For the first time in human history, one out of every two people lives in a city. One out of three of these city dwellers lives in the informal environment—a slum. Home to nearly one million people, Dharavi is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet.

OWP/P | Cannon Design was engaged by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architects to participate on a collaborative team working for the redevelopment the Dharavi district in Mumbai. Given the massive scale of the project, each firm on the team led specific components: the master plan concept was prepared by Chicago Consultants Studio; the commercial market-rate fabric development by AS + GG, and OWP/P | Cannon Design oversaw the tenement housing fabric development, including planning for new schools.

Education across the globe is transforming from a pedagogy that trains children to be information receptors to a pedagogy that trains future generations to be knowledge seekers. An environment that supports “multiple intelligences” is imperative—it must provide a diversity of teaching and learning spaces to support a wide range of learners. Flow and agility will be intrinsic in these spaces so that the knowledge sharing and relationship between teacher and learner is constantly enhanced.

Both primary and secondary schools would be developed using the same base building module, allowing for ease of transition between the school types as the demand for education shifts based on demographics. A primary design driver was maximization of efficiency and space so that every area within the building supports teaching and learning.

For the primary school level, our concept is based on the academy model, which is a series of 500-student schools. Primary schools will be embedded within residential buildings and dispersed across Dharavi so that students can attend neighborhood-based schools. The schools will have open community space at the ground floor, in order to strengthen community ties to formal education. A medical clinic is planned at the ground floor of the primary school as a fully functional clinic that also amplifies the belief in educating the whole child.

Secondary school students in Mumbai’s slums have some of the lowest graduation rates in the country. The proposed program for secondary education will be based on an apprentice/entrepreneurship model, whereby students can spend time in adjacent commercial, healthcare and merchant communities in preparation for future career and trade opportunities.

VS Furniture recently furnished 53,000 square feet of classroom and lab space at St. Mary’s Episcopal School, a private school for girls in Tennessee. Below are some excerpts, highlighting the role of research in the design process, from a case study VS Furniture recently wrote on the project.

“‘We pursue the best research-based decisions for how to teach and how to learn,’ says the Assistant Head of School, Mr. Throckmorton. ‘When we found out that VS Furniture grounds its furniture solutions in research, that really struck a chord with us.’

To ensure perfect fit, the school’s principal measured the heights of all 228 middle schoolers so that VS Furniture could recommend the correct chair and desk height for the range of student sizes. The company offers six different heights to ensure that students have appropriately sized classroom furniture.

‘Growing bodies have a natural need to move,’ explains Dr. Dieter Breithecker, Europe’s foremost expert on the relationship between ergonomic design in educational furniture and the physical development of school children. ‘Increased opportunities to move while seated, including rocking, swiveling, and rolling, improve blood flow and oxygen to the brain, thereby increasing attention and concentration levels.’

[The furniture’s] ergonomic design allows the girls to change their sitting position throughout the day, which is critical to student success. Research studies show a significant relationship between movement and mental fitness.”

Linda Keane, AIA is Professor of Architecture and Environmental Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She and her husband, Mark Keane, founded Studio 1032, an architecture firm based in Milwaukee and Chicago. Linda is co-creator of NEXT.cc, an award-winning website that teaches young students about design.

Why is it important to teach young kids design?

Only one out of one hundred people in the world goes to college. So if you only teach design in college, what does that mean for the other 99? They are the design denied. In this country it’s 36 out of 100, but still there is this huge gap.

We lived in a designed world. Everything around has been designed by someone, somewhere. We realized that teaching design at the university level was too late to introduce design to the public. In our work, especially when it comes to green architecture, we realized that the public did not have adequate knowledge to make the best choices. At the same time we found that the public mostly thought of architecture as buildings, maybe as construction, but they really had no idea about the complexity of architectural planning and envisioning, which is so important to the health of our cities.

What’s the history behind NEXT.cc?

We have children (4!) and when they were going through public schools we went into their schools and did career days. We talked about architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning. We had hands-on, quick, little thirty-minute lectures and projects. They built a skyscraper or drew a garden design or made column capitals, and they loved it. And we realized that, with our children going through the public school system, that basically, environmental design and design education did not exist. The art teachers and the drafting teachers that were teaching it were teaching it much more formally or technically and not at all as the messy, complex, creative and innovative, propositional field that it is.

So, we decided that we needed to bring design into K12 education. With students, we designed 16 initial journeys published in a little book. We piloted it in Racine County with inner-city kids and they ate it up. Some of the students did all 16 journeys in two weeks and asked for more!

The journeys are accessed online, but why is it important that what students learn about design is ‘place-based’?

