The Teaching Green School Building: a framework for linking architecture and environmental education

Abstract

The ‘Teaching Green School Building’ is an emergent type of school building that attempts to engage building users with environmental issues in buildings. Architectural interventions in these buildings range from signage to interactive touch screens to gardens and demonstration kitchens that foster educational programmes about sustainable food. The result can be a building that offers informal education, support for formal environmental education, and, overall, a chance for students to embody sustainable living in their daily lives at school. To date, this type of building has been weakly theorized, and the relationship between architectural interventions and environmental education largely unexplored in the literature. This literature review weaves together theories that connect the physical environment with human factors. In particular, research in environmental education, museum studies, conservation psychology and architecture illuminates ways in which buildings can support environmental education and with tactics that go well beyond the convention of informational signage on the wall. The result of the literature review is a framework that points to design patterns that extend from passive to active, individual to collective, and formal to informal. This framework can inform the design, use and evaluation of school buildings designed with pedagogical intent.

Keywords:

• place-based environmental education
• architecture
• green schools
• school building as teaching tool
• informal learning

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Raymond De Young, Jean Wineman and Michaela Zint for their constructive comments throughout the development of this work.

Notes

1. LEED, advanced by the USGBC, is the dominant green building rating system in the USA.