LEARNING IN PLACE AND BY DESIGN

Rationale

Children are constantly learning, and the landscapes they inhabit offer varied potentials for learning. Robin Moore and Herb Wong provide a useful framework to view different learning contexts: “Informal education includes all learning… that results from children’s daily interactions with the social and physical environment.... Formal education is what we usually associate with schools—lessons delivered to children, in classrooms, by teachers.... Nonformal education provides the bridge between the informal and formal modes of education.”1 These kinds of learning opportunities may involve a mentor or interpreter to a place.

Main Take Aways

The readings for this theme raised several considerations for design that may support learning. Two key insights are seeking relevant learning opportunities and providing the tools for open-ended discovery. Learning happens through meaningful experiences in our local environments. Authors Mannion and Adey wrote, “Through intergenerational place-based education, all participants, places, and the relations among them are co-produced.”1

From Nicholson’s “theory of loose parts” we discovered the importance of natural objects as potential learning tools: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.”2

And he proposed an approach for how we design with this in mind:

“1. Give top priority to where the children are.

2. Let children play a part in the process.

3. Use an interdisciplinary approach.

4. Establish a clearing-house for information.”3

Reflection

This reflection focused on critiquing a familiar place that is part of our daily routine, to examine how learning may occur in this place and to suggest what could be changed to improve learning opportunities. Learning opportunities are found in natural areas, artwork, gateways, seating, shade, vegetable gardens, and place-based education.

A well-designed place can engage all types of users. Open spaces are really great “classrooms” for both the children and the community to experience nature, learn about how things work more effectively, and participate in restoring and shaping the future of habitat.

“The bike and pedestrian route along the Tiber offers opportunities for learning about civic landscape systems. The embankment walls contain seasonal flooding of the Tiber. People walking along the river throughout the year cannot miss the dramatic changes in water level. These changes begin to allude to the complex hydrological processes that occur within a watershed.”

Will Shrader

Relationship To Studio Site

“There are a lot of campos in Italy, but none of them are for children or learning. If any of them were designed for children or even just to take children into consideration, it would be interesting to see how children learn things from daily life. I think this is the goal of edible education: instead of learning from a book, children will be inspired more by learning physical tools of daily life.”

Chih-Ping Chen

When we design places throughout the Licton SpringsHaller Lake neighborhood, we should think about how can we provide learning opportunities for children from daily life by enabling diverse and engaging experiences and by interacting with others? As the seminar handout for this theme asked, “What might a city look like where everyone can be learning more about the ecological and cultural systems that sustain them?”