Andrea Wheeler, B.A. (Hons.), Dip.Arch., M.Phil, Ph.D.,

ESRC Early Careers Interdisciplinary Research Fellow, The University of Nottingham, Institute of Architecture/and School of Education.

(ESRC Project (RES-152-27-0001): How Can We Design Schools As Better Learning Spaces and To Encourage Sustainable Behaviour? Co-Design Methodologies and Sustainable Communities.) 

The Question of Feeling at Home?Designing for Lifestyle Change with Young

People.

What do I mean by ‘feeling at home’, or ‘feeling more at home’ in school? Why is the question significant for architects designing sustainable schools?

It is important because it is one that can be asked to children, that they can discuss, and for adults it raises the question of how we do or can we relate to childrens’ world-views.

Furthermore, discussions with young people around this theme can raise the need to:[a] create better relationships within the school, to the community of the school and local environment and suggest the requirement for more social spaces;[b] create/respond to a wider environmental question for a better, non-exploitative relationship to the world and others.

For architects it may present an important opportunity to explore how co-created architectures (in the broadest sense) could begin to address some of the intentions raised by policy makers and the creators of the UK Building Schools for the Future programme to transform learning and embed sustainability into children’s experience.

Schools as transitional spaces …but from what to what?

Schools as second homes?Schools as shop windows (creating a connection to the community)Schools as ‘malls’, ‘streets’ and ‘market places’Schools as ‘call centres’ or mills or factoriesSchools as farms and gardensSchools as villages

Designing New Schools and the Building Schools for the Future

programme

2004

Tony Blair, at the start of the programme, proposed: ‘Sustainable development will not just be a subject in the classroom: it will be in its bricks and mortar and the way the school uses and even generates its own power. Our students won’t just be told about sustainable development, they will see and work within it: a living, learning place in which to explore what a sustainable lifestyle means’.[1]

1] Blair, 2004 PM Speech on Climate Change 14th September 2004, Archive No. 10 Downing Street, London, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6333.asp (accessed 06 May 2008)

2007

The more recent Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures, published in December 2007 by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), even states an ambition for all new school buildings to be zero carbon by 2016.

The problem of pro-environmental lifestyle change, encouraging sustainable behaviour, and of

sustainable citizenship is not simply about individual choice.

We need radical lifestyle changes and neither educators nor

architects are providing ‘models’ or pedagogies that can support

sustainable behaviours.

So what do children think? What do they think sustainable lifestyles are? What do

they understand from teachers, from culture and from the media? What do they think their schools will be like? And how do

they see their relationship with the world and others in the future?

The workshops

In each school I visited I set out to carry out 4 workshops with 4-6 students over a 4 week period, of between 1-2 hours each. Not all the students turned up every week, not all the groups were interested in the project, some decided not to attend weeks 3 and 4 and others were positive and enthusiastic and wanted to continue past the four weeks. Some groups wanted to talk more than they wanted to design and some wanted to design and not answer my questions. Sixth formers tended to be keen to discuss, 14 year olds tended to be suspicious, concerned with what others in the group thought, judged others in the group and wanted to know whether my research would really achieve anything (backing this up with their own stories).

I carried out workshops with young people aged 10-14/15 years old (Years 6-10) and some sixth-formers. I asked them about their experiences of school. I asked them a broad set of questions, about school buildings, the school day, food, sport, how they travelled to school, playtime, play areas, hobbies, time out of school, their local environment, their friends and I listened when stories emerged – stories they wanted to tell me about good and bad behaviours, good and bad spaces, stories about adult behaviours and the conflicts they feel. The stories that most interested were those that constituted a sort of ‘event’ in the workshop and tended to be emotionally charged, (but there was also enthusiasm in design, and in design solutions discovered). I asked them to design, both separately and together- and was often asked to help and negotiate competing ideas in group exercises (I had been introduced more often that not as the architect by children’s teachers).

1. “Global Warming Panic”

The media portrayal of environmental change loomed large, the young peoples’ stories expressed a real problem of how do we get young people to behave responsibly towards a broader and future other whose world we cannot know and where our action has no immediate or apparent effect?

DIALOGUE 1

V1: Has anyone seen that movie? The day after tomorrow? V2: YesV1: Some people that that is going to happen, the day after

tomorrow.V3: Oh is that the one where the earth gets flooded? Yes,

the world all gets flooded and stuff like that.V4: I gave all my clothes to the Tsunami when that

happened.V3: What do you wear then?V2: I don’t know what’s going to happen to the world, who

knows what’s going to really happen. Whether we’re going to get finished off by flooding, whether it’s going to fly into the Sun, whether we’re all going to die due to global warming.

V3: We’ve got a few years left.V2: Whether the Magma’s going to come out and flood the

world with Magma. Who knows whether someone will create a Zombie virus and bring Zombies, dead people back to life. Who knows if aliens don’t exist and they might destroy the earth. I’m just coming up with theories about what might happen to the earth. I’m thinking be might implode.

2. “Is it our responsibility?”

Whilst young people felt confused by media portrayals of the dangers of environmental change and global warming they also questioned me on whose responsibility it was. Should I really be trying to change their and others behaviours?

DIALOGUE 2

AW: What do you think it would take to make people behave more sustainably?

V1: There’s a lot of rubbish on the field, more bins around the back for the school… […]

V2: Supermarkets are saying to people [to recycle], but they put drinks in packets and wrappers […]

V3: On some packing it says you can recycle it, but some people just chuck it on the floor […]

V2: Because one some games, computer games, there’s like plastic and you’ve got to separate it […] they should make an easier way to recycle.

V3: It’s not just like the public getting it wrong because the Government aren’t really doing much about it […] and they are sending it to India!

AW: Yeah, I saw that TV programme too.

V2: Everyone is just worrying about the credit crunch, the credit crunch at the moment.

V3: It might be about the public, but it is the Government as well.

3. “It costs more to be environmentally friendly

doesn’t it?”

4. “Greed, consumerism and other vices?”

5. “The problem of habit”

6. “Children’s agency and lifestyle change. No one will listen

anyway…”

7. “Good spaces and bad spaces, good and bad behaviours…”

8. “Sexual difference and world-views of young people?”

What does this mean for building sustainable schools?

If sustainable development is to be encouraged honestly and effectively, young people will have to enter into a discussion of community, relation, social cohesion and all the political and philosophical complexities this entails.Furthermore, young people will have to reconcile the need for reduced consumption with the consumerist norms of their peers – which is certainly a challenge for the teaching profession. Exploring the question of living and dwelling – of feeling at home - with young people presents a way to explore these issues and a way for architects to respond. We need some very different ways of both teaching and designing in the 21st century if we are to address the social and environmental problems that climate change will bring and important issues are being ignored: we may need to change the structures, institutions and processes that govern how we live our lives, and the inequalities we experience in our society. We need pedagogies of connection.

Thank you

andrea.wheeler@nottingham.ac.uk