The Portuguese school buildings were built during the 20th century promoted by educational policies based on four main political regimes – monarchy until 1910, republic from 1910 to 1926, dictatorship from 1926 to 1974, and democracy since 1974 (Moniz & Cordeiro, 2019). These regimes used the schools not only to educate the population but also to represent their power relations. In most cases, the students were not the center of the education process, as John Dewey claimed already in 1916 in his book “Education and Democracy”, where students should “learn by doing”.

Beyond some interesting experiences in the 1960s and 1970s, in the late days of the dictatorship and the early days of democracy, school buildings were designed by architects without any interaction with the school community. The governmental institution prepared an architectural brief based on technical and programmatic regulations, and architects developed proposals supported by their contemporary architecture culture – neoclassic, modern, pavilions, brutalist, minimalist, etc. Beautiful school buildings were designed and built, but without the engagement of the school community - although the rector or the school director was involved in some cases (Moniz, 2018).

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Portuguese government started a programme to renovate secondary school buildings, named Parque Escolar, that worked between 2007 and 2017, where 100 buildings were refurbished. Although the programme aimed for community participation, in most cases that was not possible due to the short time to develop the architectural project and to a lack of participation culture.

Today, the government is transferring the management of the secondary school buildings to the municipalities and an opportunity is created to do things differently, due to the proximity between the municipalities and the schools (Cordeiro et al, 2023). The question is how can the school community be engaged in the redesign of their school buildings and what are the goals that may be achieved with this participation process? 

The case of the José Falcão Secondary School, the former Lyceum of Coimbra (Moniz, 2004, 2008; Coelho, 2018a), can offer answers and guidance to achieve a more inclusive education supported by an architectural and pedagogical design process developed with the school community.

The building was designed in 1930 and built in 1936 in the frame of the national competition for modern lyceums, promoted by the dictatorship, in the early years of the so-called New State. The renovation of this school building was not included in the Parque Escolar programme because the teachers were not involved in the decision, and they refused the transformation of the school into a music school – the conservatory of Coimbra. Due to this lack of consensus, the school was excluded from the programme and the renovation is today very urgent and delicate because the building is a national monument, and it has a strong sense of belonging for Coimbra society.

The Municipality of Coimbra understood the exceptional character of this building and started a competition for a research-in-action project opened to universities with research centers in architecture, education and engineering. The University of Coimbra presented a proposal, led by the Department of Architecture, in partnership with the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and the Department of Civil and Mechanics Engineering, and several research centers. 

This paper aims to discuss the proposal submitted by the University of Coimbra and to present the first results of the participatory process that was developed between November 2023 and January 2024.

During the last months, several teams are developing the first phase of the research-in-action project, surveying the school in architectural and engineering terms, to know more about the present physical condition of the building. In parallel, an interdisciplinary team is promoting a participatory process with the school community to engage them in its redesign process. The team is replicating the methodologies developed previously in two European projects, where concepts, methods and tools were developed and tested to answer these challenges: RMB – Reuse of Modernist Buildings (coordinated by HfM Detmold) (Moniz & Ferreira, 2016) and CoRed – Collaborative Redesign with Schools (coordinated by Newcastle University) (Woolner, 2018). The University of Coimbra was a partner in these projects and members of these teams are now developing the research-in-action project for the renovation of José Falcão Secondary School. The methodology is focused on the participatory process developed with the school community between December 2023 and January 2024 to build together the functional programme and to rethink the use of the existing school spaces’ according to the experience of its daily users. The research activities are based on the Survey on Student School Spaces methodology (S3S) (Coelho et al, 2022) developed in the CoReD project (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/cored/). This current process integrates surveys, walkthroughs, workshops, interviews and a school assembly, and involves 500 participants among a community of 1000 members. Specifically, students (aged 12-19), teachers and staff were asked to participate in an online survey about their activities and feelings in the school’s common spaces. This was followed by walkthroughs with the several groups that detailed their feedback. Finally, all the school community was invited to an assembly where conclusions were displayed and programme proposals analysed, to inform the subsequent design process. Additionally, this was complemented by workshops with former students and with the school council; and by walkthroughs to identify the specificities related to the labs, classrooms, arts and sports areas. Furthermore, the School Direction and the Municipality are also involved as active stakeholders, in a state-of-the-art redesign process that involves all the school community in the refurbishment of a modern school building. The final programme proposed by the research team is the product of the dialogue between the community voices and the modern building principles, and also the result of conflicts and opportunities mediated by a participatory process that included all the school’s stakeholders.

This project seeks to renovate a nearly nine-decade-old school, national heritage site, using participatory methods for full school community engagement. Uncommon in a traditionally centralized country, the functional program is defined collaboratively, a departure from previous Municipality or Government-driven decisions lacking input from daily users. Six workshops and ten walkthroughs conveyed representatives from diverse groups of the educational community, with workshop attendance ranging between 15-20 individuals and walkthroughs hosting around 5-10 participants. The online survey gathered 524 responses (80% students, 17% teachers and 3% staff), followed by four walkthroughs and one workshop, which were conducted for further data clarification. The school assembly, attended by more than 150 participants, facilitated the presentation of the project’s initial conclusions and invited active participation in refining the programme proposal. In summary, the comprehensive engagement through all the activities fostered a collaborative environment, encouraging diverse stakeholders to contribute to the refinement of the proposed educational program in development. With more than 500 participants, this was a rare time in Portugal when open and participatory work was carried out in the context of the refurbishment of a school facility. Additionally, this project is taking place at a time when society expects schools to involve all children and youngsters for longer, as an adaptable and sustainable learning environment that doesn't discriminate against anyone (Coelho, 2018b). Thus, the participation of the community, implies the educational spaces to be inclusive, to answer users’ functional and mobility requirements, and to enable the teaching-learning processes according to the current paradigm. This encompasses a profound update of the school’s facilities, the refurbishment of its physical condition, its preservation as a national heritage building, and also its redesign as a contemporary urban, social and educational hub, which the participatory process aims to achieve through the active engagement of all the school community.

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