Architecture for kids podcast with Mary Featherston AM Adjunct Professor at RMIT University

I thank Antonio Capelao, and Architecture for Kids for the opportunity to
talk about ideas which I believe are vital for both children and architecture
/ schools and schooling. Schools may be places of learning and delight - for 
young people and adults - their teachers.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration and Featherstone, they were inaugural inductees into the Design Institute Hall of Fame and they are represented in several state collections. Mary lives in the home workplace that Robin Boyd designed for the couple 55 years ago. She is an adjunct professor of RMIT, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. In 2020, Mary was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the arts, particularly to interior and industrial design. Mary, thank you for talking to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation. What was your favourite subjects at school and what subjects did you excel?

SPEAKER_00: 1:50

I didn't have any favourite subjects and I didn't excel at anything. I was very interested in art and architecture but the school I went to had no interest in that whatsoever. So school was a complete sort of misfit.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04

Your trajectory into design and architecture, how did that happen?

SPEAKER_00: 2:08

It was something that I felt very early in childhood and I grew I grew up in England and we came to Australia when I was nine. And I remember before we left England, I had a very strong response to spaces. It actually intrigues me that quite few young children have a very early passion in life. They discover it early in life. It might be marine biology or flight or something, but I think it's fortunate if you find it early and if you find people that will cultivate it, you're very lucky. And I think my parents, although they've They had virtually no education. They were tradespeople, but they had a great sense of the value of creativity, beauty, imagination, and I think they supported my interest in creativity.

SPEAKER_01: 2:55

Those aptitudes that you just described, how did they manifest and how were you in tune with them?

SPEAKER_00: 3:00

Well, I like to draw. I remember getting into trouble at school because I wanted to spend a long time drawing on an intricate archaeological, you know, a flintstone. It fascinated me. where the class had to move on. The other thing was that in England we lived opposite an architect and it must have been quite unusual. His studio was at home. It was a great treat able to go and visit him and go into his office and I jokingly say it was the smell of Derwent pencils that hooked a very particular smell. But I also visited some interesting spaces like the Tower of London and Great Cathedrals. I can remember them still

SPEAKER_01: 3:39

very vivid. You're a professional and life partnership, how developing of your professional career and where you are now. Do you want to talk about that?

SPEAKER_00: 3:47

Yes. I left school as soon as I could and I did an interior design course. I thought that I was interested in architecture, but then I realized it wasn't really architecture. It was internal spaces that really intrigued me. Yes, I did the design course and then worked with an architect for a couple of years before meeting and marrying my husband, who was by then a well-established furniture designer. And And so we spent 10, 15 years working on various furniture and interior projects together. But the thing that I guess really propelled me into the course that I've been following for the last 50 years was when our first son was born just over 50 years ago. I knew nothing about children. I was a lonely child. I knew nothing. I started to read up about child development and the sorts of things I discovered absolutely intrigued me. You know, things like the fact that babies can hear before they're born, they can see light before they're born. And then before they go to school, they can speak a language, at least more than one in some case. That, together with the fact that we have a very unusual house, it was designed by Robert Boyd, who was one of our great architects. It's a very unusual house in that it combines workspaces and our living spaces in one, and it's a very open space with platforms, different levels. When young children play in that space, or when they enter that space, there very excited by it and they explore it. And then they'll gradually settle down into whatever they want to do. And I had the chance of observing various children over time and realising that they're capable of great lengths of concentration. They're very imaginative, they're very curious, they're very active. I formed a view about how children like to be in the world, I

SPEAKER_01: 5:34

suppose. It was quite innovative at the time, not just in Australia, but the rest of the world. When you started thinking about children's furniture and children's basis, how did you develop and how easy was it to implement your idea?

