Together, we can all be the seeds that inspire people everywhere to reimagine the structure and purpose of school.”

 

 

Education Needs New Metaphors. Let’s Start With These Five.

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Education Needs New Metaphors. Let’s Start With These Five.

I spend most of my waking hours in schools of the present that are working to recalibrate themselves into schools of the future. Across those experiences, I’ve observed some larger patterns to which we are all beholden:

The contours of global citizenship are shifting.

The barrier between man and machine is shrinking.

And the time it will take to undo the human damage to the natural world is running out.

Amidst so many uncertainties, what is the future path we must traverse? What will our students need to know, believe and do in order to add value to such a rapidly changing world? And how will our schools summon the professional courage to shift their practices in order to better support the personal growth of each new generation of young people?

This is the crux of our challenge. And I believe we won’t succeed until we retire the two dominant educational metaphors of the past one hundred years: the assembly line and the tabula rasa.

At best, they no longer serve us.

At worst, they actively prevent us from reimagining the structure and purpose of school.

The word metaphor combines two Greek words — meta, which means over and above, and pherein, to bear across. Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.

Consequently, a new era requires a new way of thinking. And based on what I have observed in some of the world’s leading schools and communities over the past two decades, these five metaphors for school (re)design feel like the right place to start:

1. SCHOOL AS MURMURATION

For more than a century, we have unconsciously accepted an endless stream of assumptions about what school requires:

Subjects and departments.

Fixed curricula.

Grades.

Transcripts.

Credit Hours.

All of these structures have presupposed a fixed path for young people to follow.

For now, that path remains a viable one for many young people to pursue. Gaze a little further out, however, and you will see that the landscape is shifting — away from the notion of a singular path, and towards a much more elastic understanding of how each person can add value to the world.

This will require a new metaphor for how we think about the structure and purpose of school — away from the mechanistic notion of an assembly line, and towards something more emergent, inextricable, and alive.

Knowing this, how might we reimagine the spaces in which learning occurs so that the movement and flow of human bodies is closer to the improvisatory choreography of a murmuration of starlings than the tightly orchestrated machinery of a factory assembly line?

Indeed, what would a murmuration of student interest and passion look like in practice? What would it engender?

2. SCHOOL AS CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

For too long, we have assumed that the purpose of a formal education was to arrive at a point of certainty about the world, and one’s place in it.

In the modern world, however, no one person or perspective can give us the answers we need. “Paradoxically,” as Margaret Wheatley has written, “we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

“It is very difficult to give up our certainties—our positions, our beliefs, our explanations. These help define us; they lie at the heart of our personal identity. Yet curiosity is what we need.”

Knowing this, how can we craft new experiences and learning spaces that will invite young people and adults to be more curious than certain — about themselves, one another, and the wider world?

Indeed, if the entirety of school was akin to a Wunderkammer — a cabinet of curiosities — how would our understanding of school need to shift?

3. SCHOOL AS PARTIALLY-PAINTED CANVAS

In the past, the end-goal of schooling was to acquire a specific body of content knowledge. In the future, however, content will merely be the means by which we reach a more vital end-goal: a set of skills, habits and dispositions that can guide young people through life.

This shift is one that will require us to be in closer relationship with one another, for it is through others that we are made manifest in the world. It will require us to admire the beautiful question more than the elegant answer. And it will require us to focus more on the construction than the completion, and more on being present in the world than re-presenting it.

Knowing this, how can schools create the conditions that will allow for deeper learning expeditions that are less bound by space, time, and tidiness, and more by open-ended inquiry and discovery?

Indeed, instead of viewing school as a masterpiece we adults were waiting to deliver in finished form to our students, what if we understood it more as the chance to craft a partially-painted canvas — one that only the students themselves could complete?

4. SCHOOL AS ASPEN GROVE

One of the more curious features of human evolution is our bihemispheric brain.

In fact, our brains are designed to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing they bring two different worlds into being. In the one, as Iain McGilchrist has written, “we experience — the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world in which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based.

“These are not different ways of thinking about the world,” McGilchrist argues. “They are different ways of being in the world.”

This observation has clear implications for the future of school. If we know that the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, while the right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, how might we more intentionally in our learning environments bring to bear both of these seemingly incompatible types of attention on the world in equal measure — one narrow, focused, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves?

This is the task of the brain — to put us in touch with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. And this, too, is the task of the future of school. How, then, might we envision our schools less as a series of separate departments, classes and cliques, and more as a holistic aspen grove — that biological marvel that appears at first to be an infinite forest of tall trees, but is in fact a single living organism (the oldest and largest on earth), bound together by a complex, interwoven underground root network?

Indeed, what does the concept of School-as-Aspen-Grove require us to design for, and prioritize, and be?

5. SCHOOL AS SWARM

To understand the individual, we need to understand the environment in which they live. As Andreas Weber says, “we have to think of beings always as interbeings.”

To understand this principle in practice, consider the phenomenon of a swarm. Whether it be bees, or dolphins, or a school of fish, a swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence.

In a swarm, a huge connected whole arises from the local coherence of small parts. A swarm does not think. It is a thought process. And so in that sense, any swarm is an intensified counterpart of any individual self.

Knowing this, in what ways can we craft spaces and experiences that invite young people (and adults) into this sort of synchrony?

