Çocuk ve Mimarlık: Çocuklar İçin Mimari Tasarım Öğretim Programı

The time is NOW, around the world, to change the way we educate our children P/K -12+. Dilek Acer is doing just that, with her second book Çocuk ve Mimarlık: Çocuklar İçin Mimari Tasarım Öğretim Programı that promotes learning with intense creativity and creative problem solving for teachers and children throughout Turkey. She shows that the work of the artist, designer, architect, educator and environmentalist are the same and are extremely important for our survival on this planet. We have a challenge in education, to preserve the built, natural and cultural environment.As a professor at the University of Ankara in Turkey, she has established an atelier for young children and reaches out to her trained university students, who have become teacher facilitators of workshops to train teachers with a new way of using our universe and planet earth as a medium for learning. The environment of Turkey and the world, becomes the textbook for this education program. The ideas inherent in the universe and the built environment, are perfect for learning math, science, history, art, architecture and stewardship in the context of real life education. Students everywhere are telling to "make our education REAL."While using the environment as a teaching-learning tool, Dr. Acer shows how to integrate subject matter areas through Design thinking, borrowed from the Architectural Design studio and the way architects are trained to think holistically. The Turkish classroom, like her atelier, must become a studio, giving power to students to create and come up with ideas and solutions, for what we now know as environmental degradation. Her series of design experiences for students P/K-12 are designed as a scope and sequence of accumulative, simple to more complex thinking for all students.Dr. Acer offers an alternative to textbook learning. Instead, she invites students to use the real world as a pallet for their thinking, knowledge, understanding and eventually wisdom about their worl...