Talking Stick - November/December 2011 - 39

reflect a high-quality environment that communicates the importance of their academic achievements and sends a message about their value to parents, faculty, and administrators. To create a place that successfully integrates home, work, and play, a place that students can claim as their own, academic village designers must be creative with developing environments. To achieve that, many contemporary designs incorporate bold contemporary forms, energetic colors, and materials that are sustainable, authentic, and natural. Hall layouts include active spaces where students can see and be seen, move furniture and fixtures in order to adapt the space to multiple uses while feeling ownership of it, and live a more nomadic lifestyle, untethered by electrical plugs and Ethernet cables.

and social gathering venues“A residence hall can be a petri dish of learning if managed correctly. Learning will take place outside the classroom no matter what. It is our job to make sure that learning is valuable and targeted so that students are learning the ‘right’ thing; that is where intentionality comes into play,” says Mark Hetzler, director of auxiliary services at Northwest Missouri State University. “We must have a curriculum for outside the classroom just like faculty has a curriculum for the classroom.” Strong visual linkages among the communities are created by a transparency that reinforces social connections and encounters. For

instance, an academic resource consultant in the hall serves to bridge the academic and student services roles of the university. “The more we can connect the two curriculums the more successful our programs will be and the more successful our students will be as well. The benefit for students is they will learn more by living the learning which sometimes translates to actual application of their learning,” says Hetzler. Live-in student staff members facilitate programs such as “Building Relationships and Integrating Diverse Growth Experiences,” where they work with a community of 200-300 residents to facilitate diversity education, and the

Talk about durable!
Talk about Brill.

The Academic Village Is Centered on the Neighborhood
An entry point for creating an academic village merges academic programs and residential life within a single building complex. This characterizes the Hudson & Perrin Academic Village, completed in 2007 at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville. This model of enriched living-learning programming is allocated to incoming first-year students, and these students play an important part in defining the living-learning experience for the rest of their four-year academic pursuit. The Hudson & Perrin 500-bed village has quickly become the most popular housing option on the campus. It is composed of scaled communities that create a hierarchy from public to private places, enhancing social connectedness and serving as an identifiable place of belonging within the village. Because of these factors, Northwest Missouri State chose to integrate more living-learning amenities and services into the project as it was being programmed, such as classrooms that open to the commons via glazed operable walls providing a dual function: academic classrooms

The Brill Company
www.brillcompany.com
November + December 2011

http://www.brillcompany.com

Talking Stick - November/December 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Talking Stick - November/December 2011