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of science and as consumers of science – very different roles
Discovery 1 School, New Zealand – a
primary school located in redundant space
within a department store that engages
closely with its community
Notschool.net
that require different types of space. Should all students gain
experience in laboratories and undertake science experiments
when only a very small percentage will go on to become scientists,
or should the focus of science education in the future be science
literacy not practice?
A prototype school of the future can be found in New Zealand,
at Discovery 1 in Christchurch. This school doesn’t represent the
perfect solution, but it does demonstrate that the world doesn’t
end when the rules are broken. It’s a primary school located in
redundant space within a department store. To get there you go
through the shop, up in the elevator, past the shop floors and you
arrive in the entrance hall of the school, which is a kitchen. This
is a space where parents, children and teachers spend time
together, whatever time they come in and out – a space for the
learning community.
Students at Discovery 1 manage their own learning in collaboration
with facilitators and develop their own learning programmes
around their own interests. The school engages closely with
the wider community, involving mentors from business and other
aspects of the community to supplement its learning resources.
The school doesn’t have any facilities beyond its own space, so
it makes use of the city’s resources to promote different ways of
learning, using city parks for sport and the city libraries and so on.
Single-age classrooms have been abandoned in favour of home
bases for groups of different ages so that the children learn from
each other. The groups travel around the city by themselves
and the older children are encouraged to use the city itself as
a learning space. So far, the academic results of this type of
learning have proved just as good as those in Christchurch’s
more formal schools.
Another prototype for the future can be found closer to home
at notschool.net, a UK initiative aimed at those for whom school
simply doesn’t work – children who have been excluded, or
who are school phobic or have dropped out of the educational
system for whatever reason. Notschool is a learning system where
children are called ‘researchers’ and, again, are given control of
their own learning process. They’re provided with a computer,
a webcam and a scanner and are teamed up with experts and
governors who help mentor them through a different type of
learning process.
11 Primary and secondary education