Spirit of Place

From time to time I find that I need to walk around our school building, remembering the tiny (but much loved) space we came from four years ago, and remind myself to wonder at the difference and be grateful for where we are. The place is so much a part of how we teach and learn, and our journey of discovery as we turned this new building from a pipe dream to a reality is reflected now in the activities and processes of the teachers and the children who work and play here.

I remember how important it was to us to find the right building. We looked at many, all with some compelling features. Two were close to the river, one had a hill in its play area (sledding!), one was an amazing pile of old warehouses stretching out from an office wing. I imagined that one as a high school where each warehouse became a studio - ceramics, poetry, carpentry, languages, electronics, you name it - but romantic though it was, it was not right for us. We looked at all kinds of places, and each had a unique spirit.

We found the building that we ended up buying first, and a long time before we were ready to do a search. We pressed our noses against the windows like children, and lost our hearts to the nooks and crannies inside and out - the trees we saw growing in the interior courtyard, the way the building branched out and embraced areas of grass and greenery. We mentally emptied the building of walls and repopulated it with bright open spaces, cosy corners and windows everywhere. We wanted a place that felt like home, and even when this building was cold, empty, dark and dusty we could feel its potential.

When we finally entered the space to look around inside, it was full of small dark offices and narrow corridors. I fully expected to come across a corporate Miss Haversham, sitting in an ancient pin-striped business suit at a derelict computer, with spiders weaving webs from her broken door handle to her dusty desk. But even then, the vision of the light-filled library and the bright classrooms cut through the shoddy walls and tiny windowless spaces, and the possibility of dreaming up our own purposeful learning space filled us with excitement.

So we dreamed up our own ideal space. We talked about public versus private space, how a shared space like the library borders with a semi-public space like the classroom front porch, which welcomes children in to the private space of the classroom and also extends it. We talked about deliberately leaving spaces that were not dedicated to one thing or another, knowing that they would find their purpose as the teachers became comfortable and the work evolved. In this way, when Fish Lab (for example) was ready to happen, it was able to grow into the little study area in the middle school commons and create a space which has become a haven and a magnet for all kinds of kids, as well as a place where our Fish Lab aquatic scientists feel pride and ownership. We focused on common areas and areas where two or three children could work in seclusion. We talked about how glass walls could offer the autonomy some students need while giving a teacher full ability to see what was happening. We discussed natural light and its effect on focused learning and added skylights and extra windows. We talked about the needs of transgender kids or adults and made sure that all our bathrooms were single-person use, and that as many as code allowed were gender-neutral. We talked about natural play areas and how to gradually allow our outdoor spaces to evolve. We left the space for the 7th and 8th graders as it was - a large central area for discussion and presentation, and multiple little spaces for small group work, to support the level of project-based learning that they have developed in that class.

The result of all this (and more - this scratches the surface of the conversations we had) is that we have a learning space that flows with the children, where dedicated spaces and open spaces combine to offer flexible, creative teaching opportunities, consistently with the needs of our learning community. It's a great gift to all of us to have a space like this, and the location of the building - right next to County Farm Park, accessible to downtown Ann Arbor, close to the border of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, accessible to the freeways - also serves the kind of programs and learning approach of this school. It fills me with gratitude. My hope is that the physical space will continue to evolve as the school itself does, and that it becomes more and more unique as each generation of children shapes changes that reflect the work they do.