How Does School Environment Shape Teenagers' Behaviors?

Herb Childress (2000) in his ethnographic study, Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy, spent considerable time learning about teenagers from a northern California exurb and theorizing about how their environment affects the way they behave. Childress explains that there were three questions that framed his study:

I had built my study on three simple questions: How do teenagers use spaces? How do they apply meanings and values to any particular place? How do conflicts about those places arise between teens and adults and between particular subsets of teens, and how are those conflicts resolved? (p.254).

In the context of answering those questions, Childress comes to name thirteen pairs of competing ideas that he labels as modernist  and existential. I couldn't help but consider how the ambiguities that Childress frames in his study of how teenagers live and behave with the sensibilities that inform high school design. In what ways does our rather modernist secondary school environments shape teenager's behavior?  What might happen if the assumptions that informed school design were less modernist and more existential?

Childress's list:

Modernist idea #1: Kids and adults should be separate.
Existential idea #1: Kids and adults should be integrated, with teenagers welcome in the adult
world.

Modernist idea #2: Children are the passive receivers of education and services.
Existential idea #2: Real learning involves an active search for experience and knowledge.

Modernist idea #3: We live in a national and global economy, and mobility is inevitable.
Existential idea #3: The local is of deep and lasting importance.

Modernist idea #4: Conflicts are decided in favor of those who have the resources to prevail.
Existential idea #4: Conflicts are decided in favor of the person or group with fewer resources to buffer any ill effects.

Modernist idea #5: Economies of scale are sensible in all areas of life.
Existential idea #5: Small and many are beautiful.

Modernist #6: People are, most centrally, consumers.
Existential idea #6: People are, most centrally, citizens.

Modernist idea #7: Objective, consistent, and encompassing rules and codes are the basis for interaction.
Existential idea #7: Negotiated agreements are both achievable and desirable.

Modernist idea #8: Social classes and their neighborhoods should be separate.
Existential idea #8: Social classes should claim their own spaces, but should also come into regular contact with each other as citizens and equals.

Modernist idea #9: Business, services, and residences should be separate.
Existential idea #9: Zoning should be primarily by scale of development rather than by type.

Modernist idea #10: Countryside is a necessary refuge from undesirable city living.
Existential idea #10: Countryside and city life both contribute to a complex, satisfying landscape.

Modernist idea #11: High densities of people are unsafe and unhealthy.
Existential idea #11: Concentration of people can encourage social connection and public safety.

Modernist idea #12: Home and land ownership is the key to community.
Existential idea #12: Easy social contact is the key to community.

Modernist idea #13: Places should closely fit their specialized functions.
Existential idea #13: Environments should be easily converted to new and multiple uses.

Childress concludes his study by stating that the presence of joy is the factor most important in what works and doesn't seem to work in teenagers' lives.  Childress writes:

After a year, I think I know some of those answers, and the idea of joy is at the heart of all of them.

That sounds simple, perhaps naïve. But I came to Curtisville in July, and became more and more depressed the more I learned. Here I was, in this growing community of new homes and businesses; in a school with a multi-million dollar budget, mostly staffed with competent, concerned people. Both the kids and the adults were telling me that something was missing, and I could tell that something was missing, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I was more and more concerned about the lack of satisfaction and intensity and desire that I saw. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem.

And then, in the middle of November, I came to the short performances of the Advanced Theater Workshop. These kids did demanding work under difficult and tense conditions with a live audience, and they were absolutely great. And the difference was joy. The love for what they were doing was so clear, all over their faces and through their motions, it just burned off the stage. And joy was what I’d seen in those handful of classes that "worked." Joy was what I’d heard in the laughing, teasing conversations on the Quad and at the Arco station. Joy was the fuel that moved skateboards and horses and pickup trucks. And joy was what was missing from most of Curtisville, and from most of it’s high school as well. I just didn’t have the word before. (254-55)

How do we engender spaces where joy is more important, more salient than core content standards and an endless sea of standardized tests and the accompanying narrow pedagogy that gets enacted in order for students to get ready for such minutia?  How do we build spaces where the emphasis on learning is invitational?  Where error is not counted as points that detract from "proficiency", but is understood as an important marker along a road of learning?

Joy resides alongside agency.

Imagine 'school' as community, where the barriers between teenagers (all of them*) and their communities are not built on a segregationist model, but rather one that deliberately seeks to integrate, involve, and welcome the teen into the adult community as partner.


floorplan and connect these learners with adults in their own community?