Schoolyards Re-Imagined

School Ground Innovation in the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond

Original date:  March 27, 2012

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Presenter: Sharon Danks

Description: Schools around the world are using their grounds to enhance hands-on teaching and learning, enrich outdoor play, and improve the ecology of their neighborhoods.  Sharon Danks will present a vibrant slideshow that takes us on a journey to explore the growing movement toward “green” school grounds.  Along the way, we will “visit” some of the world’s most innovative green schoolyards including schools with edible gardens with fruit trees, vegetables, chickens, honeybees, and outdoor cooking facilities; wildlife habitats with ponds or forest ecosystems; schoolyard watershed models, rainwater catchment systems, and waste-water treatment wetlands; renewable energy systems that power landscape features or the whole school; waste-as-a-resource projects that give new life to old materials in beautiful ways; curriculum connections for a wide range of disciplines from science and math to art and social studies; and creative play opportunities that diversify school ground recreational options and encourage children to explore the natural world while they run, hop, skip, jump, balance, slide, and twirl. The talk will also ground these examples in a practical framework that schools can use to make their schoolyards more comfortable, enjoyable, and sustainable, and describe a participatory design process to engage school communities as stewards of their own public spaces.

Suitability:  All formal and non-formal youth educators, school administrators, parents, environmentalists, and design professionals

Sharon Danks is an environmental planner and a founding principal of Bay Tree Design in Berkeley, California. Over the last twelve years, her professional work and passion have focused on transforming school grounds into vibrant public spaces that reflect and enhance local ecology and nurture children as they learn and play.  An accomplished schoolyard researcher and an advocate of ecological design, Sharon has travelled the world to study hundreds of school grounds. She applies this international experience to her work and celebrates it in her recent book, Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation, published by New Village Press in November 2010. Danks has facilitated green schoolyard master-planning processes for more than two dozen green schoolyards in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Sharon holds an MLA-MCP from UC Berkeley and a BA from Princeton University.  She is the mother of two expert playground testers.