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 transportable classrooms and turn them into truly dynamic learning environments. In an article for the Washington Post, education writer Jay Matthews described how some children found transportables to be "exciting,... like our own little clubhouse" or an "outpost for conquest."

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.