Working with South East Planning Aid, Rosemary Dymond and Anne Schuster are bringing together their Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 students to investigate how their local community has developed and how the built environment needs to change to cater to their needs.
Students and local resident © Alys Tomlinson.
Learning to change
Rosemary is Headteacher at Riverview Junior School in Gravesend. She wanted her students to become more involved with the local community, to realise their own sense of worth, to become more confident and to use their own initiative more. She also wanted to improve the students’ mathematical skills by presenting them with real life problems to solve.
Anne teaches Construction and Built Environment Diploma students at Thamesview School. She wanted her students to become more confident at speaking and presenting to each other and strangers, to become more focussed and meet targets, and to gain a wider appreciation of the built environment and of its relevance to them.
With their aims for their learners in mind, they partnered with Jill Harris from South East Planning Aid, to develop a project focussing on the regeneration of the Gravesend Canal Basin.
The clients meet the developers
Both groups of students visited the Canal Basin, looked at maps of the area and learnt about its history. Riverview and Thamesview then met up to discuss their findings and set each other a challenge.
Thamesview asked the Riverview students to create a building to a given footprint and height. Riverview asked the Thamesview students to create a masterplan of the Canal Basin area.
To enable them to complete these tasks with the needs of the local area taken in to account the students decided to hold a tea party where they could carry out community consultation.
Students compare feedback © Alys Tomlinson.
The community come for tea
At the beginning of February the students held a tea party at Riverview Junior School. Many local residents were invited to come, as well as representatives from the Gravesend history society and businesses that used the river. On the day the hall was packed with people who were interested in the schools’ project and wanted to contribute to their work.
The students displayed their work to date, with maps of the area and photographs, for the attendees to consider. They had prepared questionnaires which they used to ensure they acquired all the basic data they needed to continue with the project. But they also took the opportunity to have informal conversations with the attendees about their experiences of growing up, living and working in Gravesend.
Next steps
The students are now in a good position to create the masterplan and the model building with support from Jill. To see the results and find out how they interpret the data collected at the tea party, come back to the Engaging Places website this summer.
Additional teaching resources
- More information about the Gravesend Canal Basin.
- Geographical Association’s ‘Investigating the local area: our town’.
- Libraries by design.
- Neighbourhood journeys: making the ordinary extraordinary.
