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PRACTICE
06 SENSES OF PLACE: BUILDING EXCELLENCE
Anne Cunningham
Educational Consultant
The Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City
My favourite place to collaborate
Firpark School, North Lanarkshire
This project was commissioned from The Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, by the Scottish Government. It is seeking to discover and develop user aspirations for the design of school buildings and their grounds in the context of the new Curriculum for Excellence. It also aims to demonstrate the ways in which well-designed learning environments can support delivery of the new curriculum.
Senses of Place: Building Excellence builds on the experience gained by The Lighthouse during the Design for Learning, 21st Century Schools project, which involved working in partnership with nine local authorities between 2004 and 2006. The project team explored a range of strategies and activities to involve young people's expertise in the development of designs for their own schools. This project was funded by the Scottish Executive, and resulted in a series of publications, including the popular and creative Designs on My Learning. 1
The principal aims of the Senses of Place project are as follows:
- identify and raise aspirations for the delivery of Curriculum for Excellence;
- identify and raise aspirations for quality school design and its importance in delivering Curriculum for Excellence;
- develop exemplars of design adaptations that would assist schools to deliver Curriculum for Excellence;
- record and reflect on the process developed over the course of the project and disseminate the outcomes.
The project was split into three separate phases, as detailed below.
Phase 1: Sensing your Place
A collaboration with local authorities and schools: June-September 2007.
The project began with a collaboration between The Lighthouse and five local authorities, in which each authority provided a team of 20 professionals and a team of young people. Within each authority, professionals and young people worked together for most or all of the time; workshops only took place separately on occasion.
The teams of professionals were comprised of a diverse range of people such as school managers, local authority officers, teachers, community professionals, community members, parents and representatives of national organisations. However, all of the participants were innovative, experienced and aspirational within their roles. The young people who took part were of a similar age within each team but had varying degrees of success within the education system.
Building spaces because we
want to be together
Baker Street Nursery, Stirling
The Building Excellence programme and workshops run by the Scottish Government throughout 2007 provided a range of topical themes that were of interest to those involved in school design. In addition, each local authority selected a theme that was of specific interest locally. The five projects are briefly described below:
North Lanarkshire: Based in a school for pupils with additional support needs, this project focused on enterprise learning and involved teachers and P6/7 pupils. Pupils worked alongside their teachers and on at least one occasion worked with pupils from a neighbouring secondary school, to explore the theme of enterprise. They chose to focus on exploring ways to enable pupils to collaborate with each other. All the participants reflected on their experiences of collaboration and developed their ideas of what enabled collaboration. They then explored different spaces, focusing their investigation on how a space could cater for a variety of different learning methods and needs.
Evaluating science learning
West Lothian
West Lothian: This project focused on environments for science lessons and learning through sciences, within a secondary school. The team combined West Lothian-based science professionals with S2-S4 pupils from across the authority and the workshops took place in a wide range of science workplaces, including the Glasgow Science Centre. Participants began by developing an awareness of their own everyday relationship with science. They explored a range of approaches to learning about and through science and examined the ways in which different places might impact on scientific learning.
Stirling: Working with nursery pupils to look at environments for play in early years and P1, this project built on work undertaken as part of the Six Cities Design Festival. 2 Facilitators worked closely with nursery staff to explore the children's 'senses of place' and develop different temporary environments for them to explore and reflect upon. The workshops culminated in a temporary space being built for use on a community day. This space/structure encouraged exploration, play and a wide range of creative activities. It enabled feedback to be gathered from the community and created a more coherent expression of the concepts the children had developed.
The consultation process delved into everyday user knowledge about the ways in which different spaces are used within schools
Shared spaces
Orkney
Orkney: This project focused on creating outward-looking schools with a distinctive Orcadian identity. The goal was that staff, pupils and community members walking into any school in Orkney should feel the same sense of welcome. The project team worked with professionals, community members and with P7-S2 pupils from around the authority, to define what makes Orkney education special. Through workshops, the participants explored the wide range of different individual and community identities that need to be brought together to form a coherent Orkney school system.
Argyll & Bute: Aiming to create temporary and short-term settings for learning within large school spaces, this project worked with teachers, community members and S5-6 pupils from across Argyll & Bute. Working within a wide range of different settings, the participants explored different approaches to learning in large spaces and considered how these would impact on different learners.
