Curriculum

Objective

To inspire and activate creativity, critical thinking, and citizenship within public high school education through the design and construction of student-built public architecture projects for community benefit.



Pedagogy

Studio H teaches by doing. Inspired by a “design/build” process that moves from alpha to omega with cohesive thought, Studio H represents a “shop class” renaissance, this time infused with design thinking, and put towards a community benefit. Using a design sensibility that values human- and context-driven research, students approach learning through creative problem solving, while the development of industry-relevant vocational skills results in workforce-ready youth and a full understanding of how ideas become real. We believe that the most formative educational experiences happen through the hands, and in building visible progress. Studio H will not only provide the framework for more engaged and holistic learning, but will make citizenship part of the public school’s curricular standards. For a public education system, Studio H offers an antidote to rigid, verbal, top-down instruction that does little to activate the type of critical, creative thinking that 21st century learners need to succeed, and that rural communities need to thrive.




The Design Process

Students will learn through a non-linear design process, which includes ethnographic research, generation of multiple (sometimes crazy!) ideas, development of a few of those ideas into workable concepts, prototyping of those potential solutions, iterative refinement, and finally the construction and implementation of the solution. The process is messy, creative, surprising, and human-centered, resulting in solutions that emerge from need and community interest rather than schematic form-making. An iterative process (which usually includes multiple rounds of prototyping-refining), distills concepts into working solutions through testing and user feedback.



Core capacities

The Studio H curriculum grows Creativity, Critical Thinking, Citizenship, and Capital within the next generation (the 4C’s). Within these four core capacities, our projects require that students gain proficiency in the following:

Design Thinking:

  • Ethnographic (human-centered) and historical context research techniques
  • Brainstorming
  • Mind-mapping
  • Ideation (how to come up with a ton of ideas quickly)
  • Iterative prototyping (building prototypes, refining, building another prototype, refining)
  • Evaluation and metrics

2d design:

  • Color theory, contrast
  • Composition and scale
  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Font and type
  • Gesture/sketching
  • Shape, Space, Texture
  • Print techniques and specifications (like for our billboard on Hwy 17!)

3d design:

  • Form
  • Materials
  • Rendering (Google Sketchup)
  • Production methods
  • Drafting (hand and AutoCAD) for construction documents (plan, elevation, section)

Production and fabrication:

  • Shop safety
  • Measuring, dimensioning, and layout
  • Woodshop: table saw, joiner, planer, chop saw, brad nailer, sander, hand tools
  • Metalshop: materials, cutting, welding
  • Joinery and adhesives
  • Hardware
  • Concrete work
  • Structures
  • Permitting and local building codes
  • Budgeting and client relations

Communication and documentation:

  • Verbal presentation of projects
  • Visual presentation of projects
  • Written documentation of process
  • Interview skills (as interviewer and interviewee)
  • Photographic documentation
  • Video documentation
  • Current events
  • Teamwork, leadership, collaborative project management



Calendar

Over the course of one year, students will spend the Fall semester doing 2 skill-building projects, leading up to the Spring semester’s “big project” which will be built over the following summer. In the first year, the project breakdown was as follows:

Project 1 (Fall semester, Week 1-7): Design Bootcamp: The Art of Cornhole

Project 2 (Fall semester, Week 8-18): Public chicken coops

Project 3 (Spring semester, Week 19-36): Food-for-all: A public farmer’s market in downtown Windsor

In the second year, the structure is condensed to one semester:

Project 1 (Spring semester, Week 1-7): Design Bootcamp: Mini-Cornhole boards for elementary school classes

Project 2 (Spring semester, Week 8-18): “Super Stands” – small-scale farm stands and community bulletin boards in outlying towns



College Credits

Studio H is offered to high school students in Bertie County in partnership with Pitt Community College located in Greenville, North Carolina (about 1 hour away). Instructors Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller are adjunct faculty in Pitt’s Architectural Technology and Design departments. Over the full year, students earn 17 college credits (8.5 per semester), 12 of which are fully transferable to any two- or four-year program in the state.



Summer Salary

Over the summer that follows the two school-year semesters, students are offered a paid summer job to construct the project they have spent the Spring semester designing and prototyping. The class is essentially the “construction crew,” under the management of instructors Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, but because they are also the designers of the project, they are more attuned to understanding the process by which the project must be constructed. At the end of the summer, a public opening for the project will serve as an unofficial “final exam,” in which students will present the project to the community.



Scalability
As of now, our focus is the implementation, assessment, and focus of the Studio H program in Bertie County. While we would eventually like to expand and/or replicate Studio H to other similar locations and districts, our current goal is to learn lessons here in Bertie County that may better inform our ability to scale in the near future. For now, however, we believe our best path to scalability is open-sourcing all of our materials, lesson plans, and evaluations, which can be accessed via our blog. Full transparency of our lessons learned, projects and processes, are a great tool to share parts of Studio H that may be adapted and implemented by anyone, anywhere.



Lesson Plans
Lesson plans will be available in the form of blog posts. View all lesson plans here.