Green School New Zealand
In 2020, as Covid ravaged the world and boarders closed, quietly in rural New Zealand Stuart MacAlpine worked as founding principal with the Founders of Green School New Zealand Rachel and Michael Perrett to create some educational magic: a destination school dedicated to regenerative practices, which lived it’s values, and gave children autonomy of their learning, with a framework that would allow them to ‘thrive with purpose’ with a framework that combined the best of regenerative western thinking with Te Ao Māori.
New ways of thinking about design
Danny Coster who was a leading figure in Steve Jobs and Danny Coster’s Industrial Design Team, as a member of the community supported the development of our ways of thinking about how to create programmes. These are notes taken during initial conversations.
An emerging learning design
The learning design had two stages. Firstly making Green School Bali practices and ideas into a coherent framework. Secondly beginning to frame a diploma around a meaningful indigenous structure for New Zealand.
The Green School Diploma
The diploma that emerged, was guided by the permaculture principles of ‘earth care, people care, and fair share’ to which were added ‘passion and play’ to create space for entrepreneurial, passion based learning. Hikoi (a Māori concept of a community march with purpose) were integrated. The sequence of the earth care component was structured around the Māori Pepeha, an introduction to self as embedded in landscape including mountain and river. The structure of the dipolma also reflected the view from campus of the mountain, river, land, caves, sea and sky.
Learning Spaces
Green School New Zealand’s site was an old dairy farm which was extensively regenerated with native plants and conservation measures to restore the land to its abundant natural state next to the Oakura River. The learning spaces were designed using principles from Rosan Bosch and play design.
Awards & Recognitions
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T4 Global Showcase school for 2020