Our children know that the rainforests are being depleted, yet cannot walk out of their school building and name the tree on their front school yard. They can name artists and musicians but not architects and designers of their town or city. So there is a gap in knowledge. A concentration and emphasis on place-based activities is really key, we believe, to the future of diversity. Children need to learn from the place that they live in. They need to connect both to the natural and the built world during the k12 experience.

How can teachers incorporate design in their curriculum?

We lead workshops for teachers. In thirty or forty-five minutes they design chairs with found materials. They struggle to create and construct and experiment and that’s good. In the process they learn a lot about materials, about comfort, function, structural stability and the design process. We’re trying to show teachers that learning through design does not have to be a huge undertaking. It can be a short, quick, wake-up, hands-on activity before traditional book and test learning.

WORK Architecture Company, the design force behind the urban farm Public Farm 1 at MoMA’s P.S.1 in 2008, have another inspiring project in the works. This time, working with Edible Schoolyard NY, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation and Public School 216 in Brooklyn, NY, the team has designed a school garden and kitchen classroom that will replace a portion of the school’s parking lot. The project is off-grid and fully self-sustaining. The space is designed to facilitate learning about nutrition, sustainable planting, energy, composting and water-reclamation. P.S. 126’s Edible Schoolyard is scheduled for completion in 2010.

The project has four main components: A kitchen classroom, with three learning stations that can accommodate a total of thirty students, a Mobile Greenhouse, made of a lightweight polycarbonate structure that will allow for year-round gardening during New York’s chilly winters, a Systems Wall, which will house a cistern for reclaimed water, composting, waste-sorting, dishwashing, a tool shed and chicken coop and finally, the ‘Ramada,’ a round outdoor seating area shaded by photovoltaic panels.

The design team involved the school community in the design process. They deserve this great space to plant, harvest, cook and eat together!

One hundred years ago, the average adult walked 10 miles per day. Now, that number averages about half-a-mile a day. At a seminar on movement and furniture, Dr. Dieter Breithecker, ergonomics researcher and contributor to The Third Teacher, spoke about the body-brain connection. His research shows that where you sit can affect how you feel and learn. Students on flexible chairs that encourage movement have more blood flow, more muscular activity and more oxygen supply.
Here is an interview of Dr. Breithecker by Denver’s NBC affiliate station about the importance of allowing students to move when they learn:

For more: http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=115346&catid=188

OWP/P | Cannon Design, working with Public Architecture, recently completed work on a Learning Environment Guide for the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which is a growing national network of charter schools.

KIPP started in off humbly in 1994 with 50 students in Houston. At that time the program’s focus was to bring 5th through 8th grade students from underprivileged communities up to their grade level in reading and math. The KIPP network has had great success in the last fifteen years, with 82 charter schools today, serving 20,000 students. KIPP has also expanded its focus, building schools and programs to educate children from pre-K to high school.

KIPP approached Public Architecture, an architecture practice dedicated to making design services available to nonprofit organizations, to help develop a comprehensive facilities design framework. OWP/P | Cannon Design, was brought on to create a Learning Environment Guide for KIPP’s Elementary Schools. A team at OWP/P | Cannon Design created the guide through the firm’s Open Hand Studio, a commitment to donate 1% of our time to working on pro-bono design projects for organizations such as KIPP schools.

The team at OWP/P | Cannon Design created a 57-page guide, detailing the basics of Elementary school design. The guide focuses on design elements that are particularly relevant to KIPP schools, such as low-cost building and sustainability solutions, redesigning existing spaces and creating flexible spaces that can be used in many ways during KIPP’s longer than average school day.

OWP/P | Cannon Design developed a checklist to help school leaders plan how much space they need. The team also developed ‘Space Flashcards’ that show the basic needs and best practices for each type of space. The flashcards include images of spaces that work well in elementary schools as well as give KIPP’s school leaders an idea of what is absolutely necessary for each type of space and what is a goal for KIPP’s bright future.

For more information about the guide, please visit: http://www.publicarchitecture.org/design/kipp_schools.htm or contact Carolyn Aler at OWP/P | Cannon Design. She may be reached at caler@cannondesign.com.

Tinkering School is a summer program where kids learn to experiment and take risks. The school’s founder, Gever Tulley, explains that instead of focusing on teaching kids a specific skill, the school’s goal is to teach kids to design, build and celebrate their mistakes.

Gever Tulley has also written a book, Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), which recommends teaching kids how to use tools, play with fire, climb and throw things safely. He says it is important to let kids learn how to do potentially dangerous things on their own so they don’t grow up to be sheltered adults who hurt themselves later. Using a knife or driving a car is empowering and helps kids develop “an extended sense of self.” Watch this video to see the five dangerous things Gever Tulley says you should let your child do.

