Transportable classrooms: "outposts for conquest"; A conceptual designer envisions a solution for keeping classrooms flexible and education dynamic.

Transportable classrooms are the ugly ducklings of learning environments. Viewed as an expedient solution to fluctuations in student population, these movable classrooms are treated as temporary facilities despite remaining on many school sites for decades.

The time has come to rethink

The transportable may become a provocative learning environment in ways that few bricks-and-mortar buildings can. It could be a unique place that responds to all children's gifts of daring, creativity, problem solving, and curiosity.

For transportables to achieve their educational potential, planners should exploit their intrinsic advantages, such as their flexibility. They can be reconfigured and moved to other locations in the community to serve a variety of purposes. Because they are manufactured like prefab housing, they can easily be customized while being mass-produced.

Part of the strategy to develop transportables should be to embrace the visions of the students who will use them, for that is where the potential excitement of the transportables resides. Children's vivid imaginations allow them to turn these prosaic structures into true outposts for conquest.

Flexible Learning and Site Usage

Just as the transportables themselves are flexible, so, too, should be the school and community sites at which they are docked.

Student populations fluctuate, neighborhoods mature, and school system requirements change. The advanced technologies used by the transportables and the evolution strategies of the sites can allow graceful responses to these predictable changes. Transportables would be deployed and configured in ways that respond to each individual learning environment and also meet general community needs.

A transportable site might begin as one format for a compact elementary school, then, when the neighborhood student population declines, it would be reconfigured into, for instance, an urban science center's satellite facility, a community center, or a performing-arts facility. When no structures are present, the site could become a park.

The use of transportables at schools is at least 60 years old. Yet, they could become a key element of twenty-first-century education if we learn to exploit their virtues--chiefly their adaptability and transportability. The transportables should be one system integrated with other systems, such as the changing site and advanced mobiles like the Explorer Lab.

Imaginatively rethinking the transportable will also lead to rethinking the learning potential for all school buildings. We will then be linking the educational environment to the learning that takes place within that environment.

RELATED ARTICLE: Scenario: The Explorer Lab

A mobile Explorer Lab docks at a middle school for a science unit on exploring a newly discovered planet. The students deploy robots to explore the planet's surface.

One team of students activates Geo-Probes to assess the condition and types of sub-surface materials. Another team works in the laboratory's meteorology module, organizing and interpreting data that will be needed after the mobile lab leaves the site to go on to the next school. Still another team returns to class for an evening session in the Explorer Lab's Astronomy module. Students search for errant meteors that may pose a danger to the colony that they will plan and design along with the other explorer team members.

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Once the planet's atmosphere has been declared safe, team members leave the module and explore the planet's surface. They verify the data that has been collected by the smart robots. The students carry PDAs with plug-in sensors for gathering information about the environment. These wireless units allow the students to download their field data into the Explorer Lab's onboard computers.

After the Explorer Lab leaves the transportable complex for the next school site, the student teams return to their classrooms. When they complete their daily class assignments, the students begin planning and designing a colony for the planet where they have "landed." The work stimulates their creativity, challenges their problem-solving skills, and sparks their risk-taking inclinations.

The mobile Explorer Lab stays for a week at each middle school in the system. The mobile lab is conceived to appeal to the students' sense of the future. Both the exterior and interior have a future-oriented appearance, and the equipment is both ergonomically correct and cool.

RELATED ARTICLE: Education in the Community

This complex is a compact, neighborhood elementary school. The transportables are bright and metallic. Conceived as manufactured products rather than architectural structures, these new transportables are fanciful and flexible.

On site, the transportables are connected by glass-canopied walkways that are aesthetically appealing. Each transportable classroom is in close proximity to an Internet Discovery Module that has large, multiple screens useful for student team research and interaction.

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Within this type of scheme, transportables leapfrog beyond their current status as odd, ad hoc appendages and become instead a part of a coherent complex of educational facilities that respond flexibly to community and neighborhood dynamics.

Concepts and Visuals by David Pesanelli

About the Author

David Pesanelli is an advanced planner, conceptual designer, and researcher who develops communications, environments, and products for both institutional and corporate clients. His address is David Pesanelli + Company, 14508 Barkwood Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20853. Telephone and fax 1-301-871-7355; e-mail dpesanelli@aol.com.