School Design Together by Pamela Woolner

Book Reviews 202 families,” and yet, Jacobs continues, “the United States has moved in the opposite direction” (271-272). Indeed, Australia’s National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families and Canada’s Indian Residential School Agreement and Truth and Reconciliation Commission have made strides in accounting for these disasters in Indian child welfare policy. Prime Ministers in both countries have issued formal apologies to Indigenous peoples for the government’s role in a host of colonial programs targeted at undermining Native sovereignty. The U.S. government, meanwhile, remains noticeably silent. Jacobs’ incisive history will provide critical historical context for all those involved in Indigenous children’s policy. The transnational scale of this study rightly places the history of adoption and foster care in an important global perspective, while connecting these unique postwar polices to longer histories of Indigenous child removal around the world. Yet the broad scope of Jacobs’ study also means that, at times, she struggles to fully flesh out the motivations and intentions behind the various historical actors involved in the Indian adoption process. This is partly due to the lack of definitive studies on both adoptive families and adoptees. At the end of her work, Jacobs points to Susan Devan Harness’ study of 25 Indian adoptees in the United States. Harness finds that roughly 44 percent endured some form of abuse by their non-Native adoptive families, and roughly 32 percent struggle with substance abuse. Jacobs rightly admits that this sample size is small, but it points to the heartbreaking outcomes of these nefarious programs. More of this kind of research, along with Jacobs’ important scholarship, will only help to further pull back the curtain on these policies, in the hopes that the United States can make important strides towards reconciliation. Review by Alessandra La Rocca Link Alessandra La Rocca Link is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. School Design Together Pamela Woolner, editor (2015). London: Routledge, 212 pages. $53.95 paperback; ISBN: 978-0-415-84076-7 The multi-dimensional nature of schools makes them among the more complex buildings to procure, design, use and maintain. Schools become even more complex when the varied stakeholders collaborate with each other in the processes of financing, designing, building and inhabiting them. School Design Together advocates for collaboration of educators and architects at all these stages, arguing that collaboration is not only possible but vital for the advancement of both fields and for realizing environments better suited for communities of teachers and Book Reviews 203 learners. Writing from their respective specializations, the authors of this edited volume discuss educational environments from the perspectives of space-makers and users. The book addresses participatory design as the methodology to accomplish collaboration, as the title implies—school design together. The book’s 10 chapters are organized into two parts. Part 1, The Design and Use of Schools, complicates the school as more than simply a building type composed of classrooms and long corridors, but rather a social and physical space experienced by different people. The chapter by Peter Blundell Jones gives an overview of school buildings’ architectural history (mainly English), describing how certain ideas about the building type were historically configured and that some of those concepts have remained while others have been challenged over time. Karl Wall’s chapter is about how the maintenance and organization of educational environments and environmental qualities including light impact learning-related activities. Geraint Franklin, in his chapter, discusses the different governmental programs and construction management practices of building primary schools in the first decade of the twenty-first century in England. Jennifer Singer’s chapter is on the outcomes of the school design panel from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in England, and how good school design is evolved through programs, people and places. In his chapter, Neil Gislason investigates the history of open-plan high schools, whose success or failure depended on staff training in how to teach in non-traditional classroom configurations. The chapters in Part 1 offer a straightforward overview of school design and introduce the different stakeholders and experiences...

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