Discussing Namahana School’s Design Process with G70 Architect Charles Kaneshiro

Feature, December 14, 2023 — In this conversation with G70 President Charles Kaneshiro, we take a deeper look at the process that led to Namahana’s campus design – including the challenges and opportunities of designing a school with no local models to emulate.

Below is a preview of the conversation. You can read the full interview here.

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Educational design has really been evolving in the last few decades. For a lot of the 20th century, it was basically about warehousing kids in the most efficient way possible. And now, there are really amazing things coming out on the frontiers of how space impacts learning. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve observed that evolution? 

Charles: There’s been a huge revolution in school design for sure in the last 10 to 12 years. It went from that European industrial model of education, which a lot of people would call “cells and bells” – there were cells for the kids, and then when the bell rang, you moved to your next cell through the double loaded corridors of classrooms. That was the model of education for most of the industrial and modern period of our society. 

I’d say back in about 2010, things started to change. There was a huge shift in our educational philosophy, and it’s taken different models. There’s definitely the focus on collaborative learning. There’s the environmental part and a lot of studies showing how things like bringing in more daylight, more transparency make a huge impact on student performance. And then also, I’d say more recently, there’s the focus on diversity and the individual student and how we cannot just force students through a singular path of teaching. Creating a lot more diversity in how we approach teaching and making it more student-focused. And that particular genre is where I think Namahana is really leading here in the state of Hawai‘i. In my 25 years of doing school design, I don’t know of any school that has done anything like the Namahana curriculum. 

When you talk about diversity and different learning profiles, how does that translate into design? Most of our listeners probably know that the traditional design is a big space for everybody to basically be doing the same thing with the rows of desks and the teacher up in front. How would a space designed for different types of learning look?

Charles: I’d say in most of the schools I’ve been seeing, yeah, the teacher is definitely not at the front. And that has made a huge influence on the classroom. Very often now, there is no front. Teachers might have moveable stations, or they may have no station, where they're just walking around the classroom. There are so many choices now that allow for teachers to craft their classrooms in ways that are more student-focused, rather than teacher-focused. 

But, again, where Namahana takes that to a totally different level is this Big Picture Learning philosophy, where we’re going to craft a curriculum for each individual student around what the student wants to do. And I don't know anybody in the state that has done that, or is planning to do that. I think that’s fantastic. And it’s a great model for other schools to hopefully follow.

How did this focus on personalized learning and flexibility translate into the design process? And what kinds of challenges or opportunities did it present to G70 when thinking about what this space needed to look like?

Charles: A lot of times schools will say, okay, what other models are out there that we would like to emulate. For instance, when we did Hawaii Baptist  Academy’s science labs, they toured Punahou’s science labs, they toured ‘Iolani’s science labs, and they took pictures of what they liked. So for Namahana, we asked, “Which schools would you say are models of what you’re interested in doing?” And they were like, “Well, nobody.” Because this model is completely different, the philosophy is so different…where do you start? 

One of the things we do in our design process is we allow the client to play architect. So we had a design workshop and we had the Namahana community come and divide up into four teams, plus a fifth team of students only. And then we had each group design what they thought was the best layout for the campus. There were educators and administrators, there were board members, there were community members mixed into these teams. And we had the students do one on their own. Then each team presented their vision for the campus to the larger group and we had everybody vote on which elements they liked best. 

And so in that way, we had – not one person’s vision or the architect’s vision – but multiple visions, from 8-year-old students all the way to the oldest board member, giving us input on what the design should be. It was really useful because we got the educator’s perspective on how this Big Picture Learning model would work, particularly relating to the environment that Namahana was going to be in. So that set the baseline for what we used to then come up with the design. 

Read the full interview here.