Open Plan, Informal, Open Corridor…

Re-Organizing Space in New York City Public Schools in the 1970s

Kate LouisAugust 22, 2010

Introduction

My paper will explore the importation of the British “informal” schools model to New York City in the early 1970s. Lillian Weber, a professor of teachers-in-training at City College, traveled to England and brought home this approach to school planning, which she then tested at several public schools. Since she was implementing the approach in traditional school buildings, she translated the idea into open-corridor or open-door plans in which hallways were turned into educational spaces and students were free to move from classroom to hallway, where special “corridor teachers” oversaw hallway activities. Opening up space (in practice if not through actual renovation) allowed students to explore and interact, liberating them from the confines of the classroom. This was a child-centered approach in which students directed their own learning and teachers were supporters and facilitators.

Questions

Some aspects of this moment in educational innovation in New York City that I will examine in my paper include:

• Its conception of the role of the teacher• Its nostalgic recollection of a one-room-school house ideal • Its sense of school as community• Its relatively limited impact on NYC public schools

Although the open-corridor model was successfully implemented at several public schools, its effect on school planning is apparent simply in the fact that most New York City schools are still comprised of contained classrooms branching off of linear hallways.

Can the decline of the open-plan movement be attributed simply to the city’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s and a lack of funding for such experimental practices?

What was the impact of improvising within existing school buildings on the success of open-corridor planning? Was it more successful when new schools were designed specifically around the open-plan concept?

Finally, what was the role of teacher training in open plan’s success or failure? Is the physical environment or the preparation of teachers in how to use the facility more important?

Influences on Open Plan Schools, #1

Why did this movement briefly thrive in New York City in the early 1970s? In addition to the advocacy of Lillian Weber and the demands from parents and teachers for solutions to chronic overcrowding, this slide and the next outline two influences on the national scale.

Published in 1970, a report commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation called Crisis in the Classroom decried the state of American public schools. Its author, journalist and education “expert” Charles E. Silberman, wrote:

“what grim, joyless places most American schools are, how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for children as children. And it need not be! Public schools can be organized to facilitate joy in learning and esthetic expression and to develop character—in the rural and urban slums no less than in the prosperous suburbs. This is no utopian hope; as I shall argue and demonstrate in the chapters that follow, there are models now in existence that can be followed.”

Some of the solutions Silberman proposed included importing the British model of informal schools, envisioning schools as communities, empowering teachers, moving away from the overemphasis on control and surveillance, and incorporating art into both the curriculum and the school environment. Although he was interested in altering school buildings, Silberman was adamant that innovative school design was not enough, pointing out specifically that a school with an open design would fail if teachers were not trained and supported to use the space effectively.

Influences on Open Plan Schools, #2

Radical thinking about school design emerged in the late 1960s. Harvard Educational Review published a special expanded issue in 1969 entitled “Architecture and Education.” One representative contributor, the avant-garde architect Giancarlo de Carlo, asked: “Must educational activity take place in buildings designed specifically for that purpose?” He called for doing away with the autonomous school building and integrating education into lived experience by combining schooling with other functions (housing, work, play) in shared, flexible, communally designed spaces.

“The representation of this concept of education becomes clear in the conception of the buildings, where we always find closed organizational structures and monumental architectural forms… very little has been done in the contemporary epoch to modify the authoritarian and monumental characteristics which school buildings have always had. Schools in cities or anywhere in the territory can be distinguished immediately; they stand there, isolated and emphatic, even when they are inserted into the most closely-woven urban fabric.”

In other words, education would not change until school buildings changed. While open plan schools were far from the obliteration of separate school facilities that de Carlo proposed, they responded, with a far more practical solution, to a similar desire to open schools up and rethink the spatial boundaries of classroom and hallway around which they were (and are) organized.

Lillian Weber• Lived from 1917 to 1994.• Was a teacher before becoming a professor of education at City College.• Studied informal schools in Britain and returned to New York City in 1966, determined to test

the approach in public schools. • Translated informal education into an open-door or open-corridor program.• Her first test site was P.S. 123 in Harlem and the second was P.S. 84 on the Upper West

Side, now called the Lillian Weber School.• In 1971, she published a book called The English Infant School and Informal Education. In

it, she insists on teacher participation and on the possibility of applying the English model to American needs and to existing school buildings:

“We search, in particular, for clues to organization and there seem to be special clues in the active participation of English heads and teachers in the extension of implication from theory, their active participation in the development of method and curriculum.”

“But such classroom organization is possible; it is possible, within present thinking, to enrich environment in all classes… and to give these children the chance to use this environment sometime during the day.”

“…even within the old buildings… the new ‘commitment to try’ makes change possible… We can test new uses, extending learning space, finding possibilities for in-and-outness in areas unused before.”

“The Joy of Learning—In the Open Corridor”

In April 1971, the New York Times published an article with the above title about Weber’s pilot program at P.S. 84. The writers, Walter and Miriam Schneir, described entering the school and meeting a boy sliding down a banister. They saw students in the corridor reading, making art, and playing, without any teacher supervision. They passed freely between the classroom and the corridor. The article asked: “How did so unorthodox a program take root in the arid soil of the New York City educational system?”

It concluded that the early success of open corridor at P.S. 84 was attributed to:

– active parents who advocated for the program– teacher participation and buy-in– teacher training and support provided by Weber and City College– the hiring of a young principal willing to take a chance on an

experimental approach– an influential ally in the superintendent’s office

“The Joy of Learning—In the Open Corridor”

The article described:

“The underlying assumption of ‘informal’ schools, both British and American, is that in an enriched and carefully planned environment that supports the natural drive toward learning children are able to learn mostly by themselves, from each other and from books. They learn in encounters with the things and people around them, and they do so at their own irregular and individual pace. They learn most intensely when they are interested and see the pertinence of what they are doing. The role of the teacher is important, but quite untraditional: there are few, if any, whole-class lessons, no standardized tests, no meticulously detailed and rigidly enforced curriculum.”

Note that the school environment is primary. The teacher’s role is as the architect of the student experience, crafting an environment and then setting students free within it.

The images on the following two slides are of P.S. 84 from the New York Times article.

Construction of New Open Plan Schools

While the earliest stages of Weber’s experiment in New York City took place in existing school buildings adapted to fit the open-corridor program, like P.S. 84, eventually new schools were designed and built to open-plan specifications.

One example was P.S. 398 in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, completed in 1976. The school was notable enough to be featured in architectural periodicals when it opened. According to New York 1960, a comprehensive guide to every structure built in New York City from the 1940s to the 1970s, P.S. 398, “was a 1,500-student, open-plan elementary school. Conceived as an educational shopping center, the basilicalike school was organized along a streetlike spine.”

I will research this school, and hopefully other examples, to compare the success of open-plan programs at adapted schools versus purpose-built schools.

Works Cites

Slide 4: Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom (New York: Random House, 1970), 10.

Slide 5: Giancarlo de Carlo, “How/Why to Build School Buildings,” Harvard Educational Review 39 (1969): 12, 18.

Slide 6: Lillian Weber, The English Infant School and Informal Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971): 248-9.

Slides 7-10: Walter and Miriam Schneir, “The Joy of Learning—In the Open Corridor,” New York Times, 4 April 1971, SM 30.

Slide 11: Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960 (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 926.