Garreth J. Heidt

I don't arrive at educational space design from the outside. In 1998, as part of a graduate seminar in American material culture at Temple University, I wrote a thesis-length literature review of the New Urbanism — a deep reading of architects and urban planners like Witold Rybczynski, Lewis Mumford, Christopher Alexander, and the pastoral suburban tradition that runs through American town planning. While the review wasn't about classrooms, it was about why some built environments make us feel human and others don't — and it has been a central question of my professional life ever since.

"The classroom is not a container for learning. It is learning — if you design it that way."

Eighteen years later, in 2016, I translated those principles into an actual classroom. Pulling on the work of Fielding International and their pattern language for school design, my students and I developed a design thinking project that won a $2,500 district grant. We used that money to build whiteboard-top tables on casters, to purchase stackable stools, and to create a cave space for introverts, and foam campfire clusters for ideation.

In addition, my chapter, "From Experience to Encounter," published in the volume The Museum as Experience in 2023, extends that work into a full philosophical account of how the museum space alters the manner in which students interact and learn, and how designed spaces facilitate embodied cognition.

Since November 2019, I have brought multiple cohorts of NOVA Lab students to Fluxspace and Corbett Inc. — a seven-year documented partnership that includes blog posts, student presentations, and a shared mission about what learning spaces should make possible. What I bring to a design firm is more than enthusiasm. It is a thirty-year philosophical apprenticeship to the question your firm exists to answer, paired with a practitioner's scars from real implementation, and a writer's ability to translate design vision into language that moves teachers, administrators, and the students who actually inhabit the spaces you make.

Most professional development asks teachers to receive. My practice asks them to make. My work is grounded in design thinking as a civic and pedagogical methodology — not as a Silicon Valley import, but as what I and co-author Scott Warner, PhD, called in The Technology and Engineering Educator a "tool for citizenship in a democratic society." That refereed publication represents a bridge most PD consultants can't cross: between theory, practice, and peer-reviewed argument.

"The architecture of assessment mirrors the architecture of space. Both either invite or foreclose genuine encounter."

I have built and facilitated design-based learning curriculum at the middle and high school levels for more than twenty years. I have coached teachers through the discomfort of student-determined learning, facilitated countless Socratic-style discussions via the Touchstones Discussion Method (for which I was named Touchstones Discussion Project Teacher of the Year in 2013), and presented at EduCon — one of the most respected practitioner-led national education conferences in the country — three times.

I am a practitioner who can write and speak at a theoretical level, who has designed curriculum for both gifted and lower-track students, and who speaks and listens deeply to guide faculty conversations without losing the room. I can keynote your conference, facilitate your design sprint, build your PBL curriculum, and leave your teachers with tools they will actually use on Monday morning.

My intellectual range at the college level is wider than my recent classroom title suggests. As an undergraduate at Temple I studied English with concentrations in American literature, religious studies, art history, and philosophy. My 1990 senior-level paper for a postmodern film seminar — a twenty-two-page analysis of the concert film Stop Making Sense and David Byrne's True Stories through Jean-François Lyotard's theory of micronarratives — proposed an aesthetic I called "showandtell," in which performance and narrative are inseparable and meaning emerges in the act of expression. Thirty-six years later, that framework is still the spine of how I think about pedagogy, identity, and design.

"Where experience describes passive reception, encounter requires presence, movement, and relational engagement."

What this means in practice is that I can teach across an unusual range. My refereed ARC Humanities Press chapter, "Experience to Encounter," provides the philosophical foundation: I can teach pre-service teachers, design students, or graduate students in educational leadership in the language of museum and classroom pedagogy. I can also teach undergraduate seminars in postmodern aesthetics, American material culture, or semiotic approaches to the built environment. I have taught Temple freshman composition, lectured no less than four times at Millersville University, and designed graduate-level curriculum for The Regional Training Center out of Suffern, NY.

I do not come with a syllabus built for someone else's course. I come to design the encounter itself — which, as my book chapter argues, is the difference between a classroom that delivers content and one that asks something of the body, the imagination, and the relationship between teacher and student.

In 1990, fresh out of Temple, I stood in the Fels Planetarium and learned something I have spent thirty years confirming: the right space, used with intentionality, makes knowledge unavoidable. The Franklin Institute was my first laboratory. The Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College was my second — a place I returned to repeatedly with students, where I also co-designed and presented a professional development workshop, "Images as Language / Images Into Words: The Museum as Classroom," in 2010.

"The museum is not a place where learning is delivered. It is a place where learning is structured into a confrontation with the real."

The museum has been a recurring subject of my intellectual work, not just a field trip destination. My chapter, "Experience to Encounter," in the text The Museum as Experience directly addresses the museum and classroom as sites of aesthetic encounter — building on Dewey, Buber, and David Perkins to argue that meaning-making in spatial learning environments depends on how the body is invited into the work, not just the mind.

I am suited to design and lead educator professional development, adult programming, school partnership curricula, or interpretive frameworks for a museum or cultural institution. My literary voice — the same one that writes essays, gave a TEDx talk, and has been featured on more than a dozen podcasts — translates complex ideas for a public audience without condescension. Leaning on my practice of design thinking, I build programs by starting with the visitor's experience and working backward, not forward from a collection catalogue or preconceived notions of "the right way."

Writing, in my classroom, has never been compliance. It has never been the five-paragraph essay. It has been, as hinted at in my essay "Writerly Ways of Being," a ritual of presence — the slow, recursive practice by which a student becomes visible to themselves. This is not a fashionable position. It is a position I have held for more than two decades, grounded in continuous study at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking, where I have taken classes in freewriting, writing to learn, and revision since 1996.

"To teach writing is not to assign essays. It is to midwife voice."

My practice draws on Peter Elbow's freewriting, Lewis Hyde's theory of the gift, Whitman's democratic poetics, and the lived experience of running summer creative writing workshops at Ursinus College, organizing community readings, overseeing the publication of student anthologies, and initiating my middle school's month-long National Poetry Month celebration as its founding master of ceremonies. I have taught freshman composition at Temple University. I have published essays myself — a personal essay in Bard's Writing from the Inside-Out anthology, a synthesis piece in SchoolArts Magazine on the parallels between poetry and graphic design, a poem in A Gathering of the Tribes, and a sustained body of public writing at onlyconnects.wordpress.com and pvhsnovalab.com.

What I offer an English department, writing program, MFA program, or organization like the National Writing Project is a teacher-writer who has spent thirty years refusing the false binary between rigorous practice and humane pedagogy. I have built reading and discussion cultures around Touchstones-style Socratic methods, taught the same students through grammar, close reading, and the genuine work of finding a voice. I can lead a writing across the curriculum initiative, run a summer institute for teachers, or build a writing program from scratch. I know what works because I have spent thirty years failing forward at it.