SPEAKER_00: 5:46

It was very interesting because I was a young woman, a young mother in the 1970s, which was an extremely interesting time. It was a time of liberation movement, a lot of protesting and challenging conventions, things like that. At that time, women had to leave the workforce when they married or certainly when they had children. But a number of us got together and said, well, we actually want to continue our professions. But there were no certain suitable places for our children to be while we work. And so we got together and we actually started a movement for community-based children's centres. And that was interesting because as we talked about what we wanted these centres to be, I realised that there was no design model for it. And so we got a research grant to look at the needs of children out of home. So that was the first of a research project I worked on. But at that time, really nobody was interested in design of the physical environment for children. They said, look, it really doesn't matter. As long as they've got good teachers, it doesn't matter. Although I was very keen to pursue that area, my husband quite rightly said, we can't because we can't make a living. Nobody's interested. It's hard to believe now when there's such an interest in it. I just did it on the side, as it were, for a few years. I guess as the children got older, I would take them to our state museum and I was horrified to find there was absolutely nothing there for children. Everything was behind glass. So that led me to agitating for a children's museum. And it took probably two, three years, a lot of agitating, but we finally got a space within the State Museum to set up a children's museum.

SPEAKER_01: 7:29

How did that relationship work between the State Museum and the Children's Museum you created?

SPEAKER_00: 7:34

Well, the State Museum was very traditional, monumental, heavy, dark, white, everything in glass cases. And what I wanted to do was to create interactive exhibitions for children and families. So that meant creating something that was completely different within the State Museum. And we were very lucky just at that time. We had a marvellous director, new director, who was very supportive. And I had a marvellous colleague to work with. She became the director of the museum. And I was a consultant. And I'd been studying the projects in North America, children's museums and very interesting projects in North America. And it seemed to me that it was really important to engage children in talking about what they would like in this museum. And we didn't have much time, but I set up little groups of children and I went and talked to them. Or I said, look, I'm from the Children's Museum and we are going to do an exhibition about the human body. What would you like to see in this exhibition? And the children's ideas just wore, it was just fantastic. And these were just little groups of half a dozen children. And I recorded it all and and their ideas came from their real life. Their experiences of going back to Greece with the grandparents and seeing grandmother kill a jook and then she showed them how you could pull on the tendons and the claws would come in. The children were just full of ideas like that and then in relation to the body they knew exactly what they wanted. They wanted to see what the body really looked like without clothes on. They wanted to see what lungs looked like from somebody who died of smoking. It was an extraordinary experience and at the end of it I realised that there had been no reference at all to their school curriculum. Absolutely none. It was all from life experience. I took all of that and then I went and talked to experts in their field of the body, aspects of the body, and asked them, well what do you think children need to know? And they told me what they thought was important. And I put those two things together, what the children wanted to know about and what the experts thought they should know. And that formed the basis of the exhibition. It was highly interactive and it was very interesting to watch the level of engagement of children in the exhibition. And all of that made me wonder, well, why are schools so different? Because the experience of going to a museum, of course, is voluntary. You're there because you want to be there. And that's very different to being in school, which is coerced. The children have no choice about whether they're in school or not. I thought, well, why can't schools be more like tourism? That really set me off. I'm still asking that.

SPEAKER_01: 10:10

And what have you done in terms of inquiring within that question, theoretical and practical?

SPEAKER_00: 10:16

Well, a lot. I studied exemplary projects locally, internationally, historically. You know, I find great interest in what John Dewey did in Chicago over 100 years ago. It was phenomenally interesting. Sure, you, but we can learn so much from that. And then there was the schools in England in the 60s and 70s, which were established by the Plowden Report, his government report that really changed direction. A marvellous team, multidisciplinary team of educators, architects, engineers, town planners all came together to design a number of schools across England. They're all different now, unfortunately, but the work that was done then was fantastic. But then there were other schools in America. But the system that is the greatest inspiration to me and has been for over 30 years is the educational project of Regio Armenia in the north of Italy. There have been many things to be said about that project, but from the point of view of design and architecture, they always understood from the very beginning, you know, in the 60s, that the pedagogy, the approach to learning and teaching, and design of the environment are absolutely inseparable. They guide one another. And they, by close observation of Chauvin, and some much marvellous visionary thinking on the part of Loris Managuzzi, the founding director, they have arrived at a process of learning and teaching which they refer to as progettazione, we call the long-term inquiry. And that really has been the approach that's guided my thinking about the environment. Because when I look at it, I think it contains all the things that I think are important about children. So if we can make it schools that respond to what we know about children, that they learn through all their senses, they learn actively, they see everything is connected. They don't see it in a separate subject. That learning is emotional and it's social. In all of these sorts of considerations, I think the regio people have just done a remarkable remarkable job. And the thing is that it goes on evolving. It's not a static sort of formula like Montessori or Steiner. It just keeps on evolving the more they understand. Plus the fact that I collaborated with many interesting educators here to develop projects

