ASSESSING AND IMPROVING THE SCHOOL GROUND
Introduction
This unit describes how teachers can make school grounds into an extremely valuable learning resource. They are an ideal setting for engaging in repeated cycles of research and action with children. Every school has some space around it, even in dense inner city areas. It generally lacks any features that children value even though it is children who are their sole users. The school ground is often not known by the teachers. It is rarely used as a subject of study even though it is available on a daily basis. Learning is thought to stop at the door to the school building.
Research on the school grounds can be usefully carried out for different reasons. Some of the more likely ones are:
- to redesign for children's better use during free time. Develop a plan to redesign based on children's existing uses and an evaluation of existing resources. This can be valuable for children's free play time both during and after school hours.
- to reduce conflict during free time use through improved management. Develop a plan for the improved management and rules of the school grounds for play and recreation.
- to create outdoor classroom spaces. Sometimes limited indoor space can be extended through the modification of the outdoors into spaces of different sizes and with a variety of furniture arrangements.
- to create a natural observatory and a wildlife management program. A highly biodiverse (diversity of plant and animal life) landscape can be created around the school to serve as a rich microcosm for learning environmental knowledge and skills. Many rural schools have farms and gardens to teach about growing plants. Some schools have now gone the next step. Children learn to manage the environment in a manner that helps them learn about both conservation of nature and agricultural production.
Procedures
Involving Everyone
The school grounds need to be developed in a way that maximizes its value to all users. The entire school population, children and staff, should be involved in the research, planning and design of any transformations to be made. A great deal of progress can be made at this survey stage of the process by working as a class even though later on it will be necessary to bring in the remainder of the users of the school grounds. If it is a large school it may be necessary for classes to elect design team representatives for stages of the process.
Making a Plan and Model of the Site
Before beginning the survey you will need, of course, to have a very large-scale site plan. If one is not already available or is too small in scale, you can follow some of the mapping guidelines to create such a plan. It is also ideal if you can build a model (some tips for how to do this can be found in Making a Community Base Map).
Surveying the Landscape
The first step of surveying the current site and what happens there is an extremely interesting and valuable task for children. A detailed inventory of the landscape and all of the resources surrounding the school building is required. "Learning Through Landscapes" in the United Kingdom suggests the following headings for a comprehensive survey of the school grounds.
- History of the school and its site
- What has happened there before? This may have affected the physical quality of the site. The site might also have some features of important symbolic meaning to the community.
- Geographic aspect
- What are the micro-climatic conditions of the site? Where is it sunny or shady, windy or susceptible to flooding?
- Geology Soil
- What are the soil characteristics? Soil type is very important not only in influencing the kinds of plants that can grow on the site, but also the kinds of recreational activities children can engage in. You might be able to invite scientific advisers from government agricultural agencies to answer children's questions on these subjects.
- Land use in the area surrounding the school and school grounds
- Mapping the larger environment beyond the school and school grounds will be important in guiding the planning of the school grounds. If for example it is decided to attract more wildlife, then it is necessary to understand what wildlife already uses the surrounding areas. There may also be other environmental factors such as surrounding industry that may affect the environmental quality of the site.
- Boundaries -- walls, fences and hedges
- The nature and the quality of these boundaries are important for the planning and design of the school grounds. What messages do the boundaries currently give to the community surrounding the school and to visitors to the site? Who is welcome? How is this conveyed? How is the school made safe?
- Other surfaces
- What resources currently exist in the form of all-weather surfaces for sports and play activities and playing fields for games?
- Trees, shrubs and other plants
- What are the existing plants? This will help determine existing habitats on the site as a basis for planning and design of the landscape.
- Footpaths
- What informal footpaths do children and staff use? These may provide valuable guidelines on where paths should and should not be in a redesigned school ground.
- Access for special needs
- How can children using wheelchairs or other devices for their special physical needs access the site? Mapping this accessibility can do a great deal for children's awareness of different people's special needs.
- How the grounds are used
- To what extent are the school grounds used for play, recreation, class work, scientific monitoring of the site, gardening, livestock management, and the study of wildlife. To what extent are they exposed to other activities such as vandalism?
