Transforming Tradition: Revitalizing Educational Spaces Through Cultural Design

Designing a school is not a new feat, and neither is culturally focused design. Though, what we often don’t recognize is that culture can be many things, showing up in a variety of ways. When we design a space dedicated to human interaction, the goal is to strengthen the culture and identity of the people who will use the facility. First, we must identify the most important question – what defines culture?  

Understanding Culture in Design: A Path to School Transformation

Culture, in terms of design, is best described as the characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a place or time. In designing educational facilities, the culture of a school can come from what the community and students value most. For some, it could be sports. Other schools might center around the arts. For the Many Farms High School community, the culture is a blend of Indigenous identities and school spirit.  

The Many Farms High School project was born out of a series of facilities assessments led by Seven Generations Architecture + Engineering (7GAE) completed for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) beginning back in 2019. The original goal was simple: to report on the current state of BIA-funded schools. However, the 7GAE team led by Scott Winchester, Tribal Liaison, and a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, believed there were opportunities to improve these schools beyond facilities maintenance and upgrades. Although they weren’t required to do so, the Bodwé team began offering recommendations to improve safety and security when completing their site reports.

“Many Farms was the first site we visited in our assessments,” Scott recalls. “We didn’t call them recommendations at the time, but we gave [the BIA] some options on how they could take the site and make it more safe and secure, while also providing a better learning environment for the students.”  

The first 19 of 34 assessments continued this way. Our team would submit draft reports, according to BIA requirements, and provide additional recommendations to the BIA program manager. Then, something happened: the BIA revised the scope for the remaining 15 assessments to include findings and recommendations for improvements to each school site. Our efforts were being noticed and, even better, they were being considered as actions of change.

Many Farms High School: Blending Tradition and Modernity

It wouldn’t be until 2022 that Many Farms would come back around as a design project. When Bodwé was awarded the contract, the team grew exponentially. All four Bodwé architecture and engineering companies were brought on board, along with 14 external consultants to redesign the entire school campus. Our efforts to provide the Many Farms students and staff with adequate learning environments and culturally responsive spaces were now propelling how we designed the entire campus.  

Designing a culturally responsive school, much like designing any other facility, helps reduce the mismatch between the space and its end users. It is re-evaluating everything from the desks and chairs in each classroom to the footprint of the entire school. Amber Anderson is leading the interiors team for Many Farms and shares her perspective on our approach.

“When we’re looking at designing the entirety of a campus and we’re talking about landscape design and how students are interacting with their environment, our goal is to make it all an experience for them,” Amber describes. “Yes, it’s a school, but it’s also their home. The intent was not changing what’s worked in the past, but instead opening the future to more possibilities.”  

For each renovation or update to school facilities, the design teams are required to follow preselected options outlined in the BIA School Facilities Design Handbook. In the instance where the design options don’t work, the Designer of Record may allow for an alternative to be used. This was the case for a few key areas at Many Farms, namely the gymnasium and the athletic fields. Nathan Fishnick, an architectural associate at 7GAE, remembers the discussions held with students, staff, and the BIA about what would happen to these spaces.

“One of the main keys I would say was access to the athletics programs, definitely for the football field and the basketball courts by the high school. There’s a lot of students that play basketball and football and those athletic programs are a pretty strong aspect of that culture they’ve built within the school. That became a key point that we tried to focus on as well.”

The Many Farms dormitories house 104 students (52 boys and 52 girls) each year, adding to the 46,000 students across 183 schools that the Bureau of Education (BIE) oversees. Because they live, eat, play, and learn within the boundaries of the school campus, it was important to our team that we make it feel like a home, even adding a few extra details to reflect the heritage of the students. Walking to the front of the new Many Farms High School, students enter from the east. To the Navajo, the east represents dawn and the rising of each new day. It also represents Mt. Blanca – one of the four sacred mountains that surround their homelands where the Many Farms High School sits.  

Incorporating Student Needs: The Significance of Place and Identity

The culture of the students, and how that factors into the design of BIA schools, is important to the BIA as well. The cultural design approach included in the BIA School Facilities Design handbook underscores development of a ‘cultural focal point for the community.’ It gives examples such as a cultural classroom, media center, cafeteria, or other gathering space. As the students of Many Farms considered life on a new campus, their primary pushback to early design concepts was that their new dormitories would be further from the gymnasium they use on the weekends.

“They have a community building with a gym and concession area that helps serve the dormitory students after school and on the weekends as a way to get physical activity and have a gathering area,” Nathan explains. “It was kind of a pain point for them, having the new dorm moved to the south. We had conversations of alleviating that during the charrette…it’s very convenient now. The dorms are only about 60 feet from the high school which does have a gym that they can use at times. That’s being worked out between the dormitory staff and the school staff.”  

The BIA guidelines around culture directly spoke to the needs of the Many Farms students. Previously, the cultural classroom was in one of the dormitories. Our team dedicated space for new cultural classrooms in the South addition, connecting the cultural programs to a central gathering space as well as the school’s media center. This also gave us the opportunity to provide an outdoor garden for growing native, local plants to help with cultural teachings of traditional medicines and plant uses.  

Shaping the Future: Improving Educational Spaces for All

In doing this work, our team has faced challenges with the guidelines in the BIA handbook. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been updated since March of 2007. BIA schools continue to be renovated and designed with rigid, traditional classroom layouts. While public school classroom culture becomes more about teamwork and group learning, BIA requirements have made it difficult to adapt to these new learning pedagogies. Thankfully, our work on BIA assessments, and now the design of Many Farms High School, is helping to change that. Scott Winchester details how we modernize these spaces and why it’s important.

“If you think about four walls in a classroom: one wall you’d normally enter from the corridor and then you’d have a teaching surface. In the old traditional sense where it was just desks looking at a wall, you only needed one direction. In more modern classrooms, you want flexible learning environments where you can arrange those desks, or tables, in multiple arrangements for small group work, or the entire large classroom work.”

By embracing culture and engaging with students, school and dormitory staff, the BIA, and other stakeholders, Many Farms is an example of how culture can be used as a design imperative for modernizing school facilities, both tribal and non-tribal, to promote a school culture geared towards teamwork and collaboration. Because of our work on the BIA school assessments and our design for the Many Farms campus, the Bodwé team is thrilled to have been invited by the BIA to update the School Facilities Design Handbook. This work will help bring access to culturally responsive and student-focused learning environments for Native youth across the country.