Cultivating and harvesting food are significant programmes for understanding the external environment as a dynamic system and inculcating a respect for other living things.18 The jury noted that many of the design proposals included programmes that used forest or agricultural
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management as an educational and community building event. Honourable mention Dave Hutch and Jean Kindratsky’s ‘Threads of Relationship’ proposes a schoolyard where children and neighbours are the agents of change as they are encouraged to participate in specific events that help maintain the forest proposed for the wet site. These events occur daily, weekly, monthly, and guide the seasonal use of the site. They include the burning of underbrush, the planting and monitoring of conifers, the construction of earth shelters, or the coppicing of willow branches. Over time they
will witness directly the impact of their actions, leading to a deeper understanding of ecological and cultural processes. By proposing a schoolyard that addresses the longevity of the site over the time span of an evolving forest, the learning benefits of the site are sustained over generations.
Pierre Belanger, Mazereeuw, and Wright of Canada propose that the schoolyard/park design embrace a term borrowed from forest management: the test patch. In their plan for the wet site they locate a series of patches that are each dedicated to a specific ecological condition,
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Irrigation and drainage ditches structure the site. Their first function is environmental as they serve to collect and filter storm water on the site, and so reveal a natural system to children who go to school on the site Simultaneously, the change in topography and wetness created by the ditches forms a rich system of wet meadows that in turn becomes enclaves for plants and animals, messy pockets that offer opportunities for exploration and discovery to children Yet. the ditch also is a receptacle of human relationships, it evokes the site’s agricultural historyand the communal necessity of water Proposed gardens on the site rely on shared responsibility for water flow through irrigation ditches and storage of water in cisterns. The physical and spatial form of the ditch and the different scales at which it manifests itself throughout the site offers opportumtes for both enclosure and exposure, for "secret
places" where children can play safely but independantly and for "places of performance"
such as wetland patch or forest patch, and each patch is assigned a specific management treatment to be performed over time by the children and residents of East Clayton. The school building is located on the highest ground but allows for direct access to each of these patches. It is anticipated by the designers that each class and a group of residents will take responsibility for a test patch. These groups can use the patch area as an
experimental ground where children and adults can study how natural systems grow, change, and die, and how human nurturing affects this cycle.
