Schools as Places of Learning and Safety.

An article in the Burlington Free Press recently started me thinking about something I just cannot seem to stop thinking about. The article described in detail  how the Shelburne community school, built in 1967, was built with an open plan which was closely related to the idea of Open Education.  The words of the  School Board Chairman,  "The open classrooms represent an idea whose time has come and gone," pretty much sum up what the community thinks of the original idea upon which the school was based. It's a somewhat curt dismissal of something that made Vermont quite famous in the 1960s and 70s as schools like Shelburne bought into the progressive education movement known as the Open Classroom. As a graduate student in the 70s I worked with teachers in an Open Classroom school in Arlington Heights, Illinois,  called the Olive School. It was a magical experience where the focus was on helping individual children learn through a variety of exciting and meaningful experiences. I miss it dearly.

Back then, whether one agreed with it or not, we designed school buildings based on how we thought students learned best; a philosophy of education, if you like.

Today, we design school buildings based on ideas of how to keep children  safe.

Interestingly. back in those halcyon days, the architecture of the building could have little effect upon the way some teachers taught. Even in those open classrooms with no walls there were teachers teaching the same way they had for 40 years with desks in rows, lecturing the 6 year olds, and giving them work sheet after work sheet.  

Sadly, as events in Newtown, Connecticut have shown, the architecture of a school cannot stop people intent on killing young children. More recently in Pakistan, even a school built like a fortress can be breached.

It is clearly not the architecture of schools that we need to address but the nature of our society.

Open Education and Open Education

One of the great things about St. Michael's college is all the incredible workshops the IT folks run for faculty development. One in particular caught my eye today not so much because of the content but because of the title; Open Education Week is March 5 - 12, this week in fact.

My initial reaction was one of amazement because Open Education was all the rage when I first came to the US in 1977. In fact I supervised student teachers at the Olive Elementary School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, which was one of the many schools in the US using this innovative approach to education. The Education Department at the University of Illinois where I was doing my doctoral studies at the time was also one of the leading advocates for Open Education. Luminaries such as Roland Barth, Charles Silberman and Hassett & Weisberg (Open Education: Alternatives Within our Tradition) were widely read by both faculty and education students.

The basic idea of Open Education was to make education more meaningful and relevant to students as children in K - 6 classrooms. It put an emphasis on what was important to childen in terms of their interests, developmental stages and lives in general. It was the counterpart, in a way, to the traditional idea that elementary school is "preparation for life" or at least preparation for middle and high school life. Open education celebrated childhood and everything it stood for by making the curriculum relevant, interesting and important to the child.

Today the idea of Open Education is somewhat different and refers to free/almost free resources such as Flatworld Knowledge, Merlot, iTunes U, Carnegie Mellon, MIT Open Courseware, Khan Academy, Wikiversity to name but a few.