The workshops took place as part of an ongoing and varied process, in which creative learning techniques were used to stimulate new ideas about learning and teaching within the context of Curriculum for Excellence. The teams worked with facilitators to explore how the designs of space, place and learning come together to make an education service. They then explored their aspirations for Curriculum for Excellence, using these as the basis for future design interventions, refurbishments and rebuilds.
Participants developed their clientship skills and were helped to understand the value and importance of their individual experiences and varied perspectives within the school design process. They learnt how to express and discuss that expertise within the context of designs under development. It was a priority to ensure that the teams had the space and time they required to become informed and aspirational clients who were not just reacting to the current status quo. Instead of a narrow focus on architecture, the consultation process delved into the broader range of everyday user knowledge about the ways in which different spaces are used within schools.
Following on from this process, each team participated in a workshop to set a design brief. They were required to build consensus around their theme and set a joint brief, with a focus on qualitative information and practical aspirations. Each of the five briefs was backed up with related information and ideas recorded during the initial workshops. This enabled the architects to understand the development of thinking behind the brief.
Phase 2: Design Challenge
A collaboration with architects and designers: September-October 2007
This design challenge brought together leading architects and designers from local authorities and the private sector who had experience in designing learning environments, or preparing for organisational change. These creative teams, including specialists in a range of different areas of design, worked collaboratively to explore the design briefs developed during Phase 1 of the project. The private sector architects involved in the design challenge included: DEGW, 3DReid, JM Architects, LWD Design, Lisa MacKenzie and Gareth Hoskins Architects. Local authorities nominated their own in-house design experts.
The design teams worked with a small group drawn from the user teams in a series of facilitated workshops, which allowed them time and space to explore the briefs in depth and then review the resultant designs as they developed. This combination allowed architects to learn from the users' expertise in spaces and learning and to develop a strong educational vision, resulting in collaborative and specialised design exemplars.
Phase 3: Learning from the Project
Exhibition, film and publication: February-April 2008
The Lighthouse will host an exhibition of these design exemplars from February to April 2008. The architects have been asked to communicate their design ideas for Curriculum for Excellence by building models of 'experiences' that will be accessible to pupils, parents, local authorities and teachers. In addition there will be a range of resources and information relating to school design and the Senses of Place publication and film will be on display.
How we feel about big spaces:
teachers and young people
Argyll & Bute
It was decided that the best way to record a collaborative project such as Senses of Place was to use participatory methods and for this reason a Senses of Place film has been in production throughout the course of the project, following teams through the process. This film, along with an associated publication, focuses on communicating and disseminating the process and activities developed. It is intended to support users and architects alike in working together to develop aspirations for learning environments in the context of Curriculum for Excellence, particularly prior to the start of a school refurbishment, re-build or minor alteration project.
The Senses of Place publication will be produced by The Lighthouse in February 2008, to coincide with the launch of the exhibition.
The Lighthouse, Scotland's first dedicated national centre for architecture and design, was opened by HM Queen Elizabeth in July 1999. The Lighthouse is the renamed, £13 million ($20 million) conversion of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 1895 Glasgow Herald newspaper office. Operated as a charitable trust, its income coming from a combination of public and private funds, the centre's vision is to develop the links between design, architecture, and the creative industries, seeing these as interconnected social, educational, economic and cultural issues of concern to everyone.
Anne Cunningham
The Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City
www.thelighthouse.co.uk
SENSES OF PLACE -THE LIGHTHOUSE PROJECT
Katy McBride, S3, pupil at St Margaret's Academy
On 12 June 2007, seven pupils and two teachers from St Margaret's Academy travelled with similar groups from West Calder High School and Whitburn Academy to Glasgow Science Centre to embark on their first day working with The Lighthouse in Senses of Place.
The Lighthouse is working with pupils, teachers and people in industry to design an exciting and inspiring science classroom. They wanted us to have our say in the design.
The first day was great fun because there were so many activities to do at the Science Centre. The activities made us think about what we would like or might not like in our classrooms.
The following days were at the Alba Centre, Livingston, where each school made a Pecha Kucha presentation to demonstrate the places we liked to work in our schools and West Lothian College which was a practical day with design briefs.
The experience has been great, we have invested our ideas and we are looking forward to working closely with the architects to see their designs.
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