“We built that!” — COLLECTIVE EDUCATION

A conversation on the power of design-build education in public schools

Challenging traditional architectural education (referred to as a Beaux-Arts tradition or master-apprentice model), design-build projects ask students to work collaboratively to design and build a project as a means of learning about real-world constraints, performance criteria, and construction methods. This educational model incorporates the elements of a collective learning practice which centers student agency, creativity, and collaboration.

Architect and educator Matthew (Matt) Miller has extensive experience teaching college architecture students and high school students using a design-build approach. Matt currently works with Portland Youthbuilders, a nonprofit offering mentorship, classes, and hands-on vocational experience to youth who have not thrived in traditional high school settings.

As an architect, educator, and student of design-build education myself, Matt and I have a shared interest in the design-build method as a model for students outside of higher education. In this interview, Matt and I sit down to talk about his experiences in teaching, why being a direct stakeholder in the community matters, and what design-build might offer students over the traditional educational model in public schools.

Austin Roch: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into teaching?

Matt Miller: In my fourth year of undergrad, I was in a crit (critique) with my favorite professor, Bob French. I was sitting on the on the floor and my Materials and Methods teacher got so livid that I wasn’t being “formal”. She wanted me to be in a chair. That’s the moment that made me want to teach. Bob was one of the older professors that had been at University of Tennessee for a long time. He’s this wise, old guru. And then there’s this young woman from Harvard. This is her first real gig, and she’s trying to be high on her horse. That’s when I realized I want to be Bob. I want to teach because because it should not look like this. This is not what architecture school should look like. We need to not take ourselves so seriously. That was the impetus to get me thinking about it.

I didn’t start teaching until I went to Cranbrook Academy of Art and got my first adjunct gig at Lawrence Tech. I didn’t think I wanted to teach at 26, but it just kind of happened. I needed the money and it sounded fun.

“This is not what architecture school should look like. We need to not take ourselves so seriously.”

How did you transition from teaching at the undergraduate level to teaching younger students?

My partner Emily’s organization – Project H in San Francisco – had designed these Learning Landscapes, which were playground elements for elementary school kids that you could build out of recycled tires. The superintendent in this small town saw her TED Talk, and I ended up going to North Carolina to build four of these for their school district.

While I was there, the superintendent and I would drive around, visit different schools, and talk about design and school and education. At one point, I brought up the idea: “Why don’t we do something more permanent? You have students, we have ideas and time and the ability to move here and do it. So let’s go. Let’s do some design build.” I had been inspired by Rural Studio and what Mockbee and Coker had done there. I had always wanted to do that at the college level, because that was the model. That was the extent of my vision. And then I landed in the small town and I thought, well, we could do something at a high school level. Why not? So that’s what got the ball rolling. He found the money to pay us, and we raised a bunch of money to to make it happen. That’s what’s documented in the film (documentary “If You Build It”, 2013).

Left: High school students building the Windsor Farmer’s Market as part of the design-build curriculum in Bertie County, North Carolina. Right: Finished Windsor Farmer’s Market.

Can you speak about how that brought you to where you are now, and why it’s still outside the sphere of higher education?

I was teaching adjunct at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) in Providence, teaching adjunct and Berkeley, living in San Francisco, all while flying out to Bertie to work on this project. It was good that I was teaching at RISD at the same time, because what I saw was a lot of international students and students coming from all over the country, and not having any real stake in Providence. The work that we did felt very much apart from the Providence community.

What I saw different in Bertie, was that the students are from there, their families live there, and they have an inherent built-in stake in that community. That’s their hometown, and of course, they care about it – even the ones that can’t wait to leave. That sparked something in me to realize that this is far more interesting, and potentially more important, than doing it at the college level.

Doing it at the college level is doing it for college students. Doing it in high school is doing it for the high school students and for their families and for their community and their neighbors, and so on. The sphere of influence is bigger, and has more impact. And then those students are going to go back at some point, they’re going to see the work, their family is going to see the work, they’re going to see it live on and progress and grow and their kids can see the work at some point. It perpetuates over time.

What do you think that this type of experience offers your students, other than getting hands-on skill building?

At best, we are stretching their creative muscles a little bit. What they get out of it is the satisfaction when it’s all over. They don’t perceive or appreciate the process the way we do as teachers. But by the end, they look at what they built. And without exception, they’re like “Holy crap. We built that. That is my design that we built that.” There’s an ownership there that you cannot match in any other classroom.

It was our opening project at Newberg High School. The whole premise of the first semester was designing something for our community and defining community as the school. We started with questions, and we discussed what they would change about the school. They eventually landed on that there’s not enough play in school. “We’re high schoolers, we just want to be like kindergarteners again. They just get to play all day, we like have to sit in these chairs all day.” So we designed a bunch of playful stuff to put around school. What we landed on as the final project to be produced, were these plywood chairs, and they look like big teardrops. They’re essentially rocking chairs.

So there’s this boy, I think was a sophomore at the time. He absolutely hated school. But it was his chair design that I kind of brought him along through. At the end, as a class, we chose this chair to build. He was super excited. He felt validated. We built half a dozen of them or so we put them around school, and he got to deliver them to different classrooms. The joy on this kid’s face. There’s this kid who hates school, and we can barely get him to show up. And then he goes through this design process and builds these chairs with his classmates as this big collaborative project for his school, his community. He now has this amazing ownership and did this amazing project. It kept him at school. As far as I know, he graduated. That’s all that matters. That’s the best case scenario.

