As many Americans adjust to life at home, exploring backyard yoga classes and telecommuting to work while their children flitter through the background disrupting Zoom meetings, the schools responsible for those children are likewise adapting to the constraints and demands of in-person instruction. In the midst of a pandemic that has fundamentally altered the physical spaces for learning a generation of students is coming to view as a “new normal,” the architecture of education echoes many changes the rest of society has undertaken since the crisis began last March.
From coast to coast, schools are turning to outdoor education as a viable alternative to indoor instruction in an attempt to work around CDC recommendations that leave educators wary and unable to perform their jobs in ways they took for granted before the pandemic.
With roots in the Scandinavian tradition called “Udeskole,” outdoor learning has become a method many in the field view as a necessary and game-changing solution to social distancing demands with additional effects that might not have been considered without the catalyst COVID-19 has provided.
The benefits of learning outdoors have proven to work wonders on the academic experience of pupils at all grade and ability levels across the world. Students with attention issues show a marked improvement in the area when classrooms are taken outside, younger children develop a host of positive character traits, behavioral issues are resolved, and progress can be tracked with decreased interruptions and higher test scores.
The benefits of learning outdoors have proven to work wonders on the academic experience of pupils at all grade and ability levels across the world.
Access to this kind of learning, however, is proving very difficult for certain communities that are hemmed in either by budgets or their physical location in dense urban environments bereft of any actual greenspaces to support it.
Schools in Los Angeles County, for example, have done an admirable job of turning barren asphalt spaces into outdoor classrooms with shaded areas and seating that complement additional resources like gardens — useful in science lessons, children of all ages can occupy them in a hands-on way previously unavailable when instruction was done mostly indoors. Other schools in the district have made strides to construct similar outdoor spaces, but their efforts are very homespun and reliant on existing public infrastructure resources like parks; making do without the help architects, landscape architects, and other design professionals can provide in terms of guidance and planning that are critical to the execution of such projects in terms of their ability to impact students academically.
One group willing to tackle the endemic challenges educators now are facing is the California-based initiative Green Schoolyards America. Founded and led by landscape architect and urban planner Sharon Danks, the nonprofit is dedicated to promoting what it calls “Living School Grounds” for K-12 institutions across the country, a movement that has taken newfound importance during the pandemic era.
Via a network called Emergency Schoolyard Design Volunteers, GSA partnered with other organizations — Ten Strands, San Mateo County Office of Education, and The Lawrence Hall of Science — in guiding districts under its National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative aimed at modifying and adapting existing spaces for schools in communities with resource limitations and urgent distancing-related needs.
Founder of the network Claire Latané feels the consequences of those limitations are being exacerbated now more than ever.
Who’s going to help the schools that don’t have resources? Who’s going to help plan the grounds for those schools that don’t have parents [who are] architects, or money?
“The story of student success during the pandemic is directly related to resources,” she told me via telephone. “Who’s going to help the schools that don’t have resources? Who’s going to help plan the grounds for those schools that don’t have parents [who are] architects, or money?”
She says this concern was the motivation behind spearheading the working group within GSA, which she had previously collaborated with as a researcher.
“I saw this as a primary concern: that this would be yet another example where schools with resources got a leg up and schools without resources, including time –– parent time, teacher time, principal time –– fell further behind.”
Through the network, schools have been able to take on the challenges with a variety of tools including a resource library published on the GSA website that has been essential to the myriad teacher and parent-led efforts to build spaces on their own, without any input or supervision from professional designers. Other schools have taken a more client-sided approach, reaching out to Latané and her network of volunteers for help putting together adaptation projects on a larger scale.
A prominent example is Maine’s Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district by far serving over 6,700 students in a metropolitan area of over half a million. It was able to construct a whopping 156 outdoor learning spaces with a $500,000 grant provided by the CARES Act Congress passed in March of 2020. The district was likewise the beneficiary of an effort organized by the Portland Society of Architecture, which matched each of PPS’s 17 schools with a professional to help draw up site plans unique to each campus.
Through their efforts, the schools created spaces for more than 1,800 students to learn outdoors, where they are 18 times less likely to transmit and contract the virus.
Students were able to take advantage of 33 seasonal shade sails provided by local manufacturer Transformit to attend lessons taught using outdoor easels made by carpenters following GSA directions as a reference. Customized five-gallon-buckets doubled as personal storage containers for the students, who rotated through a two-and-two hybrid learning model that gave their teachers time to undergo development training meant to help them instruct outside more effectively. It is an example of coordination between design professionals and educators in a streamlined way that doesn’t involve either proposals or a lengthy bidding process, bucking a trend Latané says has been rule rather than exception until recent times.
“The way architects and landscape architects typically work with schools is really divorced from students and teachers,” she said. “Typically, designers and even primary consultants don’t have a direct line to teachers and the parents and students. They work through the district, and it’s very top-down. And if they do have a connection to the community, it’s pretty superficial.”
Typically, designers and even primary consultants don’t have a direct line to teachers and the parents and students. They work through the district, and it’s very top-down. And if they do have a connection to the community, it’s pretty superficial.
Latané cites her experience as a parent at Eagle Rock Elementary as a basis for her cynicism. Although she was able to leverage her academic position and relationship to the school to lead a grant-winning project with help from GSA founder Sharon Danks, Latané says the design-build was atypical, an impression that stuck with her until the pandemic, which, she hopes, will serve as a vehicle for change within the industry.
“I practiced landscape architecture for 13 years, and the only school that I got to work with the community on was Eagle Rock Elementary, and that was only because my children went there.”
“It shines a light on the lack of value we frankly show for our schools as community environments and community spaces,” she added. “The hope is that seeing positive change, and that teachers being more comfortable being at school because of the health benefits, will then take that next step to think about ‘Ok, where can we plant a few more trees? Where could we have a learning garden that brings in native plants and attracts birds and butterflies? Where can we start learning by doing on our campus instead of just being outside while we’re learning the way we were [before Covid].'”
Her hopes, like the dreams of so many students and educators, will take years to materialize. Public health concerns have changed the way we think about school architecture before, and the current stasis is bound to yield similar consequences. Schools have begun a process now that may be tied to more immediate considerations, but the question people like Latané are asking is whether the science and philosophy behind the movement can stick for the generations that follow.
The answer, as many teachers know, is up in the air.
Josh Niland is a Connecticut-based writer and editor. He studied philosophy at Boston University and worked briefly in the museum field and as a substitute teacher before joining Archinect. He has experience in the newsrooms of various cultural outlets and has published writing ...
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