SPEAKER_01: 12:27

in Australia. In terms of the projects you develop in Australia, is there one in particular that you would like to talk about in terms of its process and co-design or co-creation, co-production? How did it develop? I

SPEAKER_00: 12:39

think the most significant project was the one we were able to do a small research project around it, which was just over 20 years ago, and it was in a suburb quite a distance out of Melbourne, quite socially disadvantaged area, with children speaking 45 different languages. The school was$19.70, very cheap, but principal and assistant principal were very enlightened, very courageous educators, and they had already for some years been searching for better ways of doing things, and they'd even made some changes to the building, but they didn't feel that it was really supporting what they were doing. They asked me to work with them and they similarly were inspired by what's happened in Red Drive. What we did was to analyse the experiences that the children were having in the course of these long-term projects. So these are projects of inquiry that a whole group may be involved in for weeks or months or years. I should say here that, and I don't know what the situation is in England, but we for some time have been able to combine teachers into teams. They're still mostly single teachers in single classrooms, but some schools have been able to move to working in teams. In this school, there was a team of four or five teachers and a group of a hundred or so children, and that gave us the opportunity to work with space of, say, five classrooms, but to modify them. But when we analysed what the children and teachers were doing together, we found that there's an enormous range of experiences, you know, all the way from quiet activities and reading reading, studying, searching, or what small groups meeting together, to wet messy activities, painting, modelling, small science, food preparation, role play. I don't know how many different things we arrived at, but we covered a wall with all of these experiences. And then I said to the kids, well, we can't have a separate room for each of these things, but what designers do is to rationalise that. We said, okay, those sorts of experiences need that sort of environment, that sort of setting. These experiences, in a wet messy stuff need a studio set up to enable messy activities and so we went through it and we ended up with a vocabulary of about 10 or 12 different spaces quite discreet but the thing that's interesting is that they all needed to flow together so if you imagine a large space made up of the discreet smaller spaces but they're all interrelated it's a heterogeneous assembly which means that people can move freely between them and also it means that teachers can supervise and people know where everybody body is at the same time. It's a very high perspective explained to people because I can't say it's like this because it isn't like anything I can imagine so it's hard to describe but that's what we came to and that's what I've had the chance to create in a number of primary schools now.

SPEAKER_01: 15:28

As you were talking about these interlocking spaces and these views that made me think about the Bauhaus initial house blocks where the mother was in the kitchen but she could see into the garden where the kids were playing as well as in the playroom.

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

And century modern houses here are quite often like this also. I think that one of the powerful things about design and the environment is that by the way that you design, you give people cues as to how to use the space. So for example, if you've got a space that is designed for construction, kids are using small bits and pieces for construction. You don't want those little pieces to sort of get lost in the other area. It's about how you put the boundaries around. And the same with messy things. You don't want those activities to spill over into carpeted learning comments area. But what I found is that people respond very much. If you give them those cues, they say, oh, well, that's the appropriate place to go to. If I want to make a lot of noise, singing and dancing, we've been able to use a space that you want the whole group to come together so that they can meet as a community to develop a sense of being a member of a democratic community. That needs to be enclosed because it's also a space where people can go and sing and dance and role-play. What we found is that we can totally enclose it and have large glazed areas, sliding glazed walls, which contain the sound quite well, so that you can have an adjacent activity, a quiet activity, which is not disturbed by the noise going on in that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

In your opinion, in terms of landscape of this work that you've been developing, what has changed and what do you think made that change? I I'm sure your contribution was a lot to do with it. But what else is another factor that you think might have helped this change, if there has been a change? And perhaps the other thing I would like to also ask you is, in comparison, what's happening in Australia and the rest of the world, how do you think things are impaired? Sorry, it's two questions and two long ones. I can come back to the second one.

