Project Description
The project is a design for a classroom for Kilema Secondary Preparatory Academy for Girls, a boarding school specifically for girls in rural Tanzania. The Kilema Secondary Preparatory Academy's mission is to provide the very best classical education to young women, instilling in them the desire and ability to succeed in college, and helping them to develop leadership skills and critical thinking skills that will enable them to become true global citizens of the world. The academy is in its early stages of development and has moved through the stages of land acquisition, curriculum development, the creation of a board, and application for 501c status. The academy, cofounded by Adia Mbuya Hoag and Sartho Mbuya, is a tribute to their grandmother Agnes Ndesoko Mbuya who had a vision of making education accessible to all young women. Acknowledging in the curriculum that, “empowering young women is essential in the global drive to eliminate poverty, achieve social justice, and stabilize the world’s population,” the academy’s five point vision includes a mandate to enrich the lives and build up the self-esteem of modern Tanzanian women, therefore increasing opportunities for their advancement in society. The vision seeks to not only reduce the number of girls who receive only a primary school education, but also to increase young women’s awareness and their ability to defend their human writes. By providing young women access to quality, rigorous education, Kilema Secondary Preparatory Academy will influence not only the individual lives of its students, but the future society of Tanzania. The classroom presented in this submission seeks to spatialise the ideals of the founding curriculum as well as respond to the wishes, hopes and concerns of the young Tanzanian girls interviewed for this project.
The academy will be located in the Mt. Kilimanjaro region at Kyuu- village, Kilema- ward, Moshi Town. The academy’s approved charter allows for up to 120 students per grade level from form 1-6. Ideally, the first group of students will begin their studies in the fall of 2011. The campus has been designed to expand in modules of eight classrooms, physically linked around a planted courtyard, and with shared resources such as mobile computer facilities, storage and teachers resources grouped per module. The vision for each classroom is to be a safe and welcoming space that facilitates serious academic achievement while at the same time nurturing individual development and student collaboration. The classroom will be built of simple, regionally appropriate materials including baked brick walls, ceramic tile floors, and corrugated aluminum roofs over treated wood trusses. Windows will be of either wood or aluminum depending on availability, and the classroom will be naturally cooled and ventilated and afford year round daylight and views to greenery and nature. The roof has been designed with high pitched trusses to allow for hot air to rise and be ventilated out of roof vents and operable clerestory windows with the help of ceiling fans. Aluminum was chosen as a roof surface as it allows for high solar reflectance as well as a hard surface to facilitate rain water collection during the rainy season which will be channeled to underground cisterns by roof drains and gutters throughout the campus. The high pitch also allows for future installation of solar panels that will be arrayed to service specific functions such as powering the computers.
The classroom has been designed specifically to meet the needs of young women and their teachers, with a focus on creating flexible, easily manipulated spaces that allow for lecture style instruction, small group discussion, and intimate individual learning. Each classroom will have a series of movable carts that can be configured to meet the specific needs of each teacher and her subject—the carts will be produced locally by carpenters, and will be light enough that a couple of girls will be able to roll them around easily. Carts such as a computer cart housing laptops, and an audio visual cart holding screen projection equipment will be shared with other classrooms and stored in common storage areas. Each classroom opens out onto an “outdoor classroom” where teachers will be encouraged to hold creative lessons as the weather permits, and allow for more rigorous activities to take place such as pot and basket making, drama and speechmaking, and science experiments.
The academy’s curriculum “operates under the assumption that all students will learn and contribute successfully to the school culture when provided with the appropriate supports and reinforcements.” Classroom culture is expected to embody the following: warm/strict, 100% active engagement, tight transitions, student investment and effort, helping hands, balance (whole group/small group/individual; teacher modeling/guided practice/independent practice), and joy/rigor. We have designed the classroom with all these aspects in mind—students will be called on to actively engage in the moving and shaping of their space, whether it be moving short counters together to form a discussion table, helping to clean the classroom by accessing the cleaning cart, drawing the curtains to cut glare from the northern windows or using a long pole to open or close the clerestory windows for ventilation, being sent on a “mission” to get the computer, AV equipment, or library carts for a specific lesson. Ample bulletin board and white board space have been provided in the classroom to provide visual stimulation and tools for each lesson, and to put up affirming notices for the students including “caught you being good” notes for students that demonstrate school values.
Over 40 teenage girls in Moshi, Tanzania were surveyed as part of this design exercise, and care has been taken to incorporate their ideas into the final design of this space. Some of their survey responses and drawings have been included in the student input section of this submission. Design moves such as the provision of whiteboards, a wall clock, book bag storage, a cleaning supply cart, water fountains in the hallway, well constructed windows, and a tight building envelope are direct responses to their concerns about their classrooms. We look forward to seeing their dreams become a reality in the near future.