First, congratulations to OWP/P | Cannon Design, VS Furniture, and Bruce Mau Design for creating The Third Teacher, a beautiful and useful book. I’ve been interested in better understanding the impact that school facilities have on all aspects of education for about 10 years now, ever since Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund introduced me to the issue by asking for some statistical advice. I believe that The Third Teacher will help greatly in spreading the word about this important issue to a broader audience.

In recent years, I’ve seen a growing number of academic studies looking at the empirical links between the quality of school facilities and a host of outcomes, including student learning (usually measured via standardized testing), teacher attitudes, and parental involvement in schools.

Together with coauthors Mark Schneider and Yi Shang, I’ve conducted some of this research myself, including looking at the relationship between the Overall Compliance Rating (a measure of facilities maintenance and repair) and the Academic Performance Index in schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (available online from the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities,) and a look at whether teachers’ reports of facility quality were predictive of their decision to continue teaching at a particular school using original survey data in Washington, D.C. public schools, (available online from the Teachers College Record).

What I’ve found, as most researchers in the area have found, is that there are strong linkages between the quality of school facilities, broadly defined, and these various outcomes. What is harder to determine, however, is the true magnitude of the causal linkage between characteristics of facilities and the outcomes that really matter. For example, a correlation between the Overall Compliance Rating and the academic performance of LAUSD schools may indicate a real causal relationship—or it may simply indicate that better-run schools both keep their physical plants well-maintained and also do a better job of teaching their students (or attracting higher performing students).

This problem is nothing new in education research. Indeed, the recent focus at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences on the central role of evidence from randomized controlled trials highlights the general increase in awareness of the limits of our evidence base across all areas of education.

I believe that it is time for research on the impacts of school facilities to join this shift to better quality evidence that allows us to make powerful statements about the causal effect of facilities on student achievement, the teacher labor market, and other key factors. This new program of research will involve randomized trials when possible—the systematic manipulation of facilities characteristics under experimental control—to better inform researchers and decision makers about the characteristics of facilities that matter. When randomized trials are too expensive, not feasible, or unethical, we need to turn to powerful natural experiments to help uncover these true causal links as well.

Again, this is not a new idea, even in the area of school facilities research. A wonderful paper by Bronzaft and McCarthy, “The Effect of Elevated Train Noise of Reading Ability,” published in 1975 in the journal, Environment and Behavior (Vol. 7, No. 4) evaluated the impact of the noise from elevated NYC subway trains on student reading achievement and several attitudinal measures. The study used a simple, but elegant design: compare matched classes within a school (over several years) where one class in each group was drawn from those on the east side of the building (less noise), while the matched class was drawn from the nosier west side, next to the elevated tracks. They found, not surprisingly, that train noise was a significant predictor of lower achievement scores. (Thanks to Todd Ely for first pointing me to this paper).

While this sort of natural experiment has its limitations, it nevertheless helps us better understand the true impact of various attributes of school facilities and can serve as an important input to decision makers faced with a cost/benefit analysis of how best to spend a limited budget on capital improvements. I strongly encourage readers of The Third Teacher who are involved in facilities improvement planning and implementation to consider building in randomization or natural experiments (such as phasing-in renovation or improvement) to the projects to help build a stronger evidence base to better make the case for the educational importance of facilities and the indoor environment.

Jack Buckley is Associate Professor of Applied Statistics (and, by courtesy, Applied Psychology, Politics, and Public Policy) at New York University’s Steinhardt School. He is the former Deputy Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Federal statistical agency for education. He can be reached electronically at spb5@nyu.edu.

A little camera called BigShot offers a great avenue to employ many Third Teacher ideas, namely, Unite the Disciplines, Imagine like a child, Think hands-on, Put theory into practice, Expand virtually and, thanks to BigShot’s most unique feature, Reveal how stuff works.

Designed by the Computer Vision Lab at Columbia University,
BigShot is a camera that students assemble and use themselves. The camera offers students the opportunity to learn about optics, mechanics, electromagnetism, electronics, image processing, and even the physiology of the human eye.

Once kids have built the camera they are encouraged to experiment with photography concepts while documenting aspects of their lives. BigShot comes with software to download, view and share photos with students from all over the world. BigShot is working to create a network of schools all over the world, which will regularly share their photos online.

The camera was designed to be used and loved by all children. It is available in many colors (inspired by something else kids love: a bag of M&M’s) and operates using either a single AA battery or a hand crank; 4-6 rotations of the crank are all you needed to take a photo!

Edge is an independent education foundation, based in the UK, which is dedicated to raising the stature of practical and vocational learning to match the emphasis currently placed on traditional academic training. Edge recently produced a documentary titled ‘We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For.’ The film explores the role of education in equipping our children with the tools they need to face the challenges of our rapidly changing world. The Third Teacher contributor, Ken Robinson, is featured in the film. Here is a short yet powerful trailer: