Building Innovation & Belonging: Re-Designing the Learning Experience

When designers, educators, and learners come together, it’s usually in service of a common goal: to make school better. As designers serving schools, we wanted to know, what must be true to make a school support today’s learning needs and be responsive to the unknown demands of the future. How do we make one that empowers learners and educators, particularly at the “middle school” level, to thrive in their respective roles, while being one that designers are proud to have created? Through our research we learned simple, yet powerful insights:

• Inertia is a compelling force. If you want to make real, enduring change you need alignment between three spheres of influence: people, practices, and place. '
• The ability to clearly communicate is required to get alignment between and within these spheres. That is how ideas can be exchanged, tested, modified and ultimately, incorporated.
• Designers, educators and learners are NOT clearly communicating with each other. As facilitators of the building design process, we (the architects and designers) are responsible for ensuring that everybody understands both the questions and the answers as they relate to architectural design.
• We need a simple, practical toolbox that can help us check, in real time, that we have identified with the educators and learners the architectural problems they face.

This will hold us accountable by targeting the problems they perceive to have the greatest impact and equipping them to manipulate their physical world in service of their educational needs. On the surface these findings may seem anything but ground-breaking. Current inclusive and engaging design practices invite diverse voices into the process in ways previously unthinkable. We “know” through those practices that schools need to be “flexible, welcoming, safe and innovative”. We are “using the same words” to point to obvious solutions. Why, then, do we keep hearing that the building is getting in the way?

Why, then, do we imagine a future that looks nothing like the present or the past... but continue building schools that are fundamentally unchanged?

People are the complex expressions of their lived experiences and education. With our toolbox we will be able to understand how our individuality – whether a designer, educator, or learner – can help us see ourselves, each other, and our physical world more clearly, as well as the steps we can take together to start designing, constructing, and learning in buildings we deserve, for the future we imagine.

Meet the Research Team