Building Community Tool
The four strategies of community formation include, cultivating respectful relationships, sense of common purposes, opportunities for cooperation, and opportunities for influence and autonomy. This tool is designed to identify different levels of interventions for each of these categories to fit different timelines and budgets, including major intervention: new and significantly renovated space; minor intervention: refresh with a focus on finishes and FF&E; and re-utilization: operational/function change in existing space.
Tool Tips
Hover over strategies for further definition and click for interventions
Improve the ease of navigation and wayfinding in the built environment
Cultivating Respectful Relationships
Improve the ease of navigation and wayfinding in the built environment
Protect student's privacy, and reduce the feeling of being monitored or surveilled.
Provide variable sensory levels to students and teachers
Comfort in terms of air quality, temperature, sound, vision, and ergonomics
Easy and sufficient access to sanitary facilities
Enhance student's and teachers' safety
Sense of Common
Purpose
Food, drink - things to make people feel energized and soothed.
Provide diversity of imagery for students
Celebration of alumni or students' achievements, legacy, and build up role models for the cohort
Let students or teachers express their needs and participate in school design.
Shared, collaborative narrative to enhance students' cohesion
Promote sustainability within school built environment.
Hazards - Create
Feelings of Exclusion
Poor or no accessibility to the building of rooms; Lack of availability of resources
Lack of cultural, historical, or racial sensitivity
Building, furniture, or rooms lack of human scale
Lack of information and lack of transparency - both policy and space
Having too many rules, or being very inflexible
Lack of sensory comfort - visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioception, thermal, tactile
Opportunities
for Collaboration
Provide access to tools, equipment, and resources
Provide acoustical comfort.
Provide variable collaboration spaces for students
Provide maker space and allow students to mess it up
Provide support or facilitation to the students as needed from faculty and admin group
Bring in the ideas of the community garden, farm, or plants to enhance cooperation
Opportunities for
Influence & Autonomy
Provide students reasonable access to tools, equipment, and other resources
Allow students or teachers to adjust the environment around them
Provide clear indications or cues for different types of spaces in the building
Provide some quiet area for the students
Enhance the campus or building's security
Provide variable presentation spaces to foster the sense of influence and autonomy
Institutional: stratified, fossilized, sterilized
What The Community is Saying
Jennifer Andaluz, Former director of Downtown College Prep
"Learning spaces cannot and will not be pristine, we need colors and images to inspire the students. And we don’t want dark and cold spaces. Furniture in classrooms needs to be light, flexible, movable, and easy to modify. It will allow teachers to control and manage their space."