SPEAKER_00: 17:33

The sad fact is that transformation of education has not happened. People have been calling for radical change. to school education for a decade. And some of our leading educational thinkers have been thrown in all over and over again. And it doesn't happen. And a lot of the work I've done has just disappeared. You can set it up. The school I've described to you before was very exciting and people were coming from all over the place to see it. This is wonderful. But it didn't stick. The woman that I worked with in that project went on and did a PhD to establish the theoretical basis for working like this. And she also moved to another school. And it's I've continued to work with now. That's over 20 years now. She is still doing it with a school, but I'm still working with her. But it's hard work, incredibly hard, because it's so counter-cultural. So what I'm doing right now is to try and write about this. You know, what is it? What is the problem? And what I've come to is that if you look at traditional schooling, mainstream schooling, which we all know, I went to school in England 70 years ago. The school that my grandchildren go to here in Melbourne is very similar to what I had in England 70 years ago. That system, if you look at it, every aspect of the design, the way time is used, the way the curriculum is divided up into pieces, the way classrooms are divided up, it's all underpinned by very strongly held values and beliefs about children, how they learn, and what is the role of school in society. That drives everything. So if you look at the classroom, it is a perfect piece of design. It's fit for purpose. It just so happens that the purpose is, you know, no longer appropriate. The world has just moved on. But the thing is that because the traditional mainstream of education is such a complex system of integrated element, they all support one another. What people have been doing is just to change one little bit of that, you know, so they might change the environment, you know, oh, we'll open it all up. And they think that that's the transformation, but it's not at all because the fundamental values are still the same. So the, I don't know what you have in England, but the thing that is sort of the core of pedagogical practice here is the lesson plan. The class comes together and you've got one teacher and a group of kids and there's a lesson plan and the teacher delivers it, the kids practice, she checks or he checks and then they move on to something else. It's very, very tightly interconnected and unless, this is my view, it'd be interesting to see what you think and other people think, but my view is that unless you change the fundamental values and beliefs, forget it, you may as well stay with the traditional system because at least it all works and Architects know what a classroom looks like. But it's very important that children are protagonists in this process, that it's not the adult control of the traditional system. It's not the child-centred thing, which everybody's talking about now. But it's a reciprocal basis where you say, what the children come with, they're all unique. They all have this rich background, family background, cultural background, their interests and questions. And if you take that into account and bring that together with the adult you know, the teacher's knowledge of the curriculum, which is, you could say, is what adult society values. That's what we want children to know. But if you bring it together with the children's culture and you build that together, so that's the inquiry project process, weaves that together and creates something new. One of the marvellous things, I think, that the Reggio people say is that school is the site for the creation of culture, not just the transmission of culture. They're recognising that these children will go on in their lives to create something in the EU culture that nobody can anticipate.

SPEAKER_01: 21:17

Now I think we should start re-educating kids in primary schools almost like we educate at universities so they can develop their critical thinking, analyse things and problem solving and work through project-based rather than the road learning. The educational system, it's completely obsolete in my view and especially with artificial intelligence coming in. The way we teach at primary school who wants Secondary school is completely relevant. I have a nine-year-old nephew. I don't need to tell him the history of Portugal. He can just Google it and tells me. We can have conversations about that. And what is interesting, and we were talking, he was telling me about Brazil and how Brazil is a relatively new country. And I said, hang on a second, where is the reference for that? And obviously it comes from the history of Portugal because after the 16th century became an independent country from Portugal. So I said, no, what is interesting is to guide them through their research. The only thing that they need, in my view, is giving them agency, giving them the skills to look at how critically can we analyze things and get to a solution and what are the tools. And culturally, people are not really aware of that. And I think we live in a society where people still doesn't think and they don't want to think. And that has to be encouraged at an earlier age. And I think if you operate that way, that will create a much more creative space as well as give agency to children and we'll start changing and we'll set them up to professional careers eventually that actually is what is happening around us at the moment because the way we prepare kids in schools here it's not for the professional careers

