Pedagogy & Space

Abstract

With a Secretary of Education mandating school choice, advocating for more religious and charter private schools, how does this address the towns that do not have the population to support more than one school? With populations ranging from 500 to 5,000 people, rural towns have to provide public schools that are accessible to everyone in their community. The public school system though is far from perfect. Programs such as "No Child Left Behind" have burdened public schools with meeting standards, leading to multiple choice testing and teaching from standardized textbooks. This has resulted in the standardized architectures of schools which do not address shifts in education towards inventive learning. This culminates in a context where rural towns who do not have the tax base to fund typical new school construction are pushed to go rogue and build a new type of public school.

A school designed not by standardized spaces of the past, but by different scales of inventive learning environments that can produce unique spaces for planned and unplanned learning. This opens an opportunity for a new type of architectural practice that can work with rural towns to reimagine a school that is not dedicated to providing consistent spaces to children, with desks in classrooms, but a school that offers variability. The first thing that emerges in rural towns located on the railroad are their large agricultural facilities with grain silos and warehouses. However, with the storage and production of grain moving to larger regional facilities, the silos and warehouses of these towns are moving towards obsolescence. Yet these structures are centrally located and adjacent to residential areas, suggesting an opportunity to adapt the silos and warehouses into typologies for a new type of school.

Thus, the first project of the school becomes its own construction, managed by the architect and utilizing the skills of the town, to adapt their rural archetypes from grain production to brain production.