Yesterday we jumped on a train from Ballarat (we’ve been dog-sitting!) to make the long journey to Clayton South. We were very excited to meet our class of grade 3/4’s, visit the school grounds that Lynne (Principal) and Caroline (Sustainability teacher) had talked about, and meet the chickens that we had read about in their newsletter.
We decided to walk from the station to the school as we wanted to get a sense of the context and get to know the surrounding area. “This is paradise!”, Ammon remarked as I started to take photos of the culturally diverse mix of shops along Clayton Road. We didn’t see any buses coming, so we walked the whole way.
When we arrived at the school, we walked past the old heritage school with a very colourful art room and were greeted by Lynne who seemed very excited to see us there. She showed us around the school grounds – introducing us to the Hilton Chook House, the BER-rrrRR building and their large oval with beautiful trees. Then, all of a sudden, a classroom door was opened and we had fifteen wide-eyed 8- & 9-year olds staring at us!
We were told that we would just be observing the students for this visit, but the teachers threw us right in the deep end! We were brought ‘adult chairs’ as the students sat around us in a circle and we started introducing ourselves. Andrew, Charles, Hannah, Jazzie, Isabella, Aisha…. I couldn’t keep up with all the names, but we’ll get there!
They had so many questions for us: “What does your office look like?” “How many hours do you work a day?” “How old are you?” “When did you decide you wanted to be an architect?” “Do you do what your boss says?” “Do you do a lot of research?”… but they also had lots of answers for us too! We were very impressed.
Within the first ten minutes we had already heard some big words from the children – including “lightweight materials” when asked how we could make a cubby that was easily movable, the word “prototype” and its definition “it’s when you make a first test before you make the final product”, and that “eco” meant being friendly to the environment, not polluting the planet, and doing things like recycling materials.
They all seemed to understand what a scale model was and they easily identified some of the issues that might come up if you were to build a cubby out of cardboard (“it could break easily”, “rain would be an issue”, “it could get soggy”). I asked them how they could communicate their ideas to each other and to us as they designed their cubby – “writing”, “drawing”, “make a model”. We pushed them one step further and explained how Ammon was doing research on “participatory design” which meant he studied how people can design and make decisions together. How could we decide together which ideas we were going to use as a group?, he asked, to which they had lots of ideas:
“You could put two things together”, someone suggested.
Ms. Robert’s asked: “what’s a word that describes putting two things together?”
“Attach?” “Join?”
“You could take parts of one and mix it with another”, suggested another.
“What’s another word for that?”
“Combine?”
“Synthesize?” Ammon tested as they all sang out “ohhhh, we learned that last year in Mrs. ______’s class”
Jazzie shot up his hand and suggested, “People could talk together until they came to the same idea”
Wow! We already had understanding of the concepts of “workshopping” or “negotiation” - something we do as architects with our clients, community groups, users and staff every day.
We soon had to wrap up the conversation, but the students seemed like they wanted to keep going. There were still some hands up with burning questions. We asked them if they wanted “homework” and most of them said yes. Ammon challenged them with thinking about the word “ecological” and what that meant in terms of design. Straight away they raised their hands up with the answers – “it means you’re eco and you’re logical” some of them chanted. “So, you’re ecological!”, they chimed. Ammon told them that people could study this question for years, but he wanted them to think deeply about it and tell us next time.
I asked them to think about their favourite place the next time they were outside playing in the playground and to describe to us next time why that was their favourite place. Think about the five senses – sound, sight, smell, taste, touch. We are so excited to see what they come up with as they start to think in ecologies and about occupation, space and place.
One last burning question?
“Do you design and plan things for other people to build or do you build things too?”, Aisha asked. (We’re starting to remember their names by now!)
We told them how often architects design, plan and make drawings in an office for other people such as builders to construct things on site from. We also told them that our particular office, and we, Ammon and I, are interested in seeing people develop their capacities in many ways by learning how to hammer or drill or paint and that there are many skills that people can learn and DIY. We asked them if their mums or dads had made anything in their homes: “models”, “tables”, and “tissue box covers” came up. Hannah told us that her mum made her some shelves, she had painted them in many different colours by herself, and her dad had installed it on her wall for her.
Later, after the students had left for lunch, we were very excited to overhear Hannah saying to another student in the hallway – “I know what we can make our cubby out of…. we can use old shelves and paint them ourselves!”
We were beaming!
We are so very thrilled to be a part of Eco-Cubby and are very excited to continue this journey with our amazing students at Clayton South Primary School! We'll be seeing them fortnightly, so stay tuned for the next update!
x
Michelle + Ammon