Comfort and Joy

At a certain point in my childhood I would spend a lot of time sitting on the shoreline rocks at Davenport Park in New Rochelle, looking across the water at the ruins of Fort Slocum. I could have been at school, or I could have been with the others not in school at the Park's car park, or down at Hudson Park, or up at The Mall, or wherever. But sometimes it is better to be alone.

Fort Slocum (now fully demolished) from the Structural Descent Blog

There are a lot of places you go as an adolescent or pre-teen when you need to be away, when you need to work on seeking yourself. I've written "some" about this...

The Drool Room(2007) River Foyle Press

We so rarely acknowledge this need in schools. In fact, we fight daily against this. Our students - especially secondary students, go through the day without any personal space or time. It is an abusive, continually challenging environment which forces students to adopt the worst of self-defense mechanisms - from bullying, to gang membership, to surly disassociation from all those around. It robs students of the psychological space in which to think, to add knowledge to a framework in a personally effective way. Our students end up acting exactly as caged rats - with lizard brains locked in survival mode - they simply fight or please their captors, rather than having time or opportunity for higher learning.

This is why, when I ask people to "re-think learning spaces" I rarely suggest that they think about "schools" at all. Our notion of "school" is a trap. It presupposes a certain concept of spatial and societal organization which interferes profoundly with our expressed desires for education.

The Long Meadow, by Frederick Law Olmsted, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY

I ask instead that we look at parks, and bookstores, street corners and coffee shops. Places where people voluntarily go to learn and commune. Places where people can make themselves comfortable, join groups or not, and let their defenses down.

Outside the Brooklyn Public Library, Main Branch [photo cc: Ira Socol]

Because defenses and discomfort block the possibility of learning. If I'm uncomfortable, fearful, hungry, thirsty, worried about time - those emotions dominate the brain. There is no room for higher order thinking.

JP's coffee, prime hangout, Holland, MI

So, space design, like the "Do Not Disturb" sign, the classroom hiding place, creating a more "ADHD-sensitive" set of school rules, corridor open spaces with comfortable furniture, even increasing "passing times" to allow kids "safe times" and, of course, personal technology devices which allow momentary escapes and personally directed learning, will all allow students to make space and time their own.

Make sure your classroom has various kinds of furniture, various kinds of lighting, various kinds of noise control. Make sure your school offers kids options in terms of space wherever they are. Booths, high tables, benches, in the cafeteria. Carpeted floor areas to hang out on. Umbrella tables outside and in offering a tiny sense of enclosure. Make sure those spaces offer choices - calm, interactive, private, voyeuristic, loud, quiet, and make sure creation tools - from wireless access to drawing spaces are available. We want students to have the option of personal learning time or an environment with contagious creativity.

This means being less paranoid. It means less pretending that somehow your school security systems will see all.  They won't. They don't. Right now they miss the bullying going on by the lockers - hall or gym. They miss the sex acts in the back stairwell too. They miss the casual cruelty of the crowded corridors during your 4 minute time between classes. But your attempts at security do make your students' lives miserable. So just calm down.

Seattle Public Library

"Instructional Tolerance" is a key phrase. It implies accepting that your students are individual humans who will shift between on-task and off-task, between engaged and unengaged, between interested and bored, just as you do. It implies that your students need space just as you do. And "planning time," and - sometimes - they need the right to be alone - physically or just mentally.

When I sat in that park - in a place as comfortable for me as any I have ever known - I was breaking all "the rules," but I was not away from education. There, certain parts of my brain relaxed in important ways, and the world came into a certain kind of focus. I sat on fossil-pocked boulders hacked up and flipped by the movement of great glaciers. Tidal pools with life's beginnings glistened at my feet. The inexorable reach of salt water stretched to the east and west. Airplanes began their descent toward LaGuardia. Wind pulled some boats along while others moved with throbbing motors. A Civil War-era fort marked one horizon, speaking of a time when distances were much greater and, perhaps, war much closer.

All kinds of things I had heard in disconnected trivial segments from "teachers" came together in a place I might both learn, and find questions.

Why couldn't school offer me that?

- Ira Socol

The Third Technology

The "first technology" of school is time. That division of "educational time" from other time, and the subsequent divisions therein. School Days and weeks, and semesters, and years. Periods of time which are separated out for this and that. "It's time for reading but not science, science but not physical education, history but not literature."