Indeed, how do we unlock the school-based choreography, and the collective intelligence, of a swarm?

The good news is that this work is not merely an abstract set of concepts. In fact, it’s already well underway, providing us with myriad examples of what these metaphors look like in practice — from the school-as-murmuration model of Crosstown High in Memphis to the Aspen-Grove-integration of the Brightworks School in San Francisco, or from the hundreds of partially-painted-canvas schools in the Big Picture Learning network to your neighborhood Montessori school, whose close attention to the nexus between the materials children use — their cabinet of curiosities — and the way they feel about learning can be witnessed in nearly 25,000 different environments around the world.

In other words, the previous era of thinking is over.

A new era has begun.

To reimagine learning, we must reimagine the physical space of “school” — but how?

Posted on | by Sam

For more than a century, the physical layout of American schools has been as consistent as any feature in American public life. Although the world around us has been in a constant state of flux, we have always been able to depend on a familiar set of symbols in our schools: neat, orderly rows of student desks; teachers delivering lessons to an entire group of children; lockers in the hallways; bell schedules — the list could go on.

But what if those timeworn structures of schooling are actually preventing us from modernizing education for a changing world? What if, in fact, the physical environment is — after parents and peers — the “third teacher” of our sons and daughters?

The latest short film in our multimedia story series about the future of learning, 180: Thrive provides a window into one school’s efforts to directly tackle those questions, and do so in a way that results in a deeper alignment between what we know about how people learn — actively, collaboratively, differently — and how our schools are physically structured. It is intended to spark useful broader thinking about the relationship between a school’s physical environment and its students’ emotional readiness to learn.

This is how we reimagine learning.

This is how we #changethestory.

#Thisis180

Welcome to the “Era of Expeditioncy”

Posted on | by Sam

I spent the first half of this week in Memphis, Tennessee, working with a remarkable local group of educators, parents and developers (yes, developers) who are all dreaming big together as part of Crosstown Concourse, an ambitious effort to redesign a 1.5 million square foot former Sears warehouse into a “vertical urban village” of residents, retail outlets, non-profits, and — wait for it — an innovative public high school.

It’s a thrilling idea — a city within a city, organized around an overarching umbrella of arts, education and wellness, and imagined as a learning ecology that helps all people examine multiple pathways to healthy living. And clearly, if it works, the high school it houses (there will also be an adult education high school, by the way) will need to look nothing like the high schools of our collective past, which were designed for efficiency, and for batching and queuing unprecedented numbers of young people into an Industrial economy that was largely fixed and known.

Indeed, if this project is successful, Crosstown High School will be, according to the lead developer (who happens to be an art history professor), “the beginning of the end of education in a vacuum.”

YES!

So what does that look like?

That’s the task we at WONDER now have before us — along with some great local partners. And while the specifics remain to be hammered out, we already know enough to say this:

  • A school like this must be a home base more than a school — a place where students gather to assemble their literal or figurative rucksacks before heading out on learning expeditions of their choosing;
  • A school like this must not look or feel like a regular “school.” The design goal is not to facilitate 1:30 teacher/student ratios, or facilitate easy movement through double-loaded corridors. Instead, it should be to give kids environments that look and feel more like this — or this.
  • A school like this must be oriented outward, not inward; the learning that happens there must be action-oriented, not abstract; and the space in which this all occurs must be dynamic, not fixed.

In other words, a school like this must mark the beginning of the end of not just education in a vacuum — but of the Industrial Age itself, and its emphasis on efficiency.

Behold: the “Age of Expeditioncy” — an era in which learning is deeply public, and contextualized, and relevant, and dynamic, and hands-on — is upon us.

A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

Last week, I spent three days at a remarkable independent school in Atlanta. It’s on the verge of designing a new building for its upper school, and I’m part of the team that is lucky enough to help them think about what such a space should look like — and what ultimate purpose(s) it should serve.

The current building is a rather traditional space — wide hallways, classrooms, a gym, a library that is slowly losing its raison d’être. But the vision of the school is something else entirely — a fusion of aspirational habits, cultural norms, and principles about teaching and learning that are designed to unleash the full potential and interest of every student.

Which leads to a really interesting question: If we begin to reimagine the spaces in which learning occurs, how could we construct those spaces so that the movement and flow of human bodies is closer to the improvisatory choreography of a murmuration of starlings in summertime– instead of, say, the tightly orchestrated machinery of an army of soldiers in wartime?

What would a murmuration of student interest and passion look like in practice? What would it engender?

Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

The founder of Intrinsic School and her architects certainly think so. What do YOU think?

Personally, I see some cool stuff, and yet overall something doesn’t sit right. Why, for example, is a school that is pushing the envelope on personalized learning still organizing its students by grade level? Shouldn’t mass groupings by age be the first thing to go?

And is it a good thing to have kids spending 50% of their day on a computer? I suppose the right way to think of it is that a kid is spending half of his or her day doing research, but for a new model of personalization, it feels awfully . . . well . . . depersonalized.

And why is that coastline place set up to have kids literally facing a brick wall? Who thought that was a good idea?

I don’t know — I think this feels more like something that was designed for kitsch, not kids. It’s angular, when learning is round.

What am I missing here? What do you see?