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6.
A FUTURE FOR ENRICHING SCHOOL LANDSCAPES
This document
has presented the learning values of school landscapes to give a context
for design qualities, themes, and processes that may enrich these landscapes
for children and community. All children need time and places to develop
an ecological literacy, and this is particularly challenging in contemporary
urban environments. As significant settings in children's daily lives,
school landscapes hold incomparable opportunities for learning through
multiple intelligences. School landscapes may actively engage the surrounding
community, as local and national initiatives have recast schools as centers
for community life. The case studies and examples suggest conditions
for creating meaningful school landscapes. Looking to a future where
school landscapes are widely valued and enriched as learning environments,
four conditions seem essential: institutional support, community partnerships,
supportive pedagogy , and informed, innovative planning and design. These
four conditions are presented here, noting issues and opportunities.
6.1
Institutional Support
To create widespread
and lasting improvements to school landscapes, institutional policies,
programs, and funds need to support outdoor learning at all levels of
the educational system and within local communities. Funding and support
are needed for inclusive participatory design processes to develop school
landscapes as integral learning environments for school and community,
as well as for constructing and sustaining them as such. Currently the
provision of outdoor learning environments isn't widely found on policy
and funding agendas through what is funded for site work, design criteria
and scope of work, and capital improvements budgets.
To build awareness
and advocacy for outdoor learning environments, the many educational and
community values of landscapes need to be presented to policy-makers,
administrators, teachers, parents, and communities in compelling ways.
Effective change can be initiated through:
current
and continued research on learning values
Existing research
and alternative learning approaches (see Section 2.2) have demonstrated
that the environment can engage multiple intelligences, serve as an
integrating context for curricula, and foster internalized meaning for
students. Enriching landscapes may support such learning more successfully
than school classrooms. To respond directly to our national preoccupation
on test scores and accountability, further research and dissemination
of findings are needed to demonstrate how effectively learning is enriched
through contact with enriching environments. The State Education and
Environment Roundtable study (see Section 2.2) is a good example of
such research and dissemination. The Department of Education's "Educational
Facilities Clearinghouse" (see Section 1.3) offers a growing literature
on issues related to school landscape design, and more information is
needed on how and why these environments can be central to learning
by children and community members.
successful
models
At a local level,
successful precedents are excellent catalysts for building broader institutional
support, as Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard project demonstrates. The
transformation of one school's grounds and curriculum around the life
cycle of growing food has resulted in district-wide adoption of policies
for every new school to have a kitchen and garden. The success and
national media coverage of this model should inspire leaders in other
communities to undertake similar projects in their schools.
outside
support
Like the Edible
Schoolyard, many school landscapes are enhanced with funding from foundations.
These funds may be specified for particular issues, rather than support
for comprehensive planning of school sites and surroundings. The Boston
Schoolyard Initiative is an innovative partnering among foundations
and with the City to enrich school landscapes, with a planning process
that builds on each school's unique context. Initial funds are used
for community outreach to ensure that a full spectrum of school and
community values are incorporated in site development.
system-wide
commitment
Formalized institutional
support is essential to move from individual initiatives to systematic
enrichment of school landscapes. School districts and state and national
agencies need to direct and actively support research, policies, and
funding for outdoor learning environments. National programs supporting
school outdoor learning environments would benefit from advocacy by
professionals, academics, and community members. With thirty states
requiring environmental education in their curricula (Holmes 1998),
the immediate school landscape becomes a compelling resource. As a
living classroom, an enriched landscape relates local experiences with
the surrounding region and distant environments.
6.2
Community Partnerships
Community partnerships
that transform school landscapes and expand outdoor learning environments
beyond the school hold multiple benefits. The three case studies (Section
5) and examples of programs (Section 2) illustrate different ways such
partnerships can engage governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations
and foundations, and neighbors with school interests. With this layering
of partners, a creative synergy of funding, resource allocation, and stewardship
can build more meaningful and enduring environments. Partnerships can
build from:
shared agency
resources
The successful
partnerships described in Section 5 demonstrate that shared land ownership
and management can become opportunities rather than obstacles. These
partnerships may take many forms. Parks Departments may lease school
grounds for community open space, as at TT Minor Elementary. School
landscapes may include adjacent parks and urban forests, as Dearborn
Park Elementary demonstrates. Land owned and maintained by public utilities
or other agencies may support school use and programs, as Meadowbrook
Pond has become a destination for local schools.
non-profit
support
Nonprofit organizations
can provide funds for land and site improvements, as well as professional
expertise to enrich learning potentials. For example, naturalists with
the Audubon Society in Boston work with schoolchildren to understand
their local ecology. Acquisition funding for Dearborn Park Elementary's
urban forest was provided by the Trust for Public Land, and the Washington
Forest Protection Association provided expertise in tailoring grade-appropriate
curricula to the forest. At TT Minor, an organization's annual community
enhancement day brought over a hundred volunteers to help build children's
raised gardens and plant areas. The nonprofit organization "Intergenerational
Innovations" has provided volunteers to work with students as mentors.
multiple
users' involvement
Involvement of
a broad constituency of users and sustained leadership are vital to
the development and ongoing care of school landscapes. Users include
school students, teachers, administration and parents as well as neighbors
and community groups. Woodridge Elementary (see Section 4.1) illustrates
how parents' initiatives resulted in the creation of a riparian habitat
with involvement of students and teachers, volunteers, grants and local
donations. At TT Minor Elementary, the support of neighborhood and
community interests was central to the first phase of development funded
by grants from varied sources. The community played an active role
with school representatives in the funded masterplanning process and
contributed time and materials for a matching grant award.