SPEAKER_00: 22:57

yes our education system here the rhetoric is that what we want for children is just as you're saying critical thinking creativity collaboration there's some things but the way the teaching is not conducive. But the exciting thing is the projects that we have been doing, the school that I'm working with and have for some years now, we now have an archive of many long-term projects. And following Reggie's example, these projects are documented so that the children and the teachers, the team of teachers working together, can see how the children's thinking and skills and knowledge is developing across the unfolding of the project. This is such a is that we know from research that children learn best when they learn in a meaningful context. It's really important the way these long-term projects are designed, which are really a bit like research projects. Start off with a research question, which is of interest to the children and the teachers together to explore. So they're gradually researching and discovering and expressing again from each other. So it's important that the children have the opportunity to express their ideas and understanding through many different media. So not just writing, not just words, but also through drawings, paintings, modelling, role play, etc. So it's a very rich process in which the children and the teachers, because the teachers are seen as researchers as well, they are learning. They're learning about the children and they're learning about the subject. And they'll also bring in specialists. Quite often it will be a parent. There was one project where the teachers thought it would be a good idea for the children to make a scale model of their ideas And so they call in a parent, a mother who was an architect, and she showed the kids how to measure to talk about ratio and how to build a model. And the fantastic thing I thought was that so they did it that year, and then next year they used it on another project. And next year, the kids were working on a completely different project, but they spontaneously, they initiated using that technique again. They saw the value in it. I mean, I think that's marvelous, you know, that they're saying, what skill do we need here? It would help us. us to understand if we build a scale model. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01: 25:13

And they learned the skills as well to do it. If we look at Australia and the rest of the world, how do you think things are, in your opinion? How do you think the situation is?

SPEAKER_00: 25:24

The history of school education has been that most schools are mainstream, and then there's always been another stream of progressive schools. We've still got a handful of progressive schools who are either trying different things, trying to do things better. They always expect But in the main, I think we're just hamstrung by, and it's worldwide, I think, that, Joan, it would take a lot of courage to say we need to do things differently. That we actually believe that children are curious. That they really do want to make meaning. And as parents, we know that children, if they're healthy, they're curious from the moment they're born. They're trying to make sense of the world. And they're interacting with the world. They're using all their senses to understand to that meaning, to communicate. And in early childhood, we keep that going to some extent, but we suddenly change it when they go to school. And part of that is because the belief that very young children learn concretely through manipulating. But when they get to school age, miraculously, they're capable of abstract thinking. And so you can put all that hands-on stuff aside and focus on what's going on in the brain. What we know is that it's continuous. And so what we should be aiming for is learning for life and a similar approach from birth to death, if you like. We know that studies will become more and more rigorous. You start off by playing and exploring and experimenting and studying in a very open way, but gradually it becomes tighter and tighter and obviously you end up as a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. But I also, when you were talking before, I thought that we also need a school system that works for everybody because the everybody's going to be a brain surgeon or an architect. We need all sorts of people and we need to respect the fact that everybody deserves to have skills for daily living but also that gives them a chance to find themselves, what do they do, what is their sense of purpose. I think that's incredibly important.

SPEAKER_01: 27:29

I think that project-based learning would enable that because you look at things that interest you and therefore you study the subjects that interest you and then organically you become to understand who you are and what you want as an adult. And that, I think, could evolve organically. And I think what we're doing as architects and designers and so on, it's one part. But I think all professions should have this active interest and participation in the development of kids' education.

