Over the last year, I have become familiar with the Springfield School District leadership in my classes, presentations, and site visits. I was shocked to discover that one out of every three students in Springfield does not graduate high school. What is happening to the school system? Why are they no longer sources of pride in a community? There are many challenges facing schools today, including the challenging process of redefining the set of skills this generation will need to become employed. American schools are currently transitioning their teaching content and assessments to the Common Core State Standards, a national initiative to standardize an American education. In the Educational policy world, we’ve opened Pandora’s box of new expectations for high school students and quantified “college and career readiness,” but I’d like to ask what will the educational landscape look like for today’s first grader, who will graduate in 2025? Will there still be stuffy institutions that deny people the opportunity to learn? Will people need a degree to get a job? What is the future of higher education?

I am proposing a center for learning ecologies, a library, coffeehouse, digital media center that represents my vision of the future of learning. 

This is a place for peer-to-peer instruction, intergenerational dialogue, unexpected working groups, hyper-local digital storytelling, and international collaboration. Everyone who enters this space pledges to be a lifelong learner, ready to recruit people in other disciplines for their innovative projects. They are approachable, committed, teachers-in-training ready for new intellectual encounters and business endeavors.

I imagine a 3rd grade class coming here to rent iPads and complete an ecological treasure hunt activity as they traverse the millrace park.

This 3rd grader finds a leaf and wonders what kind of tree it came from. She takes a picture of it and the device recognizes it as an oak leaf. She picks it up and shows her friend, who tells her a story about the oak savannah behind her house. When they find the oak tree, she and her friend sit under its canopy, type up the story, and digitally tag it to the tree. Now next year’s third graders, and anyone who passes the tree for generations to come can read about this girl’s experience. When the class returns to the Forum, the teacher can download the content from the devices to the digital infrastructure that the Center for Learning Ecologies staff manages. It is a comprehensive learning mapping system, much like a portfolio, that integrates state assessments, allows teachers to visualize student data, and provides a long-term tracking system from grade to grade and beyond. The student can continue to add new experiences, link to their mentors, and use this portfolio to apply to college, jobs, and reach out to new collaborators.

The prisms in the building not only serve as a lighting and ventilation system, but display building-level data that people look up to for reference, much like a clocktower or scoreboard. Not only could they display the time, schedule of events or question of the day, but other metrics related to sustainability of the building, such as gallons of water collected, treated, the flow of the millrace, or the rate of rainfall in realtime. People could pose questions like, what is the correlation between the number of coffees served and the number of emails sent on site?

I imagine the Booth Kelly site to be a place that Springfielders return to again and again for inspiration, for birthday celebrations, to buy their groceries, to peoplewatch, and to discover the richness of their local community. The project seeks to increase ones chances of meeting someone new, learning something new, and creating something new. It is a space for people of different disciplines to co-mingle, to come together for a common cause. Where a dropout and a veteran with complimentary skills and shared interest can work together.

With the United Nations declaring that internet access is a human right, I now firmly believe that education is in your own hands. I believe Booth Kelly is an access point for the community to find information, to reach other communities, to document their achievements, and to understand one another. I’ve integrated 5 levels of information display to help people find the right scale of engagement:

Sometimes you need a little nugget to feel inspired- you read a passing quote from a LED feed embedded in the pavers, from the park bench. It’s unobtrusive, and its just as slow and delightful as discovering a line of ants.

Sometimes you need to orient yourself- you need to know where you are to know where to get to next. The signage scale will display how many people are in the building, which areas are dense, noisy or quiet (as illustrated by this spatial spectrum diagram), and which rooms are reserved and by what organization. If the users desire to hashtag their conversation, the signage will allow people to see what topics they’re discussing. This will allow people to unobtrusively discover the variety of access points they have to learning in real time. With the integration of Linked In or Facebook, one could check in at the site and have people read about their skills and interests even before entering the room.

The next scale, glass walls, are at its basic level, meant to provide a place to congregate around a writing surface, but also to reveal the lens through which we each view reality. This could be a transparent smart board, that interacts with the landscape beyond, that recognizes gestures like a Kinect, and can illustrate to viewers how the user navigates social, digital, and natural worlds. You can find these walls in the forum and the lounge.

There are thousands of applications created each day for mobile devices that can enhance our decision making, that allow us to ride our waves of curiosity, that allow us to understand the world and its opportunities differently. I believe we need to be teaching the ethics and etiquette surrounding technology in addition to the mechanics of how to operate them. The forum can provide rental, repair, and training for digital learning tools.

The Center for Learning Ecologies
+ provides a setting for different types of unexpected interactions
+ is a space that illustrates the learning continuum
+ is a scaffolding meant to inspire people to engage with the world

The metaphors we live by and the settings we learn in are changing. This architectural proposal is a system that provides constant incentives for change, supports the serendipitous nature of learning and celebrates the environment’s interactive role as a factor affecting knowledge construction, creative revitalization of cities, and our relationship with each other and with nature.