How Co-Creating Learning Spaces Develops a Connection to Place

“This is for you, we knew you were coming”

“The building must not be too beautiful, lest it be a place for children to keep and not for them to use.”

“It must be inspiring — with a beauty that suggests action, not passiveness on the children’s part. Yet it must give children the basic feeling of rightness and the belief that they too can be, act and create, and that They, their action and creation are needed.”

It must be a place for living, a place for use, good hard use, for it is to be successively the home, the abiding place, for a procession of thousands of children through the years. It must be warm, personal, and intimate, that it shall be to each of these thousands, “My school.”

School environments must be places where children can create and act — and kids need to feel that their creation and action are not only warranted, but needed.
We couldn’t micromanage any of these projects into being. Learners were involved in every step of the design and creation process, so they knew exactly what they needed to do during each phase of the build.

“Now, they know the weight of a mattock and the effort required to swing it 100 times. They know the value of time and how quickly it dissolves in the rush to meet deadlines. They know what it means to be trusted and trustworthy. To work with real tools. To make decisions, not unimportant ones, real decisions, which carry real consequences. They understand the challenge of placemaking and how breathing life into unloved spaces impacts a community.

Now, they know.”

Our attachment to nature and connection to place has been described as a “fundamental human defence against loneliness.” Can you think of a place that you feel a strong sense of connection and belonging to? I wonder how many of us would say we felt that same sense of connection to place during our school years?

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Education blog. "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say" - Flannery O'Connor

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Abe Moore

Education blog. "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say" - Flannery O'Connor