The EarthLab Masterplan illustrates what can happen when a grass-roots environmental non-profit (Groundwork SD) in a disadvantaged community, a local school district (San Diego Unified School District and a research university (UC San Diego) partner to co-develop a new type of educational public space.

With the support of the Surdna Foundation, CGJ and Groundwork mobilized the community design process to envision the EarthLab programmatic and physical masterplan. We summoned diverse demographic groups across the Encanto neighborhoods, including community leaders, area residents, school teachers, businesses, faith-based institutions. These meetings produced the initial imagination and aspiration for the programmatic composition of The EarthLab Masterplan, the specific learning objectives and pedagogical strategies, as well as the physical environments and exhibits to support these programs and activities.

The participatory design process included a set of workshops with school leaders, educators, children and their families, industry representatives and design professionals to brainstorm preliminary design concepts. The EarthLab has been designed by leading informal science educators, climate action scientists, museum designers, architects and landscape architects.

The EarthLab Masterplan calls for the installation of six educational exhibits (activity stations) informed by food/water/energy topics under the overarching theme of climate action and organized through principles of indigenous practices. These exhibits are designed to support formal and informal learning modules at the EarthLab, and will elevate Groundwork’s theory of learning, as a model for other science educators seeking to integrate in-door (methodological) and out-door (experiential) learning. Specifically, these exhibits are designed with supporting tools, environments and playgrounds to guide students and users to: ask questions, define problems, plan and carry out investigations, analyze and interpret data, construct and explain experiences, develop and use replicable models, and design solutions to challenges that climate change excerpts in their environment.

All exhibits are designed as interactive-environments, flexible and adaptable spaces where different types of experiential educational activities (technology-conservation-culture) can co-exist, linking play and knowledge. Flexibility of use and adaptation is important so that even without direct guidance, visitors will engage with energy knowledge through self-play and interaction.

An important aspect of the exhibits is that all of them have been designed to facilitate their reproduction in miniature when students are back in their classrooms. Their formal attributes, geometric patterns, shapes and materials, etc., inform educational design tools and experiments that enable teachers to elaborate on the data that students have collected out-doors. The main design features of each of these exhibits/environments are shown here.

Research shows that underserved urban youth have less exposure to green spaces, and thus do not have essential opportunities to develop environmental empathy in the first ten years of life. These communities are also disproportionately impacted by climate change, and have the fewest resources to adapt. Environmental justice demands that we invest urgent resources and enhanced educational opportunities in these communities.

The research is clear: Getting kids into green spaces with hands-on field learning, produces better educational outcomes. This finding is particularly relevant in disadvantaged urban communities, where elementary and middle school students typically have less access to green space than their wealthier counterparts, and also experience the greatest STEM deficits in early education. Because these deficits are difficult to rectify after they happen, Groundwork San Diego is committed to delivering enhanced environmental education to urban youth at the EarthLab.

EarthLab gets young people beyond the four walls of the school and into green spaces, into the neighborhood, with hands-on, practical, inquiry-based exercises to supplement the California state standards-based curriculum they are learning in the classroom. By providing students with opportunities to participate in authentic science experiences, the EarthLab enhances their potential to meet and exceed state standards and supports the development of a more scientifically literate society.

A central premise in our experiential education model is that science is embedded in the everyday life of communities. The EarthLab Model integrates a holistic approach to education, which includes both indigenous and scientific knowledge to understand and address urgent challenges like climate change. Cultural practices are integrated into our curriculum by translating traditional knowledges of indigenous communities into new models of experiential education, environmental practice, science and technology.

For example, the Chollas Watershed is a Kumeyaay sacred environment. The EarthLab exhibits integrate the Kumeyaay worldview and knowledges, as well as the traditional knowledges of indigenous peoples across the globe, to enrich our understanding of the impacts of climate change, as well as solutions to it. Climate action is a ripe opportunity for decolonizing knowledge, introducing children to different ways of viewing the world, and addressing its most urgent challenges.

We believe that children at all grade-levels learn better when conventional STEM fields are combined with skills of visual literacy and aesthetic appreciation. For us, linking arts and humanities to science and math is an essential component of bridging the achievement gap in underserved urban neighborhoods. Through artistic drawing and the recording of empirical observations in “science notebooks”, students at the EarthLab cultivate both visual and scientific competency.