Vashon Green School, Covid-19, and Human-centered Design — Part 1
Vashon Green School and Covid-19
I first met Sandy Cioffi as one of my professors for a graduate level course at UW on Emergent Storytelling in Spring of 2020. This class (conducted over Zoom due to Covid-19)introduced me to concepts in emergent theory and human-centered design, and I immediately felt a kinship to these ideas and philosophies. In Summer of 2020, after the class, I got in touch with Sandy about setting up an independent study for the Fall to explore these ideas further.
During our initial meeting in July, Sandy began to describe the design work she had been doing at the Vashon Green School (VGS) which is run by Dana Schuerholz, an old colleague of hers. VGS is a small private school on Vashon Island with a total of about 30 students built out of Dana’s home and on her personal 7-acre property. The school is in the middle of the woods with a large garden, a couple goats, a pond, a greenhouse, and large solar panels that provide all the power they need to run the school.
The school has an interdisciplinary curriculum that honors differ ways of thinking, and features a Spanish immersion program so all classes shift between being taught in English and Spanish. Sandy described how, before Covid-19, the students would often all participate together in one large group to cooperate on assignments, celebrate important milestones, and work on chores around the farm. Now, Dana was preparing to reopen the school in September by assigning students into three “pods’’ of 10 students or less, creating an all outdoor curriculum, all while keeping the students six feet apart and wearing masks as much as possible. Sandy was collaborating with Dana to help with the design, implementation, and iterative process of adapting to an all-outdoor school for the fall, and she asked if I was interested in joining her. This sounded like an incredible opportunity to step outside my career in live streaming video production, so I told Sandy I was very interested in helping out and I began the proper steps to set up an independent study with my graduate program to commence in the fall.
First Visits and Observations
My first visit to VGS was in late mid-September, and the school had already been holding classes for a couple weeks. Having grown up on Whidbey Island, the ferry ride to a small island in the Pacific Northwest was very reminiscent of my childhood. And, as I later told Sandy, driving down a dirt road to VGS I felt as if I could have been a five minute drive from my parent’s house back on Whidbey. This familiarity and nostalgia from childhood proved to be very useful, as this sense of “childhood” helped me approach my observations of the school from this youthlike, curious perspective. I approached Dana’s home and met with Sandy, which was the first time I had met her in person due to Covid, even though I’d known her for about six months at this point. Sandy gave me a comprehensive tour of the school, showing me the three different outdoor classroom-areas: the Treehouse, the Greenhouse, and the Swamp. Each outdoor classroom had a pod of 8–10 students and one teacher. Every hour or two, the teachers would rotate between these classrooms to deliver their lesson to a new group. Also, each week the student pods would move to a new classroom, to experience their learning in a new environment.
While I didn’t have a chance to meet with Dana on this first visit, I did get to have a conversation with one of the women who worked at the school named Aimee who is also mother to one of the students. Aimee described how the students showed deep concern in the transition to being outdoors; they wondered how many of activities, games, and celebrations that were so important to them the year before would happen this year since Covid would not allow them to be done the same way.
The second time I visited VGS I observed Dana leading a class, and I was impressed by how intentional and well-crafted the activities were. One example is I watched as Dana had all the students close their eyes and pretend to be earthworms as she began to bump a large stick on the ground. She told the students to keep their eyes closed and asked them how they thought earthworms sensed the world around them. The students started to brainstorm answers out loud until they landed on the answer Dana was looking for: earthworms use their sense of touch to navigate through their world. This narrative based learning exercise was new to me, and I was inspired by how Dana lets the experience of being human drive the connections between different subject areas, rather than putting different disciplines and subjects into their own isolated categories.
Once Dana finished this class session, I had a chance to sit down with her Sandy, and one of the teachers named Lucia. Though this conversation I picked up on many of the important elements of the school that are most important to Dana. One idea in particular stuck out when she spoke about the importance of somatic practices, about the students understanding themselves in their own bodies. She explained how she liked to use rituals, ceremonies, and observation of the seasons to “celebrate the passage of time as earthlings” in order to ground the students in intuitive and emotional truths as a foundation for the rest of the learning. One example of this is each year Dana leads a ceremony where each student is given a “nature name” paired with a direction on the compass (North, West, East, or South) and is assigned a stump to sit on during class.