SPEAKER_00: 28:01

We talk about project-based learning, and that is often and universally, but it means a million different things. And it can quite often mean that, you know, kids do at 2 o'clock on Friday afternoon or that it's a predetermined end product. You set off to build a model of a solar system or something. It's very predictable. But what the project is the only is an anticipatory process. It starts with a question like in a scientific research question which you can't be sure where it's going to end up. The teachers are constantly anticipating, reviewing what the children are saying and doing and asking and reframing around that. It is a very, as you say, a very organic process and it can take up most of their school time. It's not something that is a separate thing. It can become the whole of their school life. And that's why I've ended up with this internal space organisation because you need all of those sorts of facilities, spaces available at any time. You might have a group that starts off with a discussion and then they want to move doing further research or writing or shadow play or whatever. But they need to be able to do it then they can't wait for their one hour in the art studio you know at the end of the week and that's what's happening in most traditional schools that you've got separate specialist facilities which are timetaped the children can only go there when it's their turn there's no freedom to make those connections it's because the whole school program is privileging the essentials of literacy and numeracy well obviously they're very important but they're best learnt in context that's where it's meaningful.

SPEAKER_01: 29:41

I'd like to ask you about this writing, this book that you're doing. Do you want to talk about that or is it too early or do you rather keep it private for the time being?

SPEAKER_00: 29:50

I don't know that it'll be a book. I think it will be probably an online process where we look at the whole system, then each element within the system and how they interact, how you organise people into groups, how you manage time, assessment, tracking students' development, documentation of project and of course design of the physical environment which I see it as layers seem a bit like an onion kin and that all of those layers need to be considered together so you've got the building shell you've got the services the fixtures and furnishings and then you've got all the loose items if you're working in this way all those loose items the stimulus materials the materials to work with are really important and so we need the sort of infrastructure all of that as well that's what I'm hoping to do but also I hope that we will include quite a bit about the value of design and the design process. Talking about before that I think it's very valuable that the way designers and architects approach a problem, what are the needs, what are the human needs, what will people be doing, how many people, for how long, what service do they need, all of that. So there's much of this that anybody can do, not just designers but non-designers can do a lot of. So I think to help people to understand that, I don't think the profession has done a very good job actually of helping people understand the value of design for really enriching their lives, not just

SPEAKER_01: 31:15

aesthetically, but also practically. The architecture profession is in turmoil. It was mainly white, middle class, 40-year-old men that were running the show. And now we're trying desperately to make it more diverse, more inclusive, as well as look at the environments. It's not just making things or building things, but it's actually looking at the repercussions of what it is that we do and how that affects the environment. You are very right the profession has not helped at all and it was very single-minded the way it was operating what was very interesting about this publication that you planning and working on as you were speaking there was a part of it that is a manual almost that could be taken and be used all over Australia and perhaps all over the world it's very easy for kids near big cities to have access to this work that you do but for instance some kids in more remote areas of Australia say Alice Springs or Darwin, I don't know, might be. Darwin is quite a big place, I suppose, but I'm talking about this more remote area in Australia. It could be a manual.

SPEAKER_00: 32:18

I sort of resist manuals and models, but it is ideas for thinking so that people think it through themselves and come to their own conclusions as to whether that's what they want to do. But the thing that is so challenging is what might motivate people to really want to change, to transform the system? What would motivate people to really look at your and as curious and capable rather than in passive vessels to be filled with knowledge by adults. It's such a huge change. Until that happens, I think that we're just tinkering around the

SPEAKER_01: 32:53

edges, really. Perhaps framework is a better word rather than a manual. Yes. In regards to the question that you just did, I think what changes us as people is having someone that supports us and encourages and inspires us. How can we translate that into people's think that way about children? I don't know. If there's something we could learn from that, look at ourselves and what makes us change. If we could use some of that, perhaps could be a starting point.

SPEAKER_00: 33:19

I think giving out the evidence, you could say, is really in the documentation of this project. And you look at it and you think, my goodness, is that what children can really do? Their ideas, they have very profound thoughts and very profound questions. And if we make that more visible, I think that would be a good

SPEAKER_01: 33:36

thing. And they're very practical and very sensible in their solutions as well. I find. Mary, is there a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you? And what is that question? Oh, gosh. Terrific. Well, good on you. Keep up the work. Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners. And please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and family. And to find out more about it, visit our websites, antonioucaplan-portfolio.co And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education and Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.