• Staying connected: a message to our community
• Introducing our new Project Manager
• Welcoming our new PhD researchers
• Development Framework workshop to occur online
• Meet the partner: Patrick Barrett, Catholic Education Diocese Parramatta
• Research activity update
• Conference presentations
• Schools as Community Hubs International Conference, December 2020
• Building Connections has a new website address and Twitter!
Staying connected: a message to our community
Welcome to Building Connections newsletter #2. This newsletter provides updates on the Building Connections: Schools as Community Hubs ARC Linkage project (2019-2022). We hope all readers are safe, well and managing to navigate the COVID-19 situation, as many of us juggle home, work and school under one roof!
Introducing our new Project Manager
We are delighted to welcome Sarah Backhouse to the role of Project Manager, replacing Dr Sianan Healy. Sarah was appointed in the first week of May from a highly competitive field of applicants. She comes with a background in architecture and research, including ARC Linkage project management experience with LEaRN’s Future Proofing Schools project (2010-2013). Sianan will step down later this month to take up a new opportunity as a Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Sianan has played an integral role in getting the Building Connections project up and running. We wish her all the best for her career in academia.
Welcoming our new PhD researchers
Natalie Miles joins the Building Connections team as a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne. Natalie is researching Spatial Analysis of School and Community Interaction, seeking to identify and record who, where, when and how community members are using school facilities. Natalie is a registered architect in Victoria and has been practicing as an Associate at Austin Maynard Architects, with several award-winning projects under her belt since completing her Master of Architecture in 2013. This PhD project sees a return to her interest in schools and education, as investigated in her Master’s thesis titled School/City.
Carolina Rivera Yévenes also joins the Building Connections team as a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne. Her research will focus on how successful schools as community hubs have been planned, designed, governed and managed to thrive in support of local communities. She holds a Master of Education from The University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Education and Philosophy. Carolina brings more than ten years’ experience as a teacher and an academic consultant working with schools and formulating intervention programs. In 2012 she co-founded the NGO Innovacien, a Chilean organisation working in the development of 21st-century skills, technology and innovation in schools.
Development Framework workshop to occur online
The first Building Connections: Schools as Community Hubs Development Framework workshop will be held on 7 May. The workshop was to be held in Brisbane, but will now be held online – enabling the participation of people from multiple states. This will be the first of six such workshops to be held during the project. Workshop #1 aims to explore the issues that will underpin the Development Framework, a set of guidelines that will help stakeholders navigate the ‘obstacle course’ that is commonly encountered when undertaking ‘hub’ projects. Specifically, the workshop aims to collect insights into what issues should be recognised in the Development Framework, covering the planning, design,
governance, management and use of school facilities, as may be co-located or shared between organisations. It will draw on the perspectives of a dynamic mix of professionals: government department representatives, school leaders, hub coordinators, planners, architects, health and human services providers, community groups, and a range of NGOs.
Meet the partner:
Patrick Barrett, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta
Patrick Barrett works with Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta (CEDP) in New South Wales. CEDP has a history of providing learning environments in its 80 schools with spaces that encourage creativity, communication and collaboration. Western Sydney is changing quickly with the new airport being built and providing school education facilities with multi-functional purposes is becoming critical as suitable land becomes more scarce. CEDP is particularly interested in how it can work more closely with planners, developers, councils, education systems and others to provide learning facilities into new developments in a community-friendly and cost-effective manner.
After months of desk-based research, primary data collection has commenced following ethics approval. Dr Philippa Chandler has conducted a number of interviews in Queensland and Victoria with architects, school principals, local council representatives and NGO employees involved in service-delivery. Interviewees have been both frank and insightful. We greatly appreciate the time they have given us. Further interviews in May and June will be conducted using video conferencing.
Conference PresentationsDr Ben Cleveland presented at the New Generation Learning Space Design conference in Sydney on 4 March, hosted by IQPC ahead of the COVID19 lockdown. He discussed the project’s objectives and early insights from the literature review. He was to present at two additional industry conferences in late March, National Futures Schools and Connecting Pedagogy and Learning Environments, however both were understandably cancelled. Ben, Associate Prof Ian McShane and Dr Philippa Chandler will present a paper titled Schools and communities: Temporal cycles of socio-educational policy and built environment
entanglements at the International Association of People-Environment Studies (IAPS) Conference in late June. This conference was to be held in Quebec City, Canada, but will now be held online.
Schools as Community Hubs International Conference,
December 2020.
Many excellent abstracts were received following our call for papers to the Schools as Community Hubs International Conference. The project team, including Partner Investigators Simon Le Nepveu and Laurence Robinson, reviewed all papers and a selection has been accepted. These include papers from multiple states of Australia and North America. Speakers will be submitting their full conference papers for peer review in the coming months. Highlights from the abstracts received include historical overviews of community school policies in the United States and Australia; case-study-based practitioner and industry perspectives; and methodological and theoretical insights into the design, management and use of community hub schools. We are looking forward to a
thought-provoking conference with many opportunities for discussion and collaboration. The conference will be held 3–4 December 2020 and registrations will open mid-year, with contingencies in place for the possibility of ongoing international travel bans.
Building Connections website's new address
As part of a wider University of Melbourne change, our Building Connections website has migrated to a new address within the LEaRN website. Please note the new address.
Building Connections'
new Twitter handle
Chirp chirp! We have launched our own Twitter account @BC_ARCProject. Follow us for more news of the project, including updates about opportunities to engage!
Correction to previous newsletterIn a previous issue of our Building Connections newsletter, we published a mistake in the section introducing our partner at ClarkeHopkinsClarke, Simon Le Nepveu. See corrected quote below: ‘We know schools designed as community hubs can have enormous impact. This isn’t a distraction to the core business of education, but a driver. Building Connections will gather the evidence to prove it’.
- Simon Le Nepveu
This research is supported under Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme [LP170101050]. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council. Partner organisations
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