These stumps are organized in a circle (each six feet apart) and face the direction of the compass the student have been assigned. Dana explained that when students sit on the same stump throughout the school year, they experience the slow changes of each season and notice the difference in weather, light, plants, clouds, and other natural elements all in relation to where they sit on their stump. This helps them develop a situational awareness of how they as a human being fit into nature and the wider world.
Brainstorm and Ideas
After Dana shared a bit about her intention behind the curriculum at VGS, her, Sandy, Lucia, and I began to brainstorm some ideas to help the school develop a sense of community while adapting to being all outdoors and following Covid protocols. Dana and Lucia talked about the concept of an altar, and having students collect meaningful objects from the school property to bring home to create a shared sense of place as a way to connect the feeling of being at school with the feeling of being at home. An offshoot of this idea was to have the students create a little box to keep items in, something they could not only use for this school year but also for years to come, something to hold meaningful belongings that would always remind them of this year. Another thought that Dana and Lucia explored was the use of music to connect the time spent at school with the time spent at home. Songs could be recorded and hosted online for the students to share at home with their families which could provide an emotional throughline between the activities done at school and family life at home. Then, Sandy landed on a concept that stuck a cord with the whole group: the creation of a “story booth” as a way for students and other VGS community members to share stories with each other since they were limited in doing it face to face. This started a new brainstorm thread where we began to envision an old phone booth with a rotary phone where people could either record one of their stories, or listen to a story from someone else. Sandy and I kicked around the idea of using Raspberry Pi, a rudimentary computer that can easily be programmed, as a means of running this story booth. Sandy described to Dana how this offered an opportunity for some of the older students to gain basic computer science skills by becoming involved with the programming and creation of the story booth. I marked down this story booth as an idea that was definitely worth exploring more.
Upon returning home from this second visit, I began reflecting more on my time spent at the school observing interactions. I thought about the model proposed by Darwin Mulijono in his thesis The Relevance of Emergence in Human-centered Design where he delineated between the environment as the place people inhabit, the interactions that take place in these environments, and the social contracts that form and arise out of these interactions. This model enables a designer to map out their approach by making creative decisions about the environment where interactions take place to ultimately shape the social contract that’s formed between the human beings involved. In our case, VGS has a very strong social contract under the leadership of Dana and the other instructors, so our design challenge is to work backwards from the social contract and design new ways of interacting within the environment(s) imposed by Covid-19. The challenges of Covid-19 also strike me as a deeper, unresolved issue in our culture at large. Our society was not prepared to be agile or adaptable, it did not have the processes in place to approach a problem of this magnitude and begin designing a solution. For the first month or two, most of what I experienced from institutions and leadership was unorganized and unclear. There was not a unified communication plan or strategy on what people needed to do in their communities. This deeper issue makes me think of the ending of the documentary film Objectified by Gary Hustwit, where iconic designer Dieter Rams gave a powerful statement on what he saw as the role of a designer: “The value and especially the legitimization of design will be, in the future, measured more in terms of how it can enable us to survive on this planet.” Mulling this over, it occurred to me that VGS should consider actively including the students in the design process, not only to help solve the immediate problems of adapting to Covid-19, but also to provide young minds an opportunity to develop skills as design thinkers to be better prepared to take on not only the challenges that will face them personally as they navigate life, but also the issues that will challenge the very existence of our species like climate change, water shortages, and renewable energy.
Next Steps
Looking ahead to the weeks that remain, I aim to begin a drafting process of the story booth idea with Sandy. Since we are short on time, the main goal will be to conceptualize a plan of action that could be implemented to build the story booth and have it functioning for VGS in early Spring while simultaneously engaging the students in the creation process to help teach computer science skills. Simultaneously, I will collaborate with Sandy to develop my idea of incorporating design thinking into the curriculum at VGS by refining the concept and coming up with something we can pitch to Dana. At this stage, I envision framing it as “problem solving” activities. One example could be each student is assigned homework to define a “problem” at their home, something like “we always forget to take out the garbage”; something mundane and everyday. Then, once back at school, all the students could share their “problems” with each other and collaboratively brainstorm solutions together. From here, they could begin an interactive process of attempting to design ways they try to resolve the problem while documenting what they try and reflecting on these attempts. These activities could also be applied to bigger challenges at VGS, like “how will we hold the end of the year celebration during Covid-19?” and the students could be involved with the iterative design process, developing their ability to become independent problem solvers in their own right.