The Quesnel School District has launched a virtual tour of the new Quesnel Junior School (QJS).
The new QJS will be built on the same property as the current Maple Drive Junior Secondary School which is located in the Red Bluff area.
The design of the new school was created by CHP Architects with “21st-Century Learning” concepts in mind to improve student interaction with the facility and encourage learning through physical design.
“Educational facility design has changed quite a lot in the last so many years, — the traditional layout of a school is based on a kind of industrial revolution factory model of school design which was intended to produce factory workers from schools,” said CHP Architect Justin Dyck. “In 21st-century learning probably the biggest change in school design is instead of having isolated classrooms we tried to break the school down into pods, or learning communities.”
Dyck explains that the modern pod design of the new QJS is the “new way” schools are being designed.
“In the last five or six years we have really seen a transformation in all the schools we have designed,” said Dyck. “One of the big features of pod design is that it will take a large school with hundreds and hundreds of students and kind of deinstitutionalize it and break it into smaller communities that students can better relate to rather then the frightening aspect of a large institution.”
Some of the design trends that CHP Architects and the Quesnel School District have incorporated into the new QJS are:
- Outdoor Learning
- Flexible Furnishings
- Learning Communities
- Real World Environments
- Transparent and “Visible Learning”
- Variety of learning spaces, large and small
- Cave space, nooks, introspective spaces
- Interconnected school community
- Learning commons
- Maker space
- Sustainability
Construction on the new QJS is slated to begin later this summer or in early fall and has a scheduled completion date of September 2022.
See the full story in Wednesday’s paper.
READ MORE: Quesnel’s new junior school still on budget, plans get approved to continue
sasha.sefter@quesnelobserver.com
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