Schoolhouse Rocked! The historic global pandemic has proven how essential school, as a place for healthy living; and learning, as a lifelong endeavor, must be grounded in our common humanity. With a sense of urgency, we, as AIA-CAE Research Subcommittee Co-Chairs, created a pop-up series of conversations with international experts in education, design, and the built environment during the first wave of Covid-19. We felt the need to bring people together to discuss what change is needed in education to reimagine, repair, and rebuild new models for learning in the context of global transformations and uncertainty. Over 150 attendees (architects, educators, researchers, designers, students, facilities personnel, technologists, doctors) participated in each of these six webinars. Many themes emerged and one thing was crystal clear, we “need a new social contract for education that can repair injustices while transforming the future.” [UNESCO 2021]. Breaking Down the Silos, the title of our booklet, introduces six major themes that can inspire more dialogue and participation to bridge the divide between the 20th century schoolhouse and a future 21st century network of healthy, creative, caring, empowered, motivated learners. Our hope is in the collective call for an equitable future, equitable citizenship through many voices, many facets of lived experience, and many cultures. This booklet serves as a memento of ideas freely exchanged during a rare time in human history.
Our hope is that the readers take any of these six peak ideas around six themes for change and use them as starting points in their own deep dive conversations in the practice of architecture.
Our deep dive concept for conversation reflects what we’ve learned by living through a global pandemic; that we are all in this together, there is no simple answer to complex problems, and that systems change is dynamic rather than fixed.