If schools are to educate students about environmental stewardship in the classroom, they must provide a real-world example without opening any textbooks. Ask an Education Architect for advice.
Living Laboratories
Consider outdoor classrooms that let students see ecosystems at work, study plant biology and monitor water retention. Rooftops with solar panels become real-time physics lessons. In fact, rainwater harvesting systems provide a means of teaching hydrology using real-world examples and very physically existent objects that they can see work to understand.
Transparency Builds Understanding
Mechanical rooms may hold educational value for students or give them an appreciation of what size generator might be able to power a building, for example. Just simply showing people graphs about how their usage can only teach so much. There are many untapped and cool ways to show how buildings work! For an Education Architect, visit Quattro.
They can see their effect almost immediately as they save water, then go and check the meter. The solar panels create power, and then the display prompts how much they are producing. Everything is so completely transparent, that it develops an environmental-awareness component where abstracted lessons cannot.
Outdoor Learning Spaces
With native plant gardens, outdoor classrooms and natural play areas right outside their doors connect pupils to the surrounding ecosystems. They will experience biodiversity on a daily basis, and see seasonal changes for themselves – as well as developing real environmental stewardship rather than just studying the theory of it.
Material Choices as Lessons
Using terms like reclaimed wood, recycled goods and low-impact finishes teaches sustainable consumption. Students get it — buildings have lifecycles, choices matter and these lessons go well beyond the four walls of a school into decision making that will shape their futures.
Long-Term Impact
As is always the case with students, they will grow up and stop viewing green as anything other than normal after years in a sustainably built school. They absorb the idea that efficiency, conservation and intelligent design are business-as-usual not miracles.