Could you speak to why you think creativity is not typically supported in K-12 environments?

I think there’s a couple of things going on. By the time they get to high school, and long before, there’s so much demand around testing. And there’s so much demand around performance. There’s just no room for creativity in that. The things that get budgeted out are PE and art classes – the things that our bodies actually need as an outlet. Instead, we expect kids to sit in a hard plastic chair for hours on end and expect them to cooperate and to come away having learned anything. It’s kind of inhumane to be honest.

I don’t put this on teachers at all. From having done this for years, the classroom management is at least 60% of your job. Essentially keeping them in their seats, trying to keep them from being kids, sit there, be quiet. We give them worksheets, because we’ve taught them how to do worksheets. And it’s an easy way to keep them busy. So they put their heads down, they’re doing their thing, and they’re quiet for five minutes. Teachers have found these strategies to keep students somewhat engaged, and in their seats, and to help with the classroom management piece. But that those strategies, I think, have killed collaboration, they’ve killed that creative thinking. They’ve killed critical thinking, because filling out a worksheet is not critical thinking.

So in your experience, are the schools you’ve been in supportive of changing this kind of learning environment? Or are you usually bringing in something that they haven’t thought of doing before?

I’ve been in both. I’ve been in schools where they just want me to be the woodshop teacher, and just shut up and teach woodshop. When I would go to the principal with some ideas, the answer was, “We have a bond that we’re going to go for in a couple years. And once we get some money, then maybe we can do more.” I’m not going to wait around five years for that to happen. In Newberg, I found a principal who was eager to do some creative stuff and really think outside the box. I had time to go into the community and meet with people every day, I had time to fundraise, I had time to build the shop out, I had time to make this work. And so I’ve seen both sides, I’ve seen very, very supportive administration for this. And I’ve worked with administration that just wants me to do the job and make sure nobody gets hurt.

We talked about this with the chair, but is there another “aha”, or favorite moment that you’ve had for doing this kind of work?

I’ve had a number of those. Same kind of students, essentially those same incidences where it’s happened a lot. It’s the best feeling in the world, to see a project through and to see a student fall in love with it and own it. Even with what I’m doing now. There’s no design in it, but we just built a fence for an elementary school. My students who finished the fence were new to the program, so they never built anything. And again, these are all students who are trying to get their GED, they’ve failed, or the system has failed them at some point. We finished that fence, and they were beaming with joy and pride in this stupid fence around this stupid garden, at this stupid elementary school. They had no connection to the elementary school, no connection to any of it. None of that mattered, but god damn it, they built a fence. And it was a beautiful fence, and they loved it. And they felt so much joy in that. And that’s amazing. And that will keep them going and motivated for the next project.

Teardrop chair for the Gay Straight Alliance built by the Integrated Design Studio students at Newberg High School.

I think it shows that the projects don’t have to be huge to matter.

No, they don’t. But they have to be finished. You have to see it through in some way, shape, or form. Because even though we relish in the process, the process and finished product has to be there. You have to be able to walk away from it, because it’s not just about you. Yes, I’m teaching because I care about my students and I want my students to learn and succeed. But the work has to take on its own life as well. Because we’re working in a community and the community needs the fence. What’s important to the students is that they got to build something and be proud of it. But what’s important to the community is that they have a fence that works. They don’t care about the process. So you’ve got to look at it from these different perspectives.

It sounds like there needs to be a real world community benefit component to this work, or a community partnership?

Yeah, I think that’s highly recommended. What what we do at Portland Youth Builders has that component. We work with community partners, to help them build their projects that they have funding for, whether that’s a fence, or a deck. Could we also have played a hand in designing that thing with the students? Yeah, that would have been cool. But that’s not our mission, and our students aren’t there for learning design. But we do the community piece really well as a nonprofit.

Is it important to change the paradigm of educational models given our current context?

I don’t know that it is. We don’t have time to save ourselves. I’m talking about bigger climate related issues. I’m too much of a pessimist to think that we’re going to do it fast enough. But I do think in a perfect world, it could start with schools. I think education may be the only way we’re going to get out of this dumpster fire that we’ve built for ourselves. I guess that’s the hope, right? Is that we could start with changing the way we teach and changing the way we learn and bringing more joy into learning and therefore more joy into life, and perhaps through a process that will take generations.

We talked about scaling back from a project perspective. Building a 1,600 square foot Farmers Market is too big, we should not be doing that. But doing some small chairs for the for the library is something that we can handle. The same way I look at my work, it’s no longer thinking design can change the world. But design can change a couple lives. Building with students can change a handful of lives. It can help get the student who is in a shelter right now motivated to get up and come to school and get his GED and maybe build a career for himself. It’s important because it’s about scale for me. I’ve found a way to keep my hope alive by working at a smaller scale group of students. I’m also outside of the school system now. I’ve left public schools, because I don’t think there’s any hope. And maybe someday I’ll go back. But right now I’m seeing success. I’m seeing a lot of success in in a small model that I’m working on right now. And that gives me hope.