Session Information
17 SES 04, School Architecture
Paper Session
Contribution
The future building school is a concept that is at the heart of a two year NWO-AHRC funded interdisciplinary and trans-national collaboration between scholars in the Netherlands and the UK. The concept is rooted in a view of school as something that is invented and reinvented by school communities over time through critical cooperative engagement with essential relationships concerning the transmission of knowledge, the development of skills and the healthy development of individuals and communities. This is not a new idea: its roots belong with John Dewey who argued that democracy was always and always would be an unfinished product of communities constructing their own identities through dialogue.1 At the heart of the project of building democracies was, according to Dewey, the creative educational process and the school whose boundaries should become ever more porous as they became the resource of the community. In the present time, certain educationalists and architects have begun to work with the notion that school is something that is not necessarily a given but can be reinvented through redesign. For Keri Facer, who has used the term future building school in her book Learning Futures, Education, Technology and Social Change, the concept embraces the notion that schools will be active agents in building sustainable futures, locally and globally. Facer argues that schools can be seen as prefigurative spaces, ‘environments in which communities can model today how they might want to live with each other in the future.’ [104]. This notion of school as a prefigurative space is central to the arguments put forward by Michael Fielding and Peter Moss in their recent book Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative. Here the authors have argued that it is necessary, if we are to progress ‘social alternatives’ in education, to construct micro-histories of schools that have, for short periods of time and usually under the guiding influence of an enlightened leading figure, developed as ‘real utopias’ through radically revising their practice. They call these micro-histories ‘critical case studies of possibilities’. One such 'real utopia' was built by Kees Boeke in The Netherlands during the 1920s. The Kees Boeke school or Werkplaats in Bilthoven was a radical experiment of 'sociocracy' outside of and in resistance to the state where children learned in an atmosphere of relative freedom but with responsibilities for their own and their community's well-being. The paper will discuss how revisiting the imagined and real environment of Kees Boeke school is informing trans-disciplinary understandings of participative design of schools for the future.
1John Dewey, Democracy and Education , 1916.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Boeke-Cadbury, B. (1971). Het leven van Kees Boeke. Bilthoven: Kees Boeke Stichting. Boekraad, C. (Red), Colette, P., Verstegen, T. & Winsen, M. van (2001). Vensterscholen. Ruimtelijke vertaling van een brede educatieve gedachte. Rotterdam: NAI Uitgevers. Boersma, T. & Verstegen, T. (1996). Nederland naar school. Twee eeuwen bouwen voor een veranderend onderwijs. Rotterdam: NAI. John Dewey (1916) Democracy and Education. Keri Facer (2011) Learning Futures, London. Routledge. Facer, K. The next 25 years?: future scenarios and future directions for education and technology.Journal of Computer Assisted Learning; Feb2010, Vol. 26 Issue 1, p74-93, Fielding, M and Moss, P (2010) Radical Education and the Common School: A Democratic Alternative. London. Routledge. Algemeen Handelsblad. (30-11-1932). Bij Kees Boeke in de Werkplaats. In: H.J. Kuipers: De wereld als werkplaats. Over de vorming van Kees Boeke en Beatrice Cadbury (Dissertation). University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Algemeen Handelsblad (14-08-1927). Bij Kees Boeke te Bilthoven. In: H.J. Kuipers: De wereld als werkplaats. Over de vorming van Kees Boeke en Beatrice Cadbury (Dissertation). University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Kuipers, H.J. (1992). De wereld als werkplaats. Over de vorming van Kees Boeke en Beatrice Cadbury (Dissertation). University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Rawson, W. (1956) The Werkplaats Adventure. Rijksoverheid. (2012, 9th of October). Passend onderwijs gaat definitief door. [Nieuwsbericht] Online van http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/passend- onderwijs/nieuws/2012/10/09/passend-onderwijs-gaat-definitief-door.html Studulski, F. (2007). Van visie naar vorm. Samen een brede school ontwerpen. Amsterdam: uitgeverij SWP. Vegt, A.L. van der & Studulski, F. (2004). Kijken door het venster. Onderzoek naar acht jaar vensterscholen in Groningen. Amsterdam: uitgeverij SWP. Wijnen, H.W.F.W. (2000). Van onderwijzen naar leren. In K. de Graaf, A. Hoogewoning & T. Verstegen, De weg naar school (pp 29-31). Amsterdam: Workshop STARO 2000.
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