<p> The notion of building sustainable schoolhouses is catching hold amongst school professionals and designers. But gaps exist in the understanding of what that means. </p><p> This dissertation emerges from a problem of practice identified from an educator's practitioner perspective, involving lack of clarity around the notion of sustainability as central to a school design and construction initiative. The study revolves around the central design question, "What is a pattern language appropriate for the development of a sustainable schoolhouse?" It goes further, to analyze the gaps and overlaps in three professional groups of experts and their understanding of design patterns for inclusion in the pattern language. The conceptual framework uses a broad-based definition of sustainability. The review of literature relies on a framework utilizing a twin focus—on design and on sustainability—to finally examine sustainable design. The study uses a multi-pronged, three round Delphi Method process to elicit design patterns from experts in three professional groups associated with building sustainable K-12 school facilities: educators, designers, and ecologists. It employs a <i>W</i> coefficient of concordance to seek objective accord amongst members of the three professional groups in terms of their respective selection of design patterns for inclusion, and subsequent ordinal rankings of the design patterns. The products of the study are: a Master Pattern Language consisting of 44 design patterns, three professional-group sub-lists that illustrate key similarities and differences between and amongst the professional groups, and a statistical analysis of the relative concordance within each professional group. The dissertation then provides analysis of the findings in light of the potential utility of the results, especially as potential tools for future school design efforts. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3559056 |
| Date | 23 May 2013 |
| Creators | Patterson, Jeremiah |
| Publisher | Lewis and Clark College |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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