[I-1] School Programming- Who's at the Table?

My interest is to study collaboration between the many players in the design of innovative new Charter schools. I want to better understand how to frame educational concepts into the right vocabulary for synthesis into the built environment.

Therefore, I was especially keen to read the article Barn raising: Collaborative Group Processes in Seminars. Oftentimes, when an architectural project is initiated, there is a ‘charrette’ or formal interactive intense exploration of concepts involved in the design of the school. After reading this piece, I was able to put a name on the way this meeting is usually conducted. It is descriptively a Distinguished House Tour. The superintendent is paraded in with his ‘Vision’ to be awed. The principal is then introduced and relates her own set of requirements. Then the favored Master teacher is ushered in with her scratchings on a sheet of notebook paper. She explains how her classroom must work.

The design process is made more problematic in Texas, there are a good number of Charter schools that were started as an extension of a religious organization by a ‘visionary’. The task of extracting the ‘vision’ to institutionalize practices so that one can design a building responsive to the pedagogy is greatly impeded by this ‘House Tour format.

I now see the need to revise the charrette to be more of a Barn raising. Each idea must be owned by the group, not the pet project of one to the detriment of the school design. First of all, the pedagogy of the school must be institutionalized (the vision must be extracted and set free). How can we acknowledge ‘peers as teachers’ in this planning meeting as the article suggests when the master teacher is sitting next to the superintendent? How can that work? How can that work? --Mikael Powell