{ppgallery}stories/test/1{/ppgallery}View some of Fielding Nair International's work in the slideshow.
Minneapolis, Minn.-based Fielding Nair International approaches projects a bit differently than most architectural firms designing for the education sector, Chairman Randall Fielding admits. “The typical way to begin a design project is to listen very well and to take good notes,” he says.
“Most architects are great listeners. They will take out a yellow pad and take dozens and dozens of pages of detailed notes about what the client wants. We don’t start there. If Henry Ford asked people in 1905 what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Even innovative educators are not necessarily visionary when it comes to the integration of space and learning.”
“The idea is you don’t know what you don’t know,” CEO Prakash Nair explains. “We’re trying to get people to tell us what they need and what they want, but we also need to open their eyes to the possibilities. Our process is what we call ‘active listening,’ where we challenge the status quo and get people to focus on real data vs. perception.
“For that reason, we have to connect quite a bit of our work to researching how facilities impact human behavior and learning,” he continues. “The process requires a level of deep understanding of both education and architecture, and what connects us between the two fields.”
Innovative Approach
Fielding and Nair established the company in 2003 after a chance encounter that would forever change the direction of both men’s careers. Fielding had ran a traditional architectural in Chicago for 14 years, but with the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, he opted to sell the company and launched an online design forum for sharing educational design ideas with architects around the world. Nair was an educational visionary making keynote speeches around the world.
“In 1999, I heard Prakash give a lecture about enabling students in Harlem with laptop computers to fantastic outcomes,” Fielding recalls. “I invited him to do an online debate with another gentleman known for wired networks throughout schools. We began to collaborate, and not to long after that, we formed Fielding Nair International.”
The company has designed projects in 27 countries on five continents. “Our projects often engage other aspects of the community,” Fielding says. “We are doing a shared facility in Regina, Saskatchewan, that includes a large health clinic, two daycare centers, a community development organization, a police station, a public library, a First Nations cultural center and a 500-student high school. They are all completely integrated.
“The high school is spread out throughout these facilities for student learning,” he continues. “Learning by doing has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but project-based learning is getting a lot more discussion these days. You might hear educators talk about relevance, rigor and relationships; project-based learning enables them to make those relevant.”
“Interestingly, we have found that communities on the lower end of the social economic scale tend to be more adventurous because they see they have nothing to lose,” Nair adds. “If you look at our case studies, our most successful examples are in the poorest neighborhoods, the last places you would be looking for success stories. These are the neighborhoods that are most likely to take a chance.”
Gauging Success
The philosophy behind Fielding Nair International is that as education continues to evolve, the learning environment must also progress. It’s an intangible process that is difficult to quantify, so the company created an education facilities effectiveness instrument (EFEI) Web site in 2005 to measure how well educational facilities are able to support best practice pedagogies.
“We can indeed measure good design,” Nair asserts. “And to be able to measure that gives clients the reassurance that all of our talk can be put into action, and quality can be measured throughout the life of the project.”
“In support of that, some of our most successful schools are the ones where students have jobs in the community and are actually paid,” Fielding adds. “This reaches kids in a high poverty area very strongly when they have an opportunity to work in the real world, even at the middle school level.
“We’ve found that kids like to take an active role in running the school lunch program,” he continues. “We have a school in Chicago where kids negotiate with local organic farmers for food. They make the food, deliver it to the kids, research nutrition, have taste tests and report to the board on profit and loss. They get credit for this in biology, economics, English, math and are very eager to work in that program.”
School of Teaching
Alongside their team of brilliant educators and innovative architects, Fielding and Nair continue in their quest to transform the learning environment both physically and conceptually. Both stress that it’s important to teach the clients how to get the most optimal use out of their new schools.
“You may have heard about the tens of millions of dollars spent on new facilities the U.S. has built in Iraq and how many of these facilities are not being used because people don’t know how to staff them or use them,” Fielding says.
“We’ve coined a new term called ‘educational commissioning’ which relates to a term now popular in the design industry because of LEED, ‘building commissioning’ where the end-users are taught how to use their mechanical and electrical systems efficiently to minimize energy usage.
“Educational commissioning is when we help our clients learn to teach more effectively in their facilities,” he explains. “We do work shops, operating manuals and education commissioning throughout the design process.
“Our educators work directly with the teachers in preliminary discussions using icons representing independent learning, small group learning, play-based learning,” Fielding continues. “We use these icons almost like game pieces to show the different ways to schedule spaces during the day and to model different learning scenarios.”
“The key is to empower the students to take charge of their own learning, that’s what it all comes down to,” Nair stresses. “The future from our perspective is that students will not have rigid boundaries around education the way our generation may have had. Jobs are becoming more fluid, more interdisciplinary. Ultimately, the world needs a complete retooling of the education system. We need to prepare students for a world that will look very different than the world we grew up in.”
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