Page 24 - College Planning & Management, June 2017

Facilities CAMPUS SPACES
The Handwriting Is on the Wall
Take a look at the next big thing in college and university classroom design: walls you can write on and push around.
BY MICHAEL FICKES
REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE A KID AND YOU liked to write on the walls? Chances are, it didn’t go well for you. Parents and teachers always objected to the practice.
But things are changing. Today, some forward-thinking col- lege and university instructors (as well as K–12 teachers, for that matter) want students to write on the walls. Well, at least they can write on walls that have been designed and installed for writing, erasing and writing again.
These teachers also want students to push classroom walls around. Today’s advanced walls are moveable as well as writable. “It’s important for educators to get familiar with moveable
walls and writable walls,” says Shawn Gaither, AIA, LEED-AP, architect and senior associate in the Minneapolis offices of the
DLR Group. “Our higher ed clients ask me what I’ve learned about moveable and writable walls in school installations.
“In fact, our higher-ed clients are requesting writable surfaces on virtually every application. They want a classroom environ- ment designed to help them teach.”
What has precipitated this? According to Gaither, the rising importance of collaborative learning and teaching has led educa- tors to begin asking for moveable and writable walls with word processing capabilities. Not only can teachers and students write on these walls, they can save the work like in the same way docu- ments are saved on a laptop computer.
These walls are metal, too, enabling students to attach work done on paper with magnets.
24 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / JUNE 2017
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PHOTO © JAMES STEINKAMP PHOTOGRAPHY