6.3
Supportive Pedagogy
A pedagogy that supports
experiential learning is needed for school landscapes to be successful
formal learning contexts as well as support informal play and nonformal
learning. Administrative support, developed curriculum, teacher preparation,
and sufficient adult supervision of student groups are all needed to reveal
school landscapes as what architect/educator Anne Taylor calls three-dimensional
textbooks (1993). Additionally, the school and site design processes
can and should be integrated with learning. Programs that integrate the
design process with curriculum (see Section 4.2) have demonstrated a myriad
of learning benefits.
Dearborn Park Elementary
demonstrates what can happen when all these factors to create a dynamic
and expanding outdoor learning environment:
The principal
has advocated for the educational use of the school's landscape, and
continues to seek out grants and community partners to enrich it.
A curriculum
tailored to each grade and the landscape's forest has been developed
and implemented.
Teachers
have been trained in using the curriculum, and have expanded upon it.
Teachers
integrated the site masterplanning process in their curricula, applying
varied skills to site analysis and programming activities as well as
the design workshop.
To provide
adequate supervision for students, classes split up and half use the
staffed computer laboratory, while the other half are outdoors with
their teacher. Through this formalized approach, the school landscape
has become an integral place and media for students' formal learning.
While a growing body
of literature on outdoor learning provides curriculum and methods, these
tools need to be paired with teacher training and assistance that can
be achieved by:
grants for
training
The Boston Schoolyard
Funders Collaborative (see Section 2) offers a professional development
grant program for teams of teachers. The grants require participating
teachers to share their experiences with others at their school. At
Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard (see Section 2), grants enabled teachers
to develop curriculum and mentor other teachers in making the garden
integral with curriculum.
institutionalized
training in teacher education
Successful curricula
and methods for teaching outdoors needs to be integral with teacher
education. The Boston Schoolyard Funders Collaborative advocates the
training of outdoor teaching skills as part of the school department's
teacher training (Meyer 1999).
administrative
and staff support
At Berkeley's Edible
Schoolyard, staff were hired to manage the garden and assist teachers
with lesson plans. The school's principal equates the garden with other
school resources, such as a computer lab or library, where staff support
is essential (Comnes 1999).
6.4
Informed, Innovative Planning and Design
Landscape architects
who design school landscapes need to draw upon and advocate for institutional
support, community partnerships, and supportive pedagogy. These conditions
are necessary for informed and innovative planning and design. As innovative
processes evolve and places are created, their stories need to be shared.
The profession's literature, conferences, and continuing education programs
can play vital roles in disseminating information and examples of best
practices. Continued research of the qualities and values of successful
learning environments is needed. This research can inform design practice
and strengthen the case for all school landscapes to be conceived and
developed as outdoor learning environments. The case studies and examples
discussed here highlighted essential components to enriching design:
inclusive
design process
An inclusive design
process can raise critical issues, provide unique insights into a landscape's
meanings, and build vested community supporters. Through their firm's
design work at TT Minor and Dearborn Park Elementary, Randy Allworth
and Dale Nussbaum brought together community and school members, and
individuals learned from each other why issues are important and how
obstacles may be overcome. Site and program priorities can be identified
through consensus, and this can lead to a masterplan and design that
expresses broadly supported goals. As primary users of school landscapes,
children need to be meaningfully involved in the design process, in
ways that the process is linked with curriculum to foster multiple benefits.
Children's participation in design and construction, like adults' participation,
can foster a vested interest in the landscape's future.
inherent
potentials of place
Informed, innovative
design builds upon unique qualities inherent in each site and potentials
of its community. An inclusive design process at T.T. Minor Elementary
raised insights about the site's potentials, and served as a community-building
process (Biondo 2000). Dearborn Park Elementary's international garden
provides unique understandings of the homelands of the school community
and creates social spaces for students to gather at the start and end
of their school days. Meadowbrook Pond's sculptural landforms literally
rose out of the pond, as the design team creatively used the excavated
material to shape a powerful sense of place with the earth and construction
savings redirected to artworks.
broadened
awareness and support
A growing professional
literature on the design of learning environments can serve as a basis
for practice and for greater awareness of and institutional support
for school landscape development. Local initiatives should be celebrated
in the media as educational and ecological infrastructure for the school
and the larger community. For example, national media attention and
a published monograph have made Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard a model
for other schools to follow, and a Foundation supporting similar projects
grew out of Alice Waters' personal investment in this project. Landscape
architects need to share successful projects and research with local,
state and national policy makers.
cross-disciplinary
dialogue
The making of school
landscapes as educationally revealing places requires collaboration
of many disciplines and interests. To be effective in planning and
design, landscape architects need to understand these perspectives and
educate others about landscape architecture's unique contributions,
as the case studies illustrated. Designers' participation in other
organizations and boards, such as the National Association for Environmental
Education, the Council of Educational Facility Planners International,
and state education facility boards is essential to build the bridges
necessary for more informed, innovative, and valued outdoor learning
environments. Design teams need to include varied disciplines to enhance
landscape curricular potentials and community values.
School is inside
as well as outside. Today's children deserve the opportunities of previous
generations: to experience diverse sights, sounds, smells, and textures
of their natural and cultural communities. As Keats wrote, "Nothing
ever becomes real till it is experienced" (Allen, p. 11). Learning
becomes real through experience. With innovative practice and engaging
processes, landscape architects can create enriching landscapes for
children, their families, and their community.
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