- Site maintenance
- How is the site currently maintained? If it is managed by a particular person at the school or by an outside agency, what duties are specified in the contract for site management? Thoroughly surveying existing maintenance of the site is important as a basis for subsequent planning.
Redesigning the Grounds
Children will have many ideas about how to the school site could be improved. They need to first ask what they want the school site to be used for. Designers call this "the design program".
The Design Program
- Identify the different users of the site.
- Interview other users, or if this project is being carried out as a whole school project, each of the groups (teachers, parents, cleaning staff, etc.) will have their own meetings and process.
- Chart the different desired activities and experiences of each of these user groups.
- Combine the different activities of all the user groups into a comprehensive list. This can be done most effectively by manipulating cards or small pieces of paper expressing the different activities into identical and similar categories. If this process involves the whole school this will have to be done by a representative committee and the conclusions will need to be made centrally visible to all school children and staff.
Transforming the Program into Design Elements
Create design suggestions for each of the program activities through group discussion. Again, this can be done with the classroom as a whole by having the children write their suggestions on small cards or pieces of paper and then sticking them on the wall next to the list of activities that need to be designed. These cards can then subsequently be creatively sorted by the group into categories of ideas.
Encourage children to be creative in their suggestions. It may not be sufficient to rely solely on their spontaneous statements of preference. For example, you might begin by asking them to make drawings of their ideas. Also, showing children pictures of very different kinds of landscapes, including highly fanciful or imaginary ones, can be a useful way of getting them to broaden their design ideas. Review the available Case Study detailing the transformation of school grounds in Berkely, California.
Building a Model Collectively
- Success in the design process lies in the creative negotiation process between the children and the other user groups of the school site. Consensus building is greatly aided by having a model of the school site with materials that can be easily added, taken away and moved around.
- The scale of the model should be large enough to manipulate the design elements. Separate groups of children can take it in turns to add features to this model.
- Participatory design workshops can be carried out with a group of children around the models. The size of each group should not be very big, ideally not more than 10 children, in order to give each child enough opportunities to participate.
- The process requires skillful mediation by a facilitator so that no children walk away from the process feeling their design ideas were rejected. Children should be encouraged to reveal the reasons behind their suggestions. For example a group of girls may insist that they have to locate the area for skipping rope in a relatively isolated part of the site, in order to prevent interference from the boys' running games.
- Teachers and other school staff can have their own modeling workshops.
- Gradually the model, in a central location in the school, is transformed into a space that balances the desires of the whole community.
Exhibiting the Design
Towards the end of the project, when the conceptual design proposals are ready, it is necessary to get wider feedback from all the residents in the community. Again, modeling is valuable. If the whole community also uses the school grounds after school hours everyone's opinions are relevant. Depending on the politics of the school, the children's ideas will now go into dialogue with all of those who have power and make decisions regarding the school environment. Hopefully representative children would at least be invited to present their ideas at some of these debates. It is particularly important that children learn why the changes they recommended cannot be instituted.
Transforming the Site with Continued Monitoring
Even if you do not engage in a large-scale research program with everyone is the school, it is still possible to make small changes. The class can then observe the effects of these changes. The children might, for example, conclude that they would like to increase the diversity of bird life on the school grounds by improving the habitat for certain species. This may involve the planting of trees or shrubs or the building of bird nesting houses. Or they might for example want to measure the number of children using the new games that they have had painted on the schoolyard. This would enable them to learn which are the most popular for boys and girls of different ages and whether more lines need to be painted for certain games. Each of their changes presents an interesting opportunity for new research.
Case Studies
Read a case study on a Playground Redevelopment
program.
Next Steps
Consider reviewing the How-to Pages on Creating Community Base Map.
Resources
For valuable publications and information, contact:
Learning Through Landscapes Trust,
3rd Floor, Southside Offices,
The Law Courts,
Winchester,
Hants,
U.K. SO23 9DL
Moore, R. and Wong, H. (1999). Natural Learning: The Life History of An Environmental Schoolyard. Berkeley, California: MIG Communications.
For further information on the transformation of a schoolyard into a green environment, including the publication Natural Learning, go to http://www.naturalearning.org
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