Co-designing Places for Outdoor Learning Facilitation Guide
Design engagements for families, students, teachers, and communities to reimagine schoolyards
The Co-designing Places for Outdoor Learning Facilitation Guide creates a process by which people can co-design outdoor places for field-based science learning on schools grounds. It is only one piece of a much larger ecosystem of materials that are part of the Learning in Places project.
The Design Engagements (DE) guide groups of families, teachers, Community-Based Organizations (non-profits) and community members in collaborative visioning and decision making, called co-design. When outdoor learning places at school are co-designed using multiple cultural and value systems they provide more equitable and sustainable learning opportunities, which each DE discusses.
Design Engagements:
This guide is made up of eight different Design Engagements (DEs) that will inform collective decision making for the design of a new outdoor learning site or the enhancement of an existing site. The activities are listed in this order as they support the development of the corresponding activities.
- Histories of Places: think across multiple time scales to consider how the school yard came to be the way it is today and what it could be in the future
- Vision and Values Discussion: set a direction for the outdoor learning place
- Place Mapping: identify the features of the land that support learning
- Rhizome Mapping: re-walk the school grounds together and use the Rhizome as a “lens” to think critically about the places you identified in the place mapping activity
- Site Selection Synthesis: reflect on the previous activities to identify a site for outdoor learning
- Designing Your Site: create a design for the site and share out with the wider community
- Planning for Installation: finalize your design plan and prepare for installation
- Sustainability, Decision-Making and Governance: consider how decisions will continue to be made and create a common agreement to support sustainability of the outdoor learning place
Download the entire facilitation guide:
Download Individual Design Engagements:
Suggested Citation
Learning in Places Collaborative. (2021). Co-designing Places for Outdoor Learning Facilitation Guide. Bothell, Seattle, WA & Evanston, Il: Learning in Places.