The "second technology" is the division of "content" - the breaking of the world of global information into discrete parcels for easy delivery.

And the "third technology" is the environment which provides - depending on the school, either a "home base" or a "learning cell."

I spent the past week in schools which surround the lands of Thomas Jefferson - "the father of American public education." Walking hallways and libraries, sitting in classrooms, talking to principals and teachers and students. And the technology we focused on was that "third one," the space, the environment, that visual, aural, spatial reality which either makes humans comfortable and sets them free, or which traps them and limits their possibilities.

When I first enter a "learning space" I look at people's feet. Even second graders are usually 'trained enough' to know that they have to control their upper body in ways which please "the teacher." The teacher, too often, is watching them from torso up, as they sit at desks or tables, and the kids - most - work to avoid excess attention there.

But down below their feet tell a different story. They tap and bounce and roll and kick, they try to curl up or lash out, they scratch and move or slide onto their sides in sleepy boredom.

"What are you looking for," a University of Virginia doctoral student asked me on Thursday, "how do you know it's learning?"

I don't know if it's learning, but I can see engagement. I never have trouble telling if a kid in a school - or out of a school - is working on the learning process. You can see it in their eyes, and you can see it in their focus, and you can see it in their feet. Which isn't a quantifiable measure for Arne Duncan, but as Justice Potter Stewart might have said it, "I know learning when I see it."

So I looked at a lot of learning spaces last week. And I watched a lot of feet, and bodies, and eyes. I saw a remarkable pile of third graders in the coat closet area of Michael Thornton's classroom, six kids who heaped themselves on the floor like young puppies, four with laptops, two doing drawings, all touching, wriggling, talking, and working - investigating different subjects, different topics, but collaborating academically, spiritually, physically. A six-by-eight foot environment of learning safety discovered and built by eight-year-olds. In that room - not a great room, not a big room - other kids clustered as 'table groups' or lay alone on the rug or sat in twos and threes on the floor leaning against the wall. One girl built a kind of high nest near the window. Kids used paper and MacBooks, iPods and whiteboards. Even books. They asked each other first, rarely coming to 'the teacher.'

It was a wonderful space to be in, but it needed some color to soften the hard white edges. And it needed the Interactive White Board at a height where third graders could use it as a touch-screen computer. And it needed more soft flooring and place where kids might draw on the floor. And it needed lamps with differing light levels to mark out areas.

And that's the kind of environmental dreaming we were doing.

Come learn together... Jefferson's Academical Village at the University of Virginia

In School Libraries we moved to toss out furniture - so often bought for once-a-month faculty meetings - and create open carpeted spaces with pillows and lapdesks and kid-sit-on-the-floor height tables. Where we imagined "creation centers" where kids would find creativity to be contagious. And where we sought to break the walls - at least conceptually - which separate those libraries from the school and the outside world.

In school corridors we found those extra "urban spaces" where kids might gather, or might seek out privacy, and wondered how to enhance those spots through furniture, aesthetics, and contemporary communications technology. In school entries we wondered how light and color might welcome, and shift young brains.

In classrooms less evolved than Mike Thornton's we wondered how to shift furniture, color, lights, technology to create differing spaces which might make that room a safe place for all kids to recharge, to inspire, to explore from, rather than act as a room for information distribution.

"For Thomas Jefferson, learning was an integral part of life. The "academical village" is based on the assumption that the life of the mind is a pursuit for all participants in the University, that learning is a lifelong and shared process, and that interaction between scholars and students enlivens the pursuit of knowledge." And I hope we see every school that way. And Jefferson also said, "Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down one of my favorite amusements," which suggests that we must re-design and re-construct constantly, based in the needs of the moment.

I began my week in Virginia talking about "Colonialism in Education." The idea that we must not insist that the only way for children to succeed is to become clones of the educational policy makers. And I ended the week talking mostly about architecture and ecological systems and environments. Because this "third technology" - that environment - enframes both what we - adults in school - do, and what students see and imagine. If a class has desks in rows, only a few things can happen. If a class has a variety of spaces, many more things can. If classrooms have open views of the school and the outside, learning is seen in a continuum, if a classroom has paper covering the door window and drawn blinds - we are telling children that learning starts and stops in a defined space. And if kids are comfortable they will imagine, dream, and investigate. And if they are not, they will resist and shut down.

Walk your school on Monday. Walk your halls. Is your environment an academical village which inspires? or is it something else